| Miami Herald | It was Halloween, so perhaps that's why Annie Lennox initially appeared to be channeling the recently deceased mime Marcel Marceau for the first 25 minutes of her packed concert at Miami's Carnival Center.
No, she didn't appear in white face -- that was just the color of her bleached, cropped hair -- and she wasn't mute.
She sang out in a voice huskier, and slightly richer, than in her Eurythmics days.
Instead, it was her overly theatrical gestures on songs like the opening No More `I Love You's' that came across as too deliberate, too affected.
Lennox, 52, also avoided stage patter during this early portion of her 90-minute set and, combined with the generally dour lyrics of the songs, she was in danger of becoming a rather dull, impersonal artifact from the Reagan decade.
But then, as if someone whispered in her ear to ''pick up the pace and engage us,'' Lennox did precisely that -- by ditching her five-piece band for a segment and cutting the tempo by half.
For this highlight portion, Lennox sat solo at the piano and turned her old Eurythmics pop hit Here Comes the Rain Again into a torch ballad.
It wasn't that the song's revision proved transcendent -- it wasn't, and vocally she was stretching her alto a bit further than it wanted to go -- but its effect on the artist was transforming.
Suddenly, Lennox, still striking and lean, dressed in black slacks and sequined top, decided she was going to enjoy herself up there. The mannerisms became more fluid, her personality flowered.
She fired quips at the audience, jokingly wishing that Tropical Storm Noel, a blustery bother in town, had made a larger impression because the cold, wet British weather she's used to just isn't exciting.
From this point, her concert offered excitement nonstop. Lennox led her appreciative audience into a clap-along during an R&B-inspired Sisters Are Doin' it for Themselves with exacting instruction.
''I'm fussy about the offbeat, keep it tight,'' she commanded, before going all Carole King on the piano with thick, punchy chords.
Her fans felt the earth move and there was no going back to the distant Lennox we met at the beginning.
There Must Be an Angel (Playing With My Heart), Ghosts in My Machine and the lively Thorn in My Side followed, all of them accentuated with well-chosen video clips flashing her past personas on a screen behind the band.
Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), the 1983 hit that introduced her to pop culture, gained new muscle.
The politics of the new We Are the World-inspired anthem Sing, though well-meaning in its fight to combat AIDS, might have been a bit heavy-handed, but the song's chorus, and Lennox, was irresistible. |
