POP REVIEW : Pryor, LaBelle Top a <i> Looong</i> AIDS Benefit

At the outset of her “Dionne & Friends Together for Life” show on behalf of the Minority AIDS Project Thursday night at the Celebrity Theatre, Dionne Warwick vowed never to succumb to AIDS-benefit burnout, at least until a cure renders such evenings obsolete.

Until that happy day comes, let’s hope Warwick and others can put on benefits that won’t lead, as this one did, to audience burnout. By the time it was over, 3 1/2 hours after the advertised starting time, more than half the near-capacity audience had left the 2,500-seat theater. Poor Warwick was forced to be the wallflower at her own party, truncating a planned three-song closing set and wrapping things up hastily with the inevitable ensemble finale, “That’s What Friends Are For.”

By then, the audience had sat through a largely superfluous 80-minute undercard and a 30-minute intermission, waiting until the second half to see what they’d come to see: Patti LaBelle belting and Richard Pryor battling.

Pryor, making a comeback as a stand-up comedian while fighting multiple sclerosis, looked thin and fragile and delivered his 22-minute set in a wizened voice. But he was as profane as ever, and, most important, as keen as ever to confront the important matters at hand. He got some comic mileage out of his own disability, and confronted AIDS in a way that, if not exactly belly-laugh inducing, cut to the fundamental absurdity posed by a disease that shadows sex with death.

Watching LaBelle can be like watching a hurricane. You’re witnessing an impressive force of nature, but soon you find yourself yearning for more temperate weather. LaBelle’s five-song set included her patented discombobulation of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” In LaBelle’s screaming version, we don’t imagine an idyllic scene of bluebirds flapping toward a rainbow; we hear Saturn rockets roaring past it. LaBelle was fun, though, in measured doses. Satin-caped, stilletto-heeled, and squeezed into neck-to-ankle spandex, she embodied the idea of entertainer as life force, and her showy voice fit well in the gospel workout “Heaven.”

Warwick’s role wound up being more to provide context than to entertain. Introduced as “one of the world’s most compassionate human beings,” she opened the evening singing “I’ll Never Love This Way Again,” warming up enough as the ballad went on to deliver a bravura sustained-note ending. Then she confidently delivered a keynote talk about the need to remain focused on the fight against AIDS, striking a tone that achieved just the right mixture of authority and dry, ironic humor.

The highlight of the benefit’s first half was an unscheduled appearance by veteran jazz guitarist Phil Upchurch, whose fingers flew playfully and unpredictably through compositions by Miles Davis and Chic. Mel Carter, who had a modest string of pop hits in the mid-’60s, sang three songs in an appealing now-cottony, now-husky tenor. Also on hand was R&B; newcomer Brian McKnight, whose debut album has been a success, but whose inexperience showed on stage in a set hampered by his wooden piano self-accompaniment and florid vocal style. Comedian Paul Mooney also performed.