The Vancouver Sun from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada • 23

The Vancouver Sun, Monday, September 22, 1997 Entertainment YUKA SATO BARB UNDER.H1LL PAUL MARTIN I TlZABETH MANLEY RUDY GALINDO A little too light-headed LASER LIGHT CLASSICS MBH Productions, Ltd. Coliseum, Sept. 20 3 5 I UJ LLOYD DYKK i JHURSDAYI Canon iioC3 23 i seemed cautionary when I wanted to bolt. As for lasers, there was just one and it combed the vast Coliseum roof with a thin, lonely triangle of beams. A wag sitting nearby said it looked like the equivalent of a karaoke machine.

It was also a bit like watching a lawn sprinkler wafting this way and that. What was hilarious was its randomness. In the middle of a serious musical passage, as in Nessun dorma sung by an unannounced, straining tenor or the tenderest moment from a West Side Story medley, the laser would suddenly go berserk, spiraling like mad and just as suddenly cutting out. An awful soprano, Sherrilyn Hall one of those pitch-approximating little "Broadway" squeakers made a stab in the dark at two numbers. The choir, so heavily miked you could hear them turning pages, roared out something from Orffs Carmina Burana and were sometimes behind the beat.

And then Barlow shamelessly repeated Elgar's Land of Hope and Glory not once, not twice, but three times and then a fourth as people headed for the aisles. He wanted everyone to sing along. "C'mon, it's my country!" Rabid Anglophiles got to their feet but there wasn't a lip moving in the red-seat section. They didn't know the words and why should they? It wasn't their country. In an abrupt change of publicity following the awful news, Barlow dedicated the concert to Princess Diana, but with that attendance, proceeds to her causes can have been small, if anything.

You doubted it had very much to do with her in the first place. How could a heartfelt tribute to Diana leave you alternately mad, bored and laughing? Sun Music Critic Light classical music and lasers. Distracting? Heck no. We should look into lasers for other things, like Preston Manning speeches, the Parliamentary channel and the shows of Andrew Lloyd Webber. Lasers Light Classics, which played the Coliseum on Saturday to a woeful tenth of the building's 15,000 seats, is the brainchild of 22-year-old British conductor Glenn Barlow, who's already brought it to London and Colorado.

He amassed about 500 local musicians including the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, the Vancouver Bach Choir and its youth choruses, the Band of the 15th Field Regiment and fanfare trumpeters, but not the Royal Canadian Artillery who were scheduled for Tchaikovsky's 18 12 Overture which went ahead without the cannon-fire (a kinder, gender 1812). Earlier, an organizer said the VSO had its knickers in a twist about deafening mortars going off within inches of their ears. Lasers are nothing new for the imperishable Pink Floyd, but when employed by the classics you'd expect something sensationally cheesy. What we got was just boringly cheesy. The publicity promised "400 lights and lasers attached to six massive space-age-type rig configurations." There were lots of lights but when they went on it was no more imposing than an "Attention, K-Mart shoppers" alert.

They also resembled the search-lights of a prisoner's pen, which a UJ -J A li I 3-Tinw Current Hurl Champion ELVIS STOJKO Olympic Silver Medalist NANCY KERRIGAN in her first Canadian Tour I THURSDAY I inth II 1 XlJseptember General Motors Place 2 3 TICKETS AVAILABLE AT GENERAL MOTORS PLACE. ORCA BAY BOX OFFICE TICKETMASTER. OUTLETS OR CHARGE BY PHONE VTV will be a unique station, says Fecan FOR GROUP SALES CALL: (604) 899-SHOW1-888-ORCABAY .1 Canadian 'She! AMJ CAMPBELL' tff t.anaaian Figure Skating Sheralon mssm Airlines oriented current affairs, will be unlike any of Baton's other stations, including its flagship, CFTO-Toronto. "(CFTO), as it exists right now, is more similar to BCTV than anything else. I don't think there's anything quite like VTV anywhere.

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