Rufus Wainwright review – 'three-cape show' brushes the comfort zone
Since signing to Dreamworks in the mid-1990s, Rufus Wainwright has careened through a ludicrous pop career from some lost showbiz golden age. After recording his $750,000 debut album, the Canadian-American moved into New York’s fabled Chelsea Hotel, befriended Leonard Cohen, worked up a monstrous crystal meth addiction, cameoed on Ab Fab, went to rehab, wrote a failed opera about a failed opera singer, released several acclaimed albums, toured a word-for-word cover of a full Judy Garland concert, authored a second opera and – in perhaps his first predictable move – feuded with Liza Minnelli.
All you’d put past him now is treading water. And yet here we are, at the conclusion of an anniversary tour for his hyper-confessional imperial phase: the self-titled debut and its jaunty follow-up, Poses. He is now 45, primed to greet full houses of veteran fans melted and mopped up by each quiver of his voice, that irrepressibly sardonic vibrato. He puts on, in his words, a “three-cape show”, with comically overwrought costumes, including a knickknack-covered dreamcoat and an engulfing dress that looks like a rainbow-hued shower loofah. He covers the Beatles’ Across the Universe, and everybody leaves with a smile.
On these terms, it’s a dizzying success. The band is note-perfect, and the material fondly remembered. The timing, too, is auspicious: Wainwright’s early pop fantasias with Jon Brion and Van Dyke Parks were so musically and lyrically ostentatious that they evaded genre. Recently though, something of their DNA could be heard in a new wave of self-aware maximalists like Father John Misty and Weyes Blood.
Cynical artists tend to deploy the anniversary tour in dire creative straits. Not so for Wainwright. His latest project was Hadrian, a sexually explicit epic about a gay Roman emperor that clearly didn’t want for ambition. As for pop, it seems improbable, to say the least, that his keen self-awareness and pathos should be on the wane. His muse, after all, is Rufus Wainwright. If he sincerely believed he was now a middle-aged washout with nothing interesting to say, he would certainly write a good album about it.
But he is an incorrigible crowdpleaser, and clearly sees each performance as its own artwork. To open tonight’s show, he strolls on in a pinstripe suit with ankle swingers and a top hat, like an Edwardian circus master. His boisterous humour routinely sets off his loyalists. Before playing Sally Ann, he describes his friendship with Cohen, carefully adding self-deprecating caveats. Conceding that the man enjoyed this particular song, however, he suddenly drops the pretence: “He played it for two days straight,” Wainwright concludes, placing a hand on his hip. “Basically, Leonard Cohen was obsessed with me.”
Showman charm helps him navigate the show’s emotional wilderness. He pays tribute to his late mother, the folk singer Kate McGarrigle, who made her last public appearance on the Albert Hall stage. He soars through an unadorned cover of Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now. But there is the faintest sense of pop obligations fulfilled, most evident on the laboured Trump protest song Sword of Damocles. A new album is reputedly on the horizon, and his tireless panache shows he’s not out of the game: old-school charm and a wily ragtime bounce at the piano, trousers dancing clumsily around his ankles. This is where he’s most comfortable, but comfort is his one bad look of the night.
• At Symphony Hall, Birmingham, on 22 April. Then touring the UK until 7 May.