POP MUSIC REVIEWS : Randy Newman Sails His Own Way

Had Mark Twain and Stephen Foster formed a songwriting team in the Brill Building circa 1960, the result might have been the music that made up Randy Newman’s performance at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts on Friday. For all the bitter wit he aims at his homeland, his songs are deeply American in character and often troubling in the recognition they force us to share with their narrators.

The show didn’t differ much in content from his local appearances of recent years, reaching back to his 1968 debut album with the bleak, despairing “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today,” and featuring songs from his upcoming musical “Faust.”

He has been performing tantalizing snippets of that work since 1991, and he offered no more than that Friday, singing only three songs from it. It’s clear that Newman approaches the musical stage with no more reverence than he does his other song-crafting: Singing the show’s opening number, Newman posited God belting a snappy gospel “get on the glory train” tune, only to be interrupted by Lucifer rudely pointing out that he and God are only figments of the imagination.

The show was opened by rarely-heard singer Buffy Sainte-Marie, as direct and guileless a songwriter as Newman is complex and convoluted. Her 13-song set was filled with numbers decrying “money junkies” and the abuses to which Native Americans have been subjected, but her songs weren’t polemics.