O.C. POP MUSIC REVIEW : Randy Newman Plays the Cerritos Center: The Devil Gets His Due

There is something nicely ratifying about seeing Randy Newman in a posh concert hall. Seated at a grand piano Friday at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, Newman looked exactly like what he is, one of the finest and most colorful songwriters this nation has produced.

Though some fans have known that of Newman for more than a quarter-century, it has sometimes been a hard sell convincing others. Even in the quirk-embracing late ‘60s he seemed a little too strange for many people. He looked like anything but a rock star, and sounded even less like one, with a hoarse, pained voice and a piano style that might kindly have been called minimalist.

In his spare, sardonic songs about social misfits and hostile deities, you either heard the humanity, insight and compassion masterfully hidden in the lines, or you heard nothing. And only on rare occasions--with “Short People” and “I Love L.A.,” both sung Friday--were radio programmers able to misconstrue his songs sufficiently to allow them on the air.

So it is nice to have seen the wheel slowly turn to where Newman now racks up Academy Award nominations for his movie songs and scores, has had tunes appropriated for toothpaste commercials, and now finds bookings in halls such as the Cerritos Center, where his Friday performance was the first of two nights.

Had Mark Twain and Stephen Foster formed a songwriting team in the Brill Building circa 1960, the result might have been the music that comprised Newman’s 27-song, two-encore, performance. 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 Orange County 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’s 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.

Newman announced that “Faust” will be opening this fall in La Jolla, which, he noted, “is fortunately very close to the border.”

Several of the songs were from his 1974 masterpiece “Good Old Boys.”

The monsters on “Good Old Boys” are very human monsters, though: The husband in “Marie” who has to be drunk to admit his love for his wife and the harm he’s done her; the racist who parodies the North’s impression of Southern racism while ignoring its own ghettos.

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On those and such numbers as his wicked portrayal of Hollywood self-importance, “My Life Is Good,” Newman’s songs carried the punch of a good short story, and in three minutes his “Bad News From Home” was as thoroughly depressing as a Cormac McCarthy novel can be.

On piano, Newman’s now an accomplished, distinctive stylist. His still quite limited voice is nonetheless the ideal medium for his songs, a balance of irony and emotion.

The show was opened by rarely heard singer Buffy Sainte-Marie, as direct and guileless a songwriter as Newman is complex and convoluted.

Composer of the Donovan hit “Universal Soldier,” Sainte-Marie was tagged as a protest singer in the 1960s, and in some respects that title still applies to her. Her 13-song set was filled with numbers decrying “money junkies” and the abuses to which Native Americans have been subjected (Sainte-Marie, 54, is a Cree Indian).

Her songs weren’t polemics, however. On recent songs, such as “Fallen Angels,” she stressed a common human plight and that the battle she sees is one to change hearts rather than still them.

Backed by three musicians, including her son Dakota Wolfchild on keyboards, Sainte-Marie’s set also featured her on mouth-bow on the traditional tune “Cripple Creek” and on her tender, much-covered “Until It’s Time for You to Go.”