Photo credit: Melissa Miller
Aretha Franklin had a cold, and it wasn’t one of those convenient, invisible colds that singers sometimes cite on stage when they’re delivering less than their best, either. This was the real thing—hacking cough, antibiotics, the whole deal. Every song during the first half hour of Franklin’s concert Friday night at the Riverside Theater was interrupted by a full-bodied cough. It was the type of ailment the 74-year-old soul pioneer has canceled shows over in the past, and she hinted that she could have this time, too, but as she told the crowd several songs into her set, “I definitely wasn’t going to disappoint you.”
At times it was a little hard to watch, a singer’s whose voice has already been diminished by time struggling to maintain her breath. Like many soul singers of a certain age, though, her voice warmed up as the show went on, gradually reclaiming some of its storied power and richness. If for the first half of her show she largely coasted on her stature, letting classics like “Think” and “Chain of Fools” perform themselves and eliciting cheers from the crowd any time she took more than a few steps, by the end of the night she was earning those cheers.
During the show’s most rousing stretch, she took a seat at the piano and led beautiful renditions of Natalie Cole’s “Inseparable” and Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” the latter of which culminated in a fiery seven-minute sermon detailing, in vague terms, a grave medical diagnosis and the holy intervention she testified kept her alive. No longer was the crowd roaring simply because she had waved to them or she dropped her fur coat to reveal a blinding sequined dress (though to be sure it was awesome when she did all of those things). They were roaring because she was crushing it, hitting notes that had seemed impossible just 30 minutes earlier.
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The concert was a lavish, big-budget affair, with Franklin supported by a 19-piece orchestra and a trio of dancers who made only the briefest appearances. Conspicuously missing, though, were any backup singers; instead she relied on distracting pre-recorded backing tracks. It probably wasn’t a matter of budget—you’d think she could have cut a few members of the 10-piece brass section to hire a few singers if it were—as much as a matter of territory: An assertion that a star of Franklin’s caliber doesn’t need to share the spotlight with anybody else. Her prime years may be long behind her, but it’s still a pleasure to watch her do her thing.
