O.C. POP MUSIC / COMEDY REVIEW : Too Much of a Good Thing : Warwick, LaBelle and Pryor Stand Out at AIDS Benefit

At the outset of her “Dionne & Friends Together for Life” show on behalf of the Minority AIDS Project on Thursday night at the Celebrity Theatre, Dionne Warwick vowed never to succumb to AIDS-benefit burnout, at least until a cure for AIDS 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 in the 2,500-seat theater had left, and poor Dionne 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.”

Earlier, the audience sat through a largely superfluous 80-minute series of opening acts 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 is making a comeback as a stand-up comedian while fighting multiple sclerosis. He looked thin and fragile, moved haltingly and delivered his 22-minute set in a wizened voice that has reduced his piping shriek of manic hilarity to something closer to a squeak.

But he was as profane as ever and, most important, as keen as ever to avoid evasion and confront the important matters at hand. He got some comic mileage out of his own disability in a running joke about how his legs were playing pranks by refusing to carry him to a waiting chair. When he finally made it to his seat, he had prepped the audience so well that they greeted the feat of plopping his body down with an ovation worthy of a length-of-the-floor dribble and slam dunk.

Pryor also confronted AIDS, a patently unfunny subject. But with his favorite subject--sex--now inextricably linked to death, he wasn’t about to back down. If his musings on AIDS didn’t stir any deep laughs, they did cut to the fundamental absurdity posed by the disease: “I love to (have sex). But I don’t want to die from it,” Pryor kept saying, in a voice not angry or amused but simply amazed.

A riff on condoms tapped further into the absurdity of AIDS. Pryor urged condom use as a necessity but also joked about how they can be a source of utmost embarrassment in the bedroom.

An important purpose of humor is to lower our defenses and give us a language for talking about what disturbs us most. Pryor’s set left no doubt that, as much as he has lost physically, he hasn’t lost his sense of purpose.

Watching Patti LaBelle can be like watching a hurricane. There’s no doubt it’s an impressive force of nature, but soon you find yourself yearning for more temperate weather.

LaBelle’s five-song, 37-minute set included her patented discombobulation of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Poignant and yearning as written, this classic certainly has resonance for an AIDS benefit. But in LaBelle’s misbegotten, incessantly roaring version, we don’t imagine an idyllic scene of bluebirds flapping toward a rainbow; we hear Saturn rockets roaring past it, beyond the exosphere and halfway to the moon.

Repeatedly, LaBelle unleashed a siren voice--not the sort that coos seductively in Greek mythology, but the kind that blares from the roofs of small-town volunteer fire departments.

She was fun, though, in measured doses. She embodied the idea of Entertainer As Life-Force as she prowled the stage in satiny turquoise cape; tight, neck-to-ankle black Spandex; stiletto-heeled boots, and a hairdo that, while relatively conservative for her, still conjured images of the leaning tower of Pisa.

She turned her opening number, “Somebody Loves You, Baby,” into a lark as she summoned a staid gent onto the stage and played cat-and-mouse with him, finally cajoling him to croon in an enthusiastic if off-key falsetto before engulfing him in a hug.

“Heaven,” with its turn toward boisterous, call-and-response gospel singing, put LaBelle’s unfettered voice to its best use. Sheila E turned up to whack timbales and cowbells in a funky but formless and overlong run through LaBelle’s new single, “All Right Now” (not the old rock hit by Free).

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. Playing in an electric trio format with Ricky Miner, the bassist from Whitney Houston’s band, and Warwick’s drummer, Dennis Allen (who was confined to the stage-side pit), Upchurch played an airy Miles Davis composition, “All Blues,” and a funk-jazz fusion take on Chic’s “I Want Your Love.” Upchurch produced clean, well-articulated tones while roving the fret board with a sense of blithe, unpredictable movement.

Mel Carter, who had a modest string of pop hits in the mid-’60s, sang in an appealing now-cottony, now-husky tenor. He offered a measured but dynamic saloon-style “Over the Rainbow” that had the taste and proportion missing from LaBelle’s reading.

His big hit, the slow-dancing “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me,” was a good showcase for doo-wop informed crooning. But Carter faltered when he strained to rise to the occasion with a grandiloquent, self-penned anthem that went “raise the world’s voice as one, sing louder than the gun.”

Also on hand was Brian McKnight, whose debut album of overheated contemporary R&B; ballad crooning has been a success but whose inexperience showed on stage. McKnight (whose older brother, Claude, sings in Take 6) accompanied himself woodenly on piano for two songs, then sang his hit, “The Way Love Goes,” to taped accompaniment. His singing style was showy, but his voice wasn’t sufficiently full-bodied to justify his florid approach. He stretched notes like so much Silly Putty, but to no apparent emotive purpose.

Comedian Paul Mooney got the predominantly black crowd roaring with an 18-minute set devoted mainly to acid-edged, frequently true-ringing jokes (“ ‘White Men Can’t Jump’--they don’t have to; they own the team”). Many of them were about the ways African-Americans have been ignored, diminished or turned into stereotypes when portrayed in television and film. Mooney urged everyone to go see Spike Lee’s “Malcolm X” as an antidote.

But the problem with his set was that it didn’t for a second echo the progression in Malcolm’s life from hatred of whites to an acceptance of a common humanity that crosses racial bounds. There’s a need for humor that vents bitterness over racial wrongs, but there was no exhausting Mooney’s pool of bile.

He fantasized about an updated plot for “Driving Miss Daisy”: “Some old Jewish woman--I’ll take a bagel and beat the (expletive) out of Miss Daisy. This is the ‘90s. I’ll take her in the alley and rob her.” With a little more material like that, maybe Mooney can get a gig at the next Ku Klux Klan convention.