BetteBack: Bette Midler: The Most Outrageous Of All

Aiken Standard
She’s Still The Most Outrageous Of All
Friday, August 24, 1984

Cyndi Lauper has bag-lady clothes and Woody Woodpecker hair. The Eurhythmies’ Annie Lennox alternates between a
carrot-orange crew cut and Elvis drag. Flat-topped Grace Jones l o o ks c o – d e s i g n ed by D r. Frankenstein and Yves St. Laurent. Boy George is really a boy.

“It is getting-harder to be outrageous,” Bette Midler acknowledged at a press conference promoting her new Home Box Office special. And though she didn’t say it, her clothes (tasteful white sweater and slacks, dainty sandals), her lowkey manner and her talk of a quieter, more serious show suggested that the queen of flash ‘n’ trash had dropped out of the competition. Such a sly one, that Bette.

In Bette Midler: Art or Bust!, which HBO unveils Saturday night, Midler reasserts her claim to being the most outrageous one of all (and the most e n d e a r i n g ). In the process, she gives pay cable a reason for existing.

Regular television wasn’t ready for Midler when she emerged from New York’s Continental Baths 10 years ago and it isn’t ready for her now. Not because of her language – she sounds more innocent uttering dirty words than Joan Collins would reading nursery rhymes.

Not because of her suggestive body language, either – her sexuality touches the heart more than the hormones.

Regular television isn’t ready for Midler because it cannot accommodate her spontaneity – the possibility of what she might do – and because her act lampoons the very tackiness that is the essence of so much TV. Her scoffing outlook
might be contagious.

That the uninhibiting realm of pay cable is where she belongs is most obvious during Art or Bustl’s “Delores de Lago” production number. The hour’s centerpiece, it is showmanship so ridiculously fresh, so charmingly bizarre, so merrily tasteless that it almost renders all that comes after it anticlimactic.

“And now, from the fresh fish locker at Becky’s Cafeteria … ” booms the announcer. And out roll Midler and her backup singers, the Harlettes, all dressed up in sequined mermaid tails, driving motorized wheelchairs. The extended routine encompasses three songs (“We Are Family,” “In the Mood” and “I Will Survive”), wacko patter and some of the funniest choreogrophy, in and out of the wheelchairs, ever conceived. It has to be seen to be believed, much less appreciated.

Art or Bust! is actually a concert film shot during Midler’s crosscountry “De Tour ’82-’83.” Much of it is unrecognizable as such, however, because the concert footage has been embellished with special visual effects. The most dazzling of
these makes it seem as though Midler is an animated element in assorted works of modern art.

Technical wizardry and ingenious choreography are most effectively combined in the show’s finale. It begins with Midler, dressed and masked as a commedia dell’arte figurine, dancing a tremulous windup ballet. She then joins herself on stage, thanks to some cinematic sleight of hand, in a new costume and begins a long medley. From Marshall Crenshaw’s “Favorite
Waste of Time,” the prettiest song on her recent No Frills album, to “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon,” which she invests with unexpected poignancy, to “The Rose,” it’s a song-cycle for which she summons all her vocal talent, dramatic flair and compassion.