Something truly special about Bennett’s ‘Classic’
In a day when it’s enough to throw a couple of stars onto an over-lighted stage, point a few video cameras at them and call the result a “special,” “Tony Bennett: An American Classic” has been made with unusual care and expense and an evident respect for its subject, who has been put on a pedestal high enough for you to get a good look at him but not so high that his head disappears into the clouds.
Rob Marshall, director of “Chicago,” has put together an efficient hour that in broad strokes tells both the singer’s story and the story of his times, while keeping the focus on the man as musician, even when surrounded by celebrity guests and dancers.
If it’s not quite the defining moment or definitive statement that were Frank Sinatra’s “A Man and His Music,” the 1968 Elvis Presley “comeback” special, Liza Minnelli’s “Liza With a Z” or the series of musical hours that sealed Barbra Streisand’s stardom well before she ever made a movie, it is schooled in those landmark broadcasts and is the best thing of its sort -- not a lot of competition there, agreed -- to come along in a long time.
Indeed, it’s debatable whether in the thousand-channel world, any television show can qualify as an actual event, no matter how strenuously the word might be promotionally applied to it -- like any other commodity, TV loses value with abundance. This is at least Bennett’s fourth special since a 1994 “MTV Unplugged” made him cooler than he’d ever been, his first then on a Major Broadcast Network (NBC, tonight), and in the middle of sweeps, yet. “An American Classic” aims high: It’s out to capture at least some of that old aura of the unmissable historical moment, to exude a particularly old-fashioned sort of class and quality.
That this is a special that wants to be especially special is clear right from the opening, which finds a spotlighted Bennett singing Charlie Chaplin’s “Smile” to an empty old Los Angeles theater (the empty old Los Angeles Theater, to be precise); at the second verse Streisand glides out of the shadows to join him, and there is something thrilling in the way the unadorned simplicity of the moment underscores the massed talent. (She is the nearest thing to a peer here.) The TV special is linked to a recording project, Bennett’s recent “Duets” album, which pairs him with singers from a number of younger generations in an orgy of mutually reflected glory, though there are many furlongs separating the old master and soft-edged revivalist Michael Buble.
Other guests include Stevie Wonder, Elton John, k.d. lang, Diana Krall and Juanes in settings meant to recall the stages of Bennett’s career as well as great moments in American entertainment -- you get a postwar New York nightclub, like something out of “Guys and Dolls,” with John Legend trading verses on “Sing You Sinners”; a trip to Vegas, with plumed showgirls circling Tony and Elton; Krall and Bennett in a perfect recreation of a mainstreamed mod-a-go-go ‘60s production number; a Fosse-esque “Steppin’ Out with My Baby” with Christina Aguilera, which is somehow supposed to stand for the MTV years. This is all jogged along by celebrity narrators including Billy Crystal, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Robert De Niro, who cover the biographical high points and ignore the low.
Some guests seem more aptly chosen than others, but they are all there as supporting players essentially, and though the show is not entirely free of corn, it has been made as tight as a drum. Production designer John Myhre, costume designer Colleen Atwood, cinematographer Dion Beebe and Marshall’s co-choreographer John DeLuca are all veterans of “Chicago” and seem to know their business.
Bennett certainly does. Experience has burned the excess sentiment out of his music, and he is in good voice -- remarkably good, given the fact that he turned 80 this year, but one need make no excuses for him. And yet, though his chiseled profile suggests he is made of the same stuff as Mt. Rushmore, there is an inescapably valedictory feeling in the show’s backward gaze, an amber mist of numbered days -- not for Bennett, necessarily, who may outlive us all, but for the world of which he is the last surviving singing superstar.
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‘Tony Bennett: An American Classic’
Where: NBC
When: 8 tonight
Rating: TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children)
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