Adele’s Concert Special: Too Much Oprah, Not Enough Adele

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Throughout the last two weeks CBS had been promoting the special they were going to show last night about the singer Adele. It was billed as “Adele: One Night Only” and was a live show that took place in front of the iconic Griffith Observatory in Lous Angeles, where much of the film Rebel Without a Cause was shot. She performed on the famous steps where Sal Mineo’s character is shot in the movie and a little man in a suit, played by director Nicholas Ray, shows up at the end to open the observatory. The show promised a concert by Adele as well as an interview of her by Oprah Winfrey, and from that I was hoping that it would be the full interview and then the concert. Instead it was a ghastly format in which Oprah’s interview with Adele, filmed in the garden of Oprah’s estate, was cut up into segments and kept intruding itself into the performance. Through the two-hou9r length of the show Adele got to perform only 10 songs, all but one being the type she’s become known for: big power ballads about dysfunctional relationships. Oprah’s interview with Adele was of such crushing banality I found myself wondering if her fabled talk show was as mind-numbingly cutesy-poo oppressive as this. She kept quizzing Adele on the details of her personal life, including her recently ended marriage to Simon and the child they had, Angelo, before she decided she was no longer happy in the relationship and decided to divorce him. Not that he’s out of her life altogether: they still live next door to each other and share parenting duties for Angelo – but she’s currently dating a Black super-agent whose name whizzed by me but whose photo was shown, and she’s said that someday she’d like to have another child.

The purpose of this show was to promote her new album, 30. Adele has named all her albums after the age she was when she recorded them: her previous albums were 19, 21 and the Grammy Album of the Year winner 25 – apparently Adele herself thought Beyoncé’s Lemonade should have won, and so did a lot of other people, including one of my oldest friends with whom I got into an argument about it. But as far as I’m concerned there was no contest: I love Adele precisely because she’s so straightforward. Like the singers I love from previous eras, including Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, she hasn’t slimmed down to concentration-camp survivor dimensions, she doesn’t leap around the stage like a Mexican jumping bean, and though her costume was an elaborate black gown and she joked about being unable to sit down in it in a normal chair, at least she kept the same outfit on throughout the show and didn’t slip off the stage periodically for costume changes. I fell in love (metaphorically) with Adele the first time I saw her on TV – here was a “woman of size” who wasn’t afraid or ashamed to look like one, though she mentioned the exercise regimen she went on that took off 100 pounds (she did it, she said, less to lose weight than to give her life structure when she wasn’t recording or touring – and she and Oprah commiserated about their struggles with weight-loss regimens), thoug she’s still on the hefty side and I love her for than. What’s more, she just stood there and sang, trusting in the sheer power and artistry of her voice to move her audiences instead of surrounding herself with choristers, huge sets and all the crappy trimmings that are burying talented singers like Beyoncé in overproduced garbage. (I’ve joked in these pages before that Beyoncé’s over-the-top videos look like they were directed by the love-child of Busby Berkeley and Leni Riefenstahl.)

Though Adele has had surgery for nodes on her vocal cords (an operation that’s been a career-killer for other singers – can you say “Julie Andrews”? – but which she seems to have survived just fine), those incredible pipes are still very much intact. She not only can sing spectacular high notes, but (like Louis Armstrong as a trumpet player) she doesn’t have to thin out her tone to make them: her soaring high notes are as full-bodied as the rest of her voice. If I have a problem with Adele it’s that so much of her material hews to one sound – she even joked when she did her one fast song of the night that her audience better enjoy it while they could – that it’s difficult to remember her songs because they all collect into one powerfully sung but somewhat mind-numbing moan. I felt especially sorry for the young Black couple, Quentin and Ashley, for whom Adele and Oprah worked out a promotional stunt that included Quentin taking Ashley to Adele’s concert with blindfold and noise-canceling headphones on, leading her to the stage (in what reminded me of an old sensitivity-training exercise I went through in high school, in which students were paired off and one was blindfolded while the other led them around campus – the point was to put your trust that totally in another person you were literally willing to let you lead them around while you couldn’t see where you were going), where he told her to take off the blindfold and himself removed her headphones so she could see he was offering her a marriage proposal in front of Adele and her audience. I was at once amused by the spectacle, rather appalled at the willingness of these people to let their proposal be exploited that way, and fearful of their future as a couple. After all, he was proposing to her in the middle of a concert by a singer who’s most famous for songs about dysfunctional relationships!