Pop Music Review : Anderson: Stand-Up Comedy to All-Out Dreamtime

In her current multimedia concert show “Empty Places,” Laurie Anderson does a bit on the peculiar musical rhythms of political speech--Hitler as drummer, Mussolini as grand opera singer, etc. When she inevitably gets to Reagan, she remarks on the way his caressing voice gets softer and more momentous at crucial moments and how his speech is dramatically punctuated “with lots . . . and lots of . . . pauses .”

Ironically, that’s close to Anderson’s own preferred style of storytelling, as seen Saturday at the Roxy and on Sunday at the beginning of a four-night Wiltern Theatre run. The difference is that Anderson draaaaws her weighty punch lines out precisely because they’re punch lines, somewhere between Reagan’s theatrical gravity and Steven Wright’s disaffected comedy.

If Anderson has said that “the best thing about the term ‘performance art’ is that it includes just about everything you might want to do,” it might help the uninitiated to think of her primarily as a sophisticated stand-up comedian who lapses into song, soundscape, slide show and all-out dreamtime.

Sophisticated, but not un-Populist; your uncle in the Midwest could probably get as good a guffaw out of some of her current material as any of the L.A. art monsters who joined in conspiratorial chuckles. (“Sonny Bono--the guy bothers me,” she said, starting one routine. Truly the bridge between the avant-garde and the Improv.) And if uncle might not agree with the occasional feminist or anti-right-wing rants in her increasingly political act, he would at least get it. For someone associated with the obscure, Anderson is surprisingly clear, even didactic, these days.

The accessibility extends beyond content to style. In this one-woman show, Anderson finally sings in her own voice, and it’s a pleasant one. Her infamous “audio masks” are still used, mostly between songs--one filtered microphone gives her a white male voice “like a shoe salesman,” and another one makes her sound like a whole chorus of female backup singers, whom she addresses as “girls.”

The stripped-down Roxy preview and the full-scale Wiltern premiere were 90% identical in content, differing in a few songs, a little patter here and there; both shows were funny, thoughtful and not a little hypnotic. Much of it worked better within the intimate club confines of the Roxy, where Anderson performed with almost none of her usual visual stimuli to back her up and did just fine or even better without it.

Yet, in full-scale presentation, the slides and film clip backdrops do, with the synthesized music, add an undeniably welcome element of suggested ethereal otherness, too, that counterbalances some of the purposefully trivial moments of this communal show. Then it’s a rally and a church, the Improv and the Planetarium, among so many other places.