Pop Music Reviews : Randy Newman Fails to Excite Fans

Randy Newman isn’t quite into the Frank Sinatra corner yet, where a show is a ritualized encounter with an immutable set of songs. But with his notoriously miserly output further slowed by his recent movie soundtrack assignments, Newman doesn’t have much to work with when it comes to revitalizing his program.

At the Wadsworth Theater on Saturday, Newman fended off artistic petrifaction with some songs from an in-progress concept album/show, and he dropped his sarcastic one-liners all over the place. But there wasn’t much liveliness in the room, and even Newman seemed to sense the antiseptic atmosphere--at the end, the owlish singer sarcastically apologized for “boring” the crowd during the final 20 minutes.

It doesn’t question the quality of his greatest songs--mainly the hilarious, haunting, scathing and resonant material from “12 Songs,” “Sail Away” and “Good Old Boys”--to wonder what’s the point of sitting through them again 20 years later. He should heed his own famous words and drop a few of the big ones from his set.

At least the show took on a fresh edge when he played music from his upcoming version of the Faust legend. In addition to some typically twisted goings-on in heaven, it included a bitter lament about England, and a tune that does for Canada what Newman did for Cleveland in “Burn On, Big River.”