Diana Ross;Reflections on a Diva Who Withers Not

By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: April 9, 2007
Diana Ross didn’t wield a scepter or a magic wand during her concert on Friday evening, but she might as well have. During a show at the Theater at Madison Square Garden that lasted barely an hour and a half Ms. Ross disappeared every 20 minutes or so, only to re-emerge swathed in new shades of ruffles and feathers, and swan around the stage in a glittering, form-fitting gown.

Richard Termine for The New York Times
Diana Ross performing at Madison Square Garden on Friday night.

The word queen came to mind: beauty queen, disco queen, fashion queen, queen of Motown, fairy queen, queen of the mermaids (in the skin-tight salmon outfit chosen for her grand entrance to the strains of “I’m Coming Out”). Flashing her Miss America smile and brushing back the forest of jet-black hair that has been her tonsorial trademark since the 1970s, Ms. Ross graciously bestowed her royal blessings on her besotted subjects, one of whom kept shouting at the stage, “You look 35!” And she did.

Talk about illusion. On March 26 Ms. Ross turned 63. Not since Marlene Dietrich has a pop diva staked so much on maintaining a fixed image of time-resistant, hard-shell glamour. That image is carried off much more effectively on the stage than on television. As a guest coach on “American Idol” recently Ms. Ross looked and acted closer to her actual age and sang not half as well as Melinda Doolittle, the contest’s front-runner.

Onstage, however, she reigned. Her perfectly groomed beauty was as reassuring as the parade of Supremes hits that she performed with an efficient band and two backup singers. As long as we can sing along with “Where Did Our Love Go?,” “Baby Love” and “Stop! In the Name of Love,” and shake our collective flabby booty, we are all forever youthful in the Sound of Young America.

It has been a long time since Ms. Ross sold records in significant quantities, and her recent album, “I Love You” (Manhattan/EMI), from which she sang two numbers on Friday, hasn’t burned up the charts. Produced by Peter Asher and Steve Tyrell, this studious attempt at a personalized oldies museum on the order of Rod Stewart’s “Still the Same: Great Rock Classics of Our Time” is as sterile as its prototype, polite but lifeless.

Those two numbers were the 1969 Spiral Starecase hit, “More Today Than Yesterday,” arranged with a toughened disco beat, and a treacly new ballad, “I Love You (That’s All That Really Matters),” written by Fred White, which Ms. Ross poured over the audience like watered down corn syrup.

Her voice, never powerful to begin with, has diminished in strength and flexibility. In particular her version of “Don’t Explain” during a brief Billie Holiday segment faltered on several sour notes. As she did in “Lady Sings the Blues” all those years ago, Ms. Ross translated Holiday’s animal woundedness into a weepy, soap-opera pseudo-sincerity.

It would be foolish, however, to underestimate the influence of Ms. Ross’s singing, which established a style of sassy, streetwise girl talk as a permanent strain of pop. You could even argue that she was pop’s original Mean Girl, who enabled Madonna, Britney and the rest.

Ms. Ross’s most revealing performance on Friday was her version of “It’s My House,” from the 1979 album “The Boss.” While singing this curt expression of self-empowerment, she coyly shimmied and did some discreet bumps and grinds.

The song may be about real estate, but Ms. Ross transformed it into an expression of physical self-possession, a celebration of the body beautiful. I imagine that she will be singing it into her 80s and that — with the help of makeup, costumes and lighting — she will still look approximately the same as she did on Friday: as the man said, 35.