POP MUSIC REVIEW : A Little Bit Country : Marie Osmond Mixes Twangy Tunes, Vegas Standards at Crazy Horse

Not everyone who was anyone was at the Oscars Monday night.

Woody Allen, as usual, was playing his clarinet for the cognoscenti at Michael’s Pub in New York. And, equally indifferent to the entertainment industry’s annual coronation, the cowboy hat and tooled-leather crowd was foot-stamping it up at the Crazy Horse Steak House. There, on center stage, held forth a cultural icon of another sort: Marie Osmond.

“Of course I prefer her to the Academy Awards,” said Ernie Tow, 61, who seemed slightly surprised that anyone would ask. “I’ve followed Marie Osmond since she started, watched all the ‘Donny & Marie’ shows,” boasted Tow, a Riverside retiree who came with his wife to celebrate their 43rd wedding anniversary.

Others seemed almost offended that the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Science’s annual dinner could be compared to an Osmond performance.

“I have better things to worry about than who’s wearing what and being seen with whom,” said Lynn Williams, 35, an Irvine martial arts instructor, who proudly added, “In fact, I’ve never even seen the Oscars.” In contrast, “when it comes to Marie and Donny Osmond, I’ve never missed any of their shows,” she said.

Villa Park contractor Michael Tonkinson, 40, may have summed it up best for those who found the Crazy Horse’s brand of entertainment preferable to what was going on at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion: “The Oscars? What do the Oscars have to do with country-Western music?”

But then, an equally valid question might be: What did Marie Osmond have to do with country-Western music?

In her fringed jacket and feathered hair and backed by a six-piece band garbed in understated Nashville, Osmond began her 90-minute set with songs that the music industry likes to call “contemporary country”: twangy tunes sung with a country inflection, backed with powerful guitar chords borrowed from pop. Such songs as “Rock and a Soft Place” and “(Love Me Like a) Hurricane” got things moving.

But soon after opening her act, Osmond showed that while she may still be “a little bit country,” she’s a whole lot Las Vegas as well.

She shifted into schmaltz-ified standards of the 1930s and ‘40s, wrenching out an overwrought “Over the Rainbow,” and a decidedly boogie-free “Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy”--so much so, in fact, that the song’s trumpet parts were replaced by a synthesizer.

To satisfy a crowd well-acquainted with her teeny-bopper hits of the 1970s, Osmond then performed an informal medley of her early songs, lacing them with a fair degree of self-deprecation. Singing a line of brother Donny’s 1972 hit, “Puppy Love,” Osmond then commented, “Isn’t that the worst song you ever heard? I was so embarrassed for him.”

She reminisced about working with Bob Hope and his USO specials, and about the dilemmas of stardom: “Your show is No. 1 and somebody comes along and then you basically sell out,” she said, by way of introduction to “Go Hawaiian”--the theme of a series of commercials she and Donny did for a sugary soft drink targeted at children.

Then it was time for the band to get into the act; after verifying that a fair number of the country fans present also identified themselves as Trekkies, she coaxed keyboardist Jerry Williams to vocalize the lyric-less, other-worldly theme from television’s “Star Trek.”

And, centrally, she followed a true family tradition: She brought a pre-pubescent Osmond onstage to amaze the audience with the practiced moves of a lounge singing veteran. In this case, it was her 8-year-old son Stephen; dressed in miniature cowboy hat and bolo tie, he precociously--and most professionally--performed two numbers, “There, I Said It” and “Born to Boogie.”

The crowd showered Osmond with its approval, and she responded by performing her encore, the gospel song “How Great Thou Art.” But after the headliner left the stage, some in the audience confessed that there was another entertainment event on their minds.

“Well, I do have my VCR on at home, and I am kind of interested in seeing who won,” Cheryl Moloney, 30, a Lakewood manicurist, said on her way out of the concert.

And even backstage, there were hints of interest in that other show going on elsewhere in Southern California.

“I don’t have anything to do with the Oscars, I’m not a part of that,” Osmond said in an interview after the concert.

“Yeah,” interjected keyboardist Williams, “but ‘Beauty and the Beast’ should take Best Picture.”

“That’s true,” said a suddenly-concerned Osmond. “I sure hope ‘Beauty and the Beast’ wins.”