Sunday, December 16, 2001 Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal Opening act outshines headliner at Aladdin concert Wainwright enthralling, Sting passionless, but you'd never know it from audience's reaction By DOUG ELFMAN REVIEW-JOURNAL There is not always justice in the world. Friday night, Rufus Wainwright performed a beautiful set of his smart and creative songs as the opening act for Sting. But when he said he had only one more song left to sing, a large contingent of Sting fans cheered for his departure. "Thank you, you've been a great audience," he said, anyway. Maybe he was thanking his appreciative fans who shelled out up to $150 to see him, or the kinder Sting fans who seemed to be won over, as opposed to the cackling future fogy talking on her cell phone in my row. Fortunately, the rude people with bad taste didn't matter in the big scheme of things, since art was its own reward, and we were treated to Wainwright's art. The 28-year-old stringy brunette is a classically trained musician who inherited tuneful genes from his parents, the big-name folkies Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle, and who then developed his talents in music school and in the years afterward. He is no folkie like his mom and dad, although his songs have a storytelling soul of folk, minus folk's repetitive-chorus nature. At the Aladdin Theatre for the Performing Arts, Wainwright sang mostly from his new, second album, "Poses," vocalizing almost nonstop, using his voice as a confident instrument, as in opera and Broadway, but with an echo through the microphone that made his lyrics sound like secret thoughts escaping from his bedtime contemplations. He had no band. He played songs alternately on piano and acoustic guitar, hopscotching over a variety of melodies that were likely influenced by his taste in pop, Broadway, singer-songwriting, opera and blues. My favorite was "Complainte de la Butte," an English-language and French-language pop aria from the "Moulin Rouge" soundtrack, that allowed Wainwright (born in the States, raised in Canada) to use many of his vocal styles in one song. He slurred and belted out interesting arpeggios on and off the song's ghostly beat, like a time-signature bandit. He sang earnestly, then playfully, skipping around quick and low half-step notes, then rising up to long, purposefully flat/sharp notes near the top of his sweet octaves. Earlier in the set, when Wainwright was trying to interest latent Sting fans, he alluded to his penchant for singing pop songs with classical structures. "This next song is sort of like a Sting song. There are a lot of chords nobody's ever heard," he cracked. A few songs later, he tried again. "This next song is a Scottish song, which is kind of like Sting, since he's from England. I'm trying to connect with you people. I think I'm doing a pretty good job." A lot of people laughed and applauded. Wainwright was flamboyantly charming. Once, a burly stage hand walked up to him to fix a technical glitch, and Wainwright teased, "This is one of my dancers, my Vegas showgirls." Others in the crowd, primarily well-coifed women for some reason, kept cackling on their phones and saying things behind me, like, "This is a waste of my time." Would they have booed the young brilliance of Nick Drake in 1972? Or the Police in 1980? Or Radiohead in 1997? Or Fiona Apple in 2000? Gawah! They were waiting for the main event, as Sting was billed, naturally, given his amazing oeuvre of great early 1980s songs with the Police, those reggae-rhythmic alternative-rockers, and his banner jazz-pop solo work of the late 1980s. But there's not much to say about Sting's nearly two-hour set. The stage looked pretty in a VH1 way, with purple-ish backdrops and soft lighting glowing around the 50-year-old tantric star/yogi. And the music sounded VH1, with Sting and his nine-piece band performing tame, challengeless, gray revisions of prior glory, as if he'd thrown all his whites, colors and darks in a hot washer for a few days. "Every Little Thing She Does is Magic," that magically happy song from 1981, was rote. "Every Breath You Take" seemed like a faster run-through of the compelling original. The cool edges of "An Englishman in New York" were rounded down to keep anyone from getting hurt. There were rare moments of good, but not great, soft-jazz breakdowns throughout the night. And the last two songs of Sting's encore were excellent, first "Message in a Bottle," with Sting singing solo plaintively while playing bass, then the gorgeous keeper "Fragile," with the whole band in tow, as Sting picked a lucid, emotional guitar line. But I got the impression that Sting has played all these songs so many hundreds, or thousands, of times that he had lost his passion for them and, so, was falling back on big band arrangements that were Vegas-ish crowd pleasers for the Sting-inclined. This theory was bolstered by his introduction of "Roxanne," the beginning of which he sang in a bored double-time or so. He said he's never forgotten to play the classic song at the thousands of concerts he's performed in the past few decades. Whether my theory is right or wrong, his domesticated routine was a crowd pleaser. People clapped to the beat en masse, danced in the aisles, and walked out saying things like, "That was awesome!" I am glad they enjoyed the show. A few of them were my dear friends. But I couldn't help but wish that Sting would take a break after this, his tour's finale, and find the inspiration to robustly live up to his staggering potential again. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp.