‘One World: Together at Home’: TV Review – Variety

Breaking News Alert: sometime between the first prime-time coronavirus relief special three weeks ago (“Fox presents iHeart Living Room Concert for America”) and “One World: Together at Home” on Saturday In the evening, Elton John has been brought to a piano. Or a piano has come to you. The superstar from that previous show showed that he had been left without one when the shelter-in-place took effect. It would be nice to believe that, in the fine print of the global closure orders, “handing over a damn piano to Elton John” has been belatedly written as an essential service.

John’s piano was the brightest instrument you’ve ever seen, but not everything about his appearance was polished. As he sang “I’m still standing,” between him and a giant hedge stood a large portable basketball hoop and a pair of balls. You may have hoped that David Furnish and one of the boys were about to emerge and do a drip choreography to augment the upbeat tune, and that wasn’t going to be. But the strange detail of the hoop served as a kind of symbol of one of the reasons why we are so paralyzed by all these live music broadcasts that are happening now, of which this show was the inevitable culmination. There is an element of hobby, or compulsory worldliness, that suddenly makes entertainment more fun and more real.

There were 19 separate musical performances in the two hours of “Together at Home”, and each of the 19 had a different producer, essentially: the artists themselves. You never knew from segment to segment how each musician would choose to perform. In the living room or in the woods? Portrait frame or landscape mode? Folk mode or phantom orchestra? Trophy rack on display, or boxed? Complete makeup and hairstyle or au naturel? (It was presenters Beyoncé and Michelle Obama, actually, representing a spectrum of possibilities there.) Professional cameras smuggled into the house and loaded into a post-production FX house, or a dazzling grain iPhone 5? If leaving these acts to your own devices isn’t the definition of a “variety show,” nothing is.

What the program needed was a relative consistency of not HD quality or the number of candles per piano, but tone. And “Together at home”, by design or chance, he decided on a fairly solid one. He was positive but not too eager to cheer us up, and sincere without criticizing schmaltz. An outlier at the silly end was co-host Jimmy Fallon, joining The Roots for a version of Men Without Hats’ “Safety Dance”, which became acceptable to nurses and other medical professionals, the show’s official honorees, became in the dance stars the video. At the other extreme was Taylor Swift’s “Soon I’ll Get Better,” a cancer-themed ballad of sheer despair that the show needed as a 11:00 number, and as a test of reality after so many assurances that everything will be fine. , when we know that many people will not.

Lady Gaga receives so much praise that you hate throwing something more on her, but in addition to any participation she has had in the curation of the program, her appearances in the choir were more than just right. She opened the show alone with Charlie Chaplin’s “Smile,” a song that can be played a bit maudlin, but yeah, we all have the “even though your heart is breaking” part, so she had fun while someone was around her. Piano with a smartphone. (On his lectern, he had some kind of scribble instead of sheet music.) At the end of the tune, he brought his finger to the corner of his mouth and moved it, as if to send his smile to the audience. while playing a final high key on the piano. Was this the time to be cute? Apparently, and it worked well. Like the solemnity that inevitably struck at the other end of the two hours, joining Celine Dion and Andrea Bocelli in their famous duet from “The Prayer” and turning her into a four-part couple with John Legend (or five, counting the companion Lang Lang).

There are those of us who are afraid to hear the revival of certain inspiring chestnuts in these settings. But when Stevie Wonder is the one reliving Bill Withers’ “Lean on Me”, well, there’s nothing to fear. (He got his own licks, merging the song into his “Love’s in Need of Love Today,” which was always turbulently concerned.) Was Lizzo the one who brought the familiar “A Change is Gonna Come” to fruition? It is not a problem. When it’s the duo of Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello putting out the inevitable “What a Wonderful World” … well, honestly, that could be either way, but they sounded great together, and they paid the suspense of which one is most likely to appear on a bowling tie. (Also, let’s not read too much about anything, but we’re starting to feel like these two are dating.)

The other song to listen to / fear was “Let It Be”. Because surely that was the song that Sir Paul McCartney was going to release, right? Surprise: It was “Lady Madonna”, of all the songs you don’t usually hear at charity events. He didn’t do it in the Fats Domino-influenced arrangement that fans have been used to for 52 years, but rather a more grumpy version. And if it wasn’t clear why “Lady Madonna” needs the boogie-woogie removed, it was fun as a different thing for Beatlemaniacs who always get surprises at this point in the day. McCartney was also the only one to receive his contribution in portrait mode, as does the Instagram generation; Whether or not he was given that instruction, he allowed the program’s editors to drop images of medical workers on either side of him … a show that never stopped moving in any context on the show. He finished his number by letting the stereo tremolo circuit play for a few seconds while doing some jazz on the air: Paul McCartney, our international entertainer to the end.

Billie Eilish and Finneas could have had the best idea for an inspiring cover, at least in terms of putting a new spin on something that was standard a few decades ago. That was Bobby Hebb’s cheery “Sunny”, one of the most covered songs of the 20th century, but definitely not the 21st. What version did your parents play for them? From Cher? Sinatra? Boney M? Wherever they picked it up, it was perfect for Eilish, and maybe he finally put the lie to some old folks’ idea that it’s all about looking or sounding grumpy, when he chose a song that’s as light as it sounds. Just one problem: any smart device being used barely registered his voice, as his brother’s great-sounding Wurlitzer electric piano dominated the “track.” (I could even say that there isn’t such a “Sunny” when her voice is gone.) There should not have been time for the producers to acknowledge the audio problem and ask for a replay, but it would be nice if the brothers provided one in the form of a real studio recording.

Kacey Musgraves’ “Rainbow” was the right song for the right time, for obvious reasons: the rainbow is a staple of support for medical workers, especially in the windows of Europe at the moment, and their one-shot single camera was so simple and ideal. how the show came Eddie Vedder got a bit darker on his keyboard with “River Cross”; You might joke about how he needed that brim of the baseball cap to shield his eyes from all the candlelight, but his earnestness made a proper break in the middle of all the sunlit tree landscapes. Maluma’s pastoral background seemed to be a green screen effect; It looked like it was getting cold on the side of a hill, but it sounded like he was hiding in his bathroom. This was also fine. The guy who seemed least interested in creating a mood of any kind was Burna Boy, with his bare cinder block wall, his gray leisure suit, and the laces hanging in the corner of the frame, all the best to focus on the pictures of anguish in the world of the “African giant”.

There were times when the special seemed a little less about show business, and these were more ticklish than offensive. When John Legend and Sam Smith sang a remote duet, the sight of Legend’s EGOT collective, in shining flesh, perched immediately over his shoulder did not escape. Smith, in what may have been accidental, but came out as a fun replica case, had his Academy Award visible on a distant mantelpiece in the mirror behind him, as if the Oscar was doing a “who, me?” Photobomb. In the end, did they sound splendid together? They did it. However, when it came to subtle greatness, no one was going to beat Jennifer Lopez, who wore a dazzling shirt with the face of Barbra Streisand from her own clothing line as she sang “People” in a vast night sprawl that looked like it might. Being The Huntington Gardens, backed by an orchestra you wanted, would come out from behind the trees. “I miss you,” he murmured to the camera, sweetly, at the end. (Divas Who Need Diva Lovers: The Luckiest People).

One quality that was completely missing from the special was anger. Having prerecorded everything, there was absolutely no chance of a moment like the famous one in the post-Katrina special when Kanye West spontaneously declared that George Bush didn’t care about blacks. The sponsoring Global Citizen is about raising money for PPE, not making people angry. Therefore, politics was a long way from entering any of that, although we are now at a sad and strange point where the non-partisan act of supporting the World Health Organization, one of the main purposes of this program , has suddenly become a political purpose. . Still, there was a ferocity and purpose in which Beyoncé made an unproductive appearance to note that “Black Americans disproportionately belong to these parts of the workforce that do not have the luxury of working from home,” and that “this virus is killing blacks at an alarmingly high rate in America. ” (Alicia Keys made the same factual observation about racial disparities that may fall in the realm of science or social science, or both.)

Was there room for real discouragement in any of this? If you were going to cry during any of “Together at Home,” it would probably be during one of the interstitial segments where we heard nurses say they were voluntarily separating from their children to be fully immersed in dangerous hospital settings, or were there to hold the hands of the dying when loved ones can’t, not so much hopeful music. But the show was willing to change that smile on at least a couple of occasions. One was when Billie Joe Armstrong, who looked more mopping than usual, a few weeks after the post-haircut era, sat down on a futon and sang “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” a song about the death of his father who can be therapeutic. for some of those who don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel for themselves or their loved ones right now.

But it was up to Swift, who generally did not consider himself a vigorous and depressing figure, who emerged as a sober narrator of the truth almost at the last minute, appearing alone, reflected on top of his piano, to perform a song with which he is unlikely to sing. any other circumstance outside the study, “You will get better soon.” It’s the song he wrote about coping with his mother’s recurring cancer, with verses so distraught that they threaten to betray the deceptively optimistic title as magical thinking. On a day when deaths in the US USA As COVID-19 peaked to date, there couldn’t be a more appropriate song for all ICU patient families sitting at home, searching for each new set of probabilities and statistics as they face off. uncertainty. The improvement in Swift’s mouth while wrapping his appearance was measured in micro millimeters, as it should be.

When we wake up with Billie Joe in the fall, will it be Swift’s heartbreaking ballad that we’ll remember? Or the casual irreverence that’s also drawing people through this: Spread out Saturday night in occasional comical interludes from presenters Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, or Fallon, who joked about the $ 50 million pledged by corporate sponsors before for the show to air, “Half of that was for holding Jeff Bezos upside down and shaking him for a loose change”?

Somehow, in their own way, the Rolling Stones divide the difference, by performing “You can’t always get what you want.” (They could have said, a la Bono, “Donald Trump stole this song, and we’re stealing it,” but he didn’t.) It was easy to focus on the practicalities of what you were doing: were you playing together or recorded sequentially? Why do Ronnie Wood’s licks appear to be live but Charlie Watts’ air battery not so much? Certain elements of that joint action may remain a mystery, until they are explained to us. But it was kind of lovely regardless … although it conveyed the slightly puzzling message that what we want, the old normal, is probably not what we’re going to get.