Shallow Evening With Diana Ross

Here’s a question that nags one while watching Diana Ross perform: How good could she be by now if she had long ago shucked the cosmic-glamorpuss jive and dedicated herself to the craft of singing? One guess: very good, judging from the true emotion and genuine style that occasionally fizz to the surface of her “champagne soul.”

A guess will have to suffice, however. In her concert Thursday night at the Starlight Bowl, Ross gave notice that she intends to remain the queen of artifice, a performer who doesn’t really sing so much as burp up itty-bitty bubbles of song as an excuse to model expensive clothes for the peasants. Sartorial noblesse oblige.

On a stage decorated with color-lighted isosceles triangles and backed by a serviceable nine-piece band and three vocalists, Ross toured the byways of a career that has produced a great number of hits. But for a new tweak here and a tuck there, it was a virtual re-creation of her performance several years ago at the Sports Arena.

She did a Supremes medley (“Where Did Our Love Go?” “Baby Love,” “Stop! In the Name of Love,” “You Can’t Hurry Love,” “You Keep Me Hangin’ On”) and selections from her collaborations with Lionel Richie (“Endless Love”), Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers (“Upside Down,” from her who-says-I-can’t-be-funky period), and Ashford-Simpson (“Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”).

She sang songs from her films “Mahogany” (“Do You Know Where You’re Going To”) and “Lady Sings the Blues” (“The Man I Love”); from her flirtation with disco (“Love Hangover”); and from her newest release, “The Force Behind the Power” (“When You Tell Me That You Love Me,” “Change of Heart”). She covered an “oldie” (“Why Do Fools Fall in Love”) and bopped her way through some straight jazz (“I Cried for You”).

She did all this and a bunch more in less than 90 minutes, while floating on and off stage for quick costume changes. Was something sacrificed in the process, you ask? You bet. Ross rarely sang an entire song.

When she did, as on a lovely reading of Stevie Wonder’s “Blame It on the Sun” or on Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child,” one glimpsed Ross’s true potential--that of a maturing torch-pop singer. She might be from the Detroit projects, but Ross lost whatever “street” sense she might have had 30 years ago; her age (47) and her acquired inclinations toward refinement and the lush life--tempered by her lack of luck on the love front--make her perfectly suited to sing adult pop songs about adult themes.

But Ross is blessed/cursed with looks and a figure that will enable her to indulge in the ingenue hokum indefinitely, and that indulgence is giving her performances the taint of self-parody. Her “concerts” have become fashion shows with musical interludes.

On Thursday, she kept a less-than-capacity audience in a state of suspended anticipation with a program that relentlessly teased without delivering the goods. Whenever people found themselves reacting to the opening lines of a favorite song, they just as quickly found themselves applauding its conclusion.

For the most part, the audience seemed disengaged, and rightly so. The only times people rose to their feet were when Ross coaxed them with shameless ploys, such as venturing into the crowd to sing (twice) or striking one of a catalogue of get-a-load-of-me poses seemingly borrowed from the Follies Bergere.

As diverting as this bunk might be for a couple out for an evening of light entertainment, it mocks the notion of “concert.” When artist and audience both get caught up in such extraneous froufrou--nail-biting over whether she’ll wear the black flouncy number next, or the slinky gold-sequined thing, or the multilayered, Scarlett O’Hara gown--the music invariably suffers. Ross’s songs never anchored long enough to soak past the surface to the soul. With a few exceptions, this concert was a study in superficiality.

It was also an exercise in barely disguised petulance. Ross, a notorious fussbudget, opened her show by announcing she had never before had to do battle with planes flying overhead. Veteran trouper that she is, she seemed completely unnerved by the behemoths on a couple of occasions. By mid-show, of course, one was pulling for the 747s.

Later in the program, she chastised her backup singers--in mid-song--for “singing too loud.” While introducing the ballad “When You Tell Me That You Love Me,” Ross even employed the Imperial We.

“We don’t like the bright lights on the side because they hurt our eyes,” she purred-sneered to the light technician. Near the close of the show, during the fade-out ending of “Endless Love”--before doing a brief version of “The Force Behind the Power,” before soliciting people to stand and sway for her signature touchy-feely song, “Reach Out and Touch (Somebody’s Hand)”--she encored the Imperial We.

“We love you,” she said, “and we hope to see you again.”

To which one’s only possible response was, “I love we, too, Diana, but not on your life.”