Went to see Cyndi Lauper at Wolf Trap last night. I wasn’t exactly eager to go, but my fiancee persuaded me. I thought of Lauper as an odd woman with a nice voice who had a few hits in the mid-80s, and then ruined her career with a series of bad p.r. moves, including getting too heavily involved in professional wrestling (remember Captain Lou Albano?) By the time I was at Yale Law School in the late ’80s, she was reduced to playing at Toad’s nightclub, a rather small live music venue in New Haven, and I didn’t think it worth the $15 (and the walk across the street to Toad’s) to go–it just seemed “so mid-80s.”
As it turns out, though, the show was great. Lauper has tremendous energy, a lot of charisma (which was most apparent when she waded into the audience during a few of her songs), a great voice, and some real musical talent, demonstrated by playing a string instrument(couldn’t identify it from the bleachers) during “Time After Time” and by a very clever arrangement of “She Bop.” Moreover, her rendition of True Colors was very moving. And instead of spending much of the concert on lame filler songs, she instead sang some very nice covers from a recent cover album. If she’s scheduled to appear in your town, by all means go.
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