Broken Moods

By RICHARD CORLISS

AZNAVOUR

Charles Aznavour still looks great at 58, with his small, powerful body sheathed in black, his ready-for-anything Cagney stance, the pouty lower lip that all chansonniers are issued at birth. Ever the actor as singer, he will poke or sculpt the air to give physical shape to a lyric; at the end of a song he may waltz or lurch into the wings. Mostly he stands at center stage and sing-talks one of the more than 1,000 ballads he has written. These are songs of subterranean emotions, of dreams and fears and guilty secrets. The best of them are stethoscopes detecting sounds often unheard: the diminished pulse beat of a love gone sour, the anxiety beneath male bravado, the hum of appliances in a lonely woman's flat. One must listen closely; Aznavour's charisma is implosive. He does not play to the audience so much as he admits it to his bittersweet, no-illusions world.

The problem with this species of charm is that it does not fill a concert stage, let alone the Broadway theater where Aznavour is beginning his tour of nine American cities (including Chicago, Washington and Los Angeles). Singing standards like Yesterday When I Was Young, The Old Fashioned Way and She is not enough to justify a solo stint on the grand scale. The star need not wear a mermaid's tail and wriggle in a wheelchair, as Bette Midler did in her recent socko turn at Radio City Music Hall. One needs simply to magnetize the spectator. Midler can do it singing The Rose; Lena Horne does it torching Stormy Weather one more time. Aznavour does not. Moreover, his show's mood is often broken by inept lighting cues and a sound system that whines when it does not crackle. It all makes one wish one were elsewhere--at home, perhaps, with a close friend, a bottle of Bordeaux and an Aznavour LP.

--By Richard Corliss This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.