Word: midlerisms
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...fitting that one of the strumpets with trumpets is chewing gum, for she and her sisters are introducing a supremely brassy babe. Crescendo! Curtain! Giant cotton-swab clouds! And there, radiant on a throne, sits the Arch Angel of Pop and Schlock. The message is clear: Bette Midler has lived up to her self-promotion. She is divine...
After 25 years as a singer, comedian, actress and a heavenly blend of all three, the lady has earned her halo. It may be mild hyperbole to call Midler the greatest entertainer in the universe -- there are, after all, other galaxies yet to be explored -- but who can doubt she's the hardest-working woman in show biz? In New York City, where she stars until Oct. 23 in the longest stop of her first tour in a decade, Bette is poetry in perpetual motion, from her prompt entrance at 8:10 (royalty is always punctual) to her exhausted departure...
...forthcoming CBS revival of Gypsy. Bette the burlesque comic, delivering her Sophie Tucker jokes with a wonderfully perky diction that bleaches out the blue. Finally, Bette the nonpareil balladeer; she has now sung The Rose 4,186 times, but it and her other standards still bloom. Age has made Midler's interpretations subtler, more mature, and her supple pipes rarely get frazzed by the punishing workout she puts them through five nights a week...
This combination of seeming spontaneity and dogged perfectionism might take its toll on a girl, or even on a middle-aged Midler. That, at least, is a running gag in the Experience the Divine tour. Who needs Andrew Lloyd Webber's Sunset Boulevard when Bette does the aging diva right here? She tells us, in a cunning rap song, that she's been compromised, Disneyized, classified, Jurassified. "I don't get out much anymore," she demurely declares, adding that mostly she sits "in my star trailer watching CNN. I know what everyone in Bosnia is wearing." She frets that...
...merriment plays off an apprehension of Midler's public, if not of the star herself, that she is in a slight career trough. A decade ago, she suffered an acrimonious flop film (Jinxed) and a nervous breakdown. She rebounded into a saner life, with a doting husband and an adored daughter, and the movie stardom that had previously eluded her. But her past three films ! have fallen this side of blockbuster. Scenes from a Mall swallowed her and Woody Allen whole; Hocus Pocus was a moderately popular summer farce; she turned down the original Sister Act script to make...