Three tenors and a baritone in slo-mo

May 18, 2009|Marc Hirsh, Globe Correspondent

The idea behind Il Divo was simple (and so deviously ingenious that it's no surprise it was masterminded by Simon Cowell): create a youthful counterpart to the Three Tenors using the template of boy-band pop groups. It's a formula that has proved wildly successful, but at Agganis Arena on Thursday, the quartet delivered a show that was almost a parody of how to sanitize popular culture for an audience that feels it's passed them by.

The incessant drive for elegance recalled the scene in "Titanic" where the passengers retired to their respective evening entertainments: boring cigar chitchat in first class and raucous dancing down in steerage. With its operatic approach to pop songs such as "Unbreak My Heart" and "The Winner Takes It All," Il Divo was the first-class crowd, tasteful to the point of inertness.

And inertness there was. With the lyrics to each song divided up and passed around (an old boy-band trick), each member of the group would sing his one line and then stand motionless, arms down by his side as he waited for his part of the song to come around again. Their wanderings around the oval walkway that extended out into the audience were likewise stultifyingly deliberate and smooth, and the videos showing on the giant screen behind them occasionally showed the band not only motionless but in slow motion.

As a result, the performances seemed strangely muted for something that was clearly meant to brim with passion. Instead, songs like "Adagio" were all faked emotion, which was underlined by Sébastien Izambard preceding "Everytime I Look at You" by asking "Would you like us to be more intimate?" With the orchestra still playing at full power, that pretty much just meant that the singers sat on stools.

The real problem was that Il Divo's entire approach diminished even great songs like "Bridge Over Troubled Water" and Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," the latter of which - featuring one of pop music's most delicately chosen English-language lyrics - was sung in Spanish for no good reason. It seemed like a commentary saying that these songs could be good, if only somebody would translate them into Romance languages and smother them with a symphony, three tenors, and a baritone.

"Enough cheesiness," declared Carlos Marin after making a joke about the curl in his hair. The show wasn't even half over.