DIONNE WARWICK: ONE LAST TIME
Star Casino, January 18
THE BAND WORE TUXEDOS, she was in black, red and sparkles, and a chap in front of me was in a gold paisley brocade jacket. They played discreetly, she was elegantly reclined on a high stool, we filled the not-insubstantial room. Not bad for an 84 year old who hasn’t had a hit since the Reagan years.
Ah, but what hits Dionne Warwick had had before then. Some of the classiest, cleverest, poppiest songs known to woman, mostly written by the greatness of Hal David and Burt Bacharach, often given their definitive version by her. And in the modest 14 song set – done and dusted in not much than an hour, including a couple of rambling, charming, not always accurate chats – we got a fair selection of them.
Done well? Hmm, that’s trickier. Warwick’s voice, not surprisingly, is not anywhere near what it was. The range isn’t there, the breath is clipped, and it was a worrying sign at the start that she was encouraging us to sing along at any opportunity we chose, leaning into the fear we’d be doing the heavy lifting while she graciously accepted the adoration.
But thankfully, no, the phrasing and remnants of the tone remain, power emerged at times, such as the climax of I Say A Little Prayer and I’ll Never Love This Way Again (a rare song not involving either Bacharach or David) and Warwick worked the lines with grace. And it should be noted, some courage. Some veteran singers beef up the stage sound with extra vocalists, more instruments and stagecraft to compensate for a voice that isn’t what it once was. Warwick eschews this for bare exposure, vocally and instrumentally, with just percussion, drums, piano and bass.
The issues mostly fell in what was likely an accommodation for that faltering voice: tempos that dragged and arrangements that simplified. Walk On By, Anyone Who Had A Heart, and Message To Michael were too slow; This Girls’ In Love With You and You’ll Never Get To Heaven were ponderous (and the latter beyond her range, which probably explains why it was cut short after a minute or so), robbing these gems of the Bacharach rhythmic flair.
More successfully, a new arrangement of I Say A Little Prayer, which she says “brought it into the 21st century”, moved further into Latin territory with a fluid rhythm, Albert Hammond and Hal David’s 99 Miles From LA worked a lovely little groove, and best of all, Do You Know The Way to San Jose? really nailed the movement, taking it into Cuban realms, and the band metaphorically loosened those bow ties for the only time, taking some solos.
We could easily have done without the pallid but popular That’s What Friends Are For when a genuinely great song like Trains And Boats And Planes was ignored, and even at this reduced level, a couple of more songs would not have been out of place, but it was a nice way to say thanks and farewell.
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A version of this review was first published in The Sydney Morning Herald
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