Pumped Up

It’s questionable how much authentic warmth and fond sentiment lie behind the reunion of New Edition, the hit teen-pop band from the ‘80s. Its current agenda seems to have at least as much to do with pump-priming for the members’ stalled solo careers as it does with any wish to relive old acquaintance.

If nothing else, though, Saturday’s performance at the Pond of Anaheim proved that real pros don’t need to rely on sentiment. Drawing on highly developed talents as singers and dancers, the six members delivered a show that charged ahead like a high-powered engine during a first half devoted to bang-bang showmanship.

The same can’t be said for a flat and contrived segment in the second half, designed to portray the reunited members as old buddies who still could interact spontaneously and collegially to conjure up the good old days. This sequence purported to draw the members together in a simulated piano bar, where they would reminisce in song over vintage material. All it proved was that they don’t relate easily.

Admissions of real, if controllable, tension between the members have cropped up in interviews along New Edition’s tour route, as founders Bobby Brown, Ralph Tresvant, Ronnie DeVoe, Michael Bivins and Ricky Bell team up again along with Johnny Gill, who stepped in for one last album in 1988 after Brown left to go solo.

Brown was missing in action last week when New Edition appeared at the American Music Awards. At the Pond, though, he was about as omnipresent as he could manage to be without tempting the others to have him forcibly removed.

Brown deserves a prominent role--he is the most striking stage performer of the group, possessed of a raging-bull athleticism as a dancer and a gritty vitality as a singer.

But add up the exaggerated swagger in his two-song solo spot, his spotlight-hogging in the ill-advised impromptu segment and, above all, his concluding you’ll-have-to-drag-me-from-the-stage James Brown turn, and it seemed as if he was trying to turn the New Edition reunion into a promotional setup for his next solo album--which, as he told the audience repeatedly, is due March 28.

In pure singing ability, Gill was the foremost member, but during his solo number, “My, My, My,” he fell into the common golden-throat trap of overdoing everything.

It was the start of the set’s second-half slump.

The opening hour had been a dazzling display in which all hands supplied a focused, cohesive merging of (very high) energies. Brown’s solo turn on “My Prerogative” would have been hot even without his mooning of the audience, and Bell Biv DeVoe, the post-New Edition trio made up of the group’s least flamboyant personalities, kept the show sizzling with its merger of rapping and harmony on “Poison” and “Do Me!”

As the show sprawled toward the two-hour mark--and the four-act evening toward 4 1/2 hours--many in the house left before New Edition finished with two good, sentimental ballads from its reunion album, “I’m Still in Love With You” and “Home Again.” Maybe the group should have renamed itself Expanded Edition--and called in an editor.

Second-billed Blackstreet, led by influential pop-R&B; producer Teddy Riley, featured a smooth blend of four voices but didn’t score with the audience until an even more influential producer, Dr. Dre, turned up to give his blessing in a rapped greeting and dance sequence that kicked off the playful cool-funk hit “No Diggity.”

* New Edition, Blackstreet and Keith Sweat appear Saturday at the Forum, 3900 W. Manchester Blvd., Inglewood, 8:30 p.m. $45-$50. (310) 419-3100.