Harry Connick Jr. Preview

Harry Connick Jr.
Chicago Theatre, Chicago
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Friday, March 16, 2007

If you’ve been waiting, breath bated, to invoke the phrase “Go piss yourself,” now just might be your chance: Harry Connick Jr. sounds pretty convincing on his tribute to New Orleans****.

Yes, those are astericks, but no, they don’t delineate four separate reasons why this might be true, more like an anxious “WAIT!” before perjoratives are hurled or articles dismissed. New Orleans is to jazz what Mesopotamia is to fire and the wheel. Oh My NOLA (Columbia) author Connick, who once played a straight character on a gay sitcom, has little to no connection to NOLA’s seedy, multicultural pot — hell, he’s too clean to make a spring-break cameo and toss some beads at a topless co-ed. His chrome voice (see “Something You Got”) couldn’t be dented or dinged if you chucked cast-iron pellets at it.

Yet there’s something campy and enormously pleasurable about the album, partly because Connick knows who he is, too. Thus the bursting horns on “Working In The Coal Mine” take on a showbiz-musical feel, well aware even if Connick spent years in a mine shaft and developed black lung, he’d still be whiter than Xerox paper on a sun deck. His soothing croon on “Let Them Talk” is pure mastery of lite-FM, romantic-comedy formulae, and “Hello Dolly” is . . . “Hello Dolly.”

Not to completely dismiss his talents, “All These People,” with Kim Burrell, takes a grave, “shame on you” tone for the stranding of Hurricane Katrina victims, gathered from street interviews Connick personally conducted. “Do Dat Thing” ends the record paying tribute to his own NOLA heroes, naming them over a sassy Bourbon beat and proving if Connick never appears dirty, he could at least stand to tuck his shirt in.

— Steve Forstneger

Category: Stage Buzz, Weekly