SIBLING REVELRY
Osmonds bring holiday show to town
“I’m so, so sorry I’m late,” said the voice over the phone. “A kid thing came up.”
The apologetic voice was that of Marie Osmond, who was calling just five minutes past the set interview time.
In case you didn’t know, the Osmonds are nice folks.
Osmond will be here with her brother, Donny, at Richmond’s River Rock Casino Dec. 20-22 for a good old-fashioned revue of singing, dancing, comedy, costume changes and chat. Think a sort of 1970s classic Donny & Marie Show filled with their hits and covered with a big dusting of Christmas.
“I tell everyone, you will leave there with the Christmas spirit, I guarantee it,” said Osmond, who started doing the Christmas shows six years ago as a means to help her deal with a terrible loss.
“My son (Michael) passed away and I could not spend Christmas at home so I was going to go out and do a Christmas show. I just can’t be home,” said Osmond, the mother of four boys and four girls. “The only way I can get through grief is to serve others, so I said ‘I’m going to go make people happy,’ and Donny said, ‘I’ll do it with you,’ and that was the beginning of our first holiday show. I love doing it.”
The only girl of famous performing family The Osmonds, Marie was calling from Las Vegas, where she and Donny have a 26-week residency at the Flamingo Hotel. This is their ninth year in Vegas and they perform five nights a week.
“We come from that old-school entertainment where you communicate with the audience, where the audience is the most important thing,” said Osmond about staying power and still drawing a crowd. “We performed there (Las Vegas) with Elvis, Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. and people like that. We saw how they did it.”
The work ethic of big stars left a mark but so did the work ethic and attention to detail of the Osmond matriarch Olive.
Osmond mom Olive enlisted Marie to help open and read The Osmond Brothers’ fan mail.
“She picked me because I was young. She wanted them to connect to those girls,” said Osmond. “She wanted to know what they were thinking. What they liked.”
Osmond said recently at a show in Vegas, five English women told her that they were true-blue, letter-writing Osmond Brothers fan club members.
“I said: ‘I read all your letters, not them. I did all that with my mother,” said Osmond. “I told the women from England, ‘I know what you thought of my brother. I didn’t get it, but I knew what you were thinking.’”
Osmond says that while letters have been replaced by Tweets and Facebook posts, what does remain is the connection.
“I must be echoing my mother’s thoughts because I think it is important to know your fans and stay close to them,” said Osmond, who does her own social media. “I don’t allow negativity. I don’t like that and that’s where I think social media can be really rough on the young girls and young boys. Because they don’t have the life experiences to let certain things blow off their shoulders. You have to keep moving in a direction that is positive. Every generation has its challenges.”
Osmond knows challenges. She developed eating disorders as a young woman. There have been bankruptcy, divorces, depression and the suicide of her son, Michael. Through it all, Osmond says work has been a cornerstone in her bid to carry on.
She’s been a talk-show host, a pitch person, doll maker and hit-recording artist (her new country album Music is Medicine has charted). She has shared a stage with everyone from Groucho Marx to Britney Spears.
“I have been so blessed,” said Osmond. “I think the blessing is the generation I grew up with. Because of them, we didn’t look at it as if we are magnificent entertainers. It was a job, a career to work at. I think I gleaned that work ethic from the older generation. It was a blessing because I watched a lot of people rotate through. I saw drugs and things like that, that were very prevalent in the ’70s. I watched how it destroyed a lot of people.”
Thankfully, the strong Mormon up bringing kept the Osmond sa way from the usual trappings of teen stardom, and a well-oiled work ethic meant jobs were always out there. A comeback could always be had. One of those situations saw Osmond sign up for the 2007 Dancing with the Stars show. Or as she likes to call it: “dancing with the starved.”
Osmond ended up placing third but scored even more in the hearts of the viewers when she collapsed on live TV.
“My biggest moment on YouTube, that dwarfs anything else I have done, and I don’t remember it,” said Osmond.
“What really ticked me off was why didn’t anyone catch me? I had a dance partner and he just let me fall to the floor,” said Osmond, whose partner was Jonathan Roberts. “I had a noggin, that’s for sure.”
A couple of years later, Osmond’s brother Donny decided to hit the Dancing with the Stars floor. He ended up winning.
“Donny won and he loves to give me a hard time about that, but I tell him, ‘Donny, if we did a dance-off, I would so kick your butt.’ The girls do 10 times more things than the boys do. He said ‘No.’ I said, ‘Then OK, do a split. Did you do one split on that show?’ He said ‘No.’ Exactly my point.”
So, after all these years and all these shows, are the rumours true? Do Donny and Marie just smile for the stage?
“Donny and I are very different,” she said. “But we are siblings. I mean, would you want to work with your brother every single day? But you know what? We both agree we are blessed and, my gosh, we are still here. There is that sibling chemistry, which I describe as an acid peel.
“We have that. But I think that might be why people enjoy it.”
Of course there’s some tension. After all, she’s a little bit country and he’s a little bit rock ‘n’ roll.
I must be echoing my mother’s thoughts because I think it is important to know your fans and stay close to them.