Wayne's world

A close encounter with Mr. Excitement

by Jeff Ousborne

LAS VEGAS -- Wayne Newton arrives on stage every night in a spaceship, but it's apparent from the start of the show that he's landing on his home planet. That's because the loungy theater in the Stardust Hotel Casino is so obviously a world of Wayne's own making. The curled white stairway that leads nowhere. The dated tux. The synthed-out strains of Also sprach Zarathustra. The "I Spent the Night with Wayne Newton" nightshirts on sale for 20 bucks. The spaceship that looks like a prop from some long-forgotten ELO tour. The dry ice. Most of all, those panting Wayniacs in the front row. Welcome to Wayne's World, where the words show biz and razzmatazz need no quotation marks, where the women in the jam-packed audience are called (with a hick's pseudo-sophistication) "gorgeous bits of feminine pulchritude," where his skin-tight band are referred to as a "musical aggregation." Keep in mind, after all, that Newton is a proud Virginia cracker with Native American roots who (as he's so often described) saw a Grand Ole Opry tour at the age of four and was entranced by Hank Williams Sr. (He still does "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" most nights.)

That was several self-inventions ago, before he became "Mr. Excitement," before Vegas made him into its very own hood ornament, before he was the androgynously voiced, baby-faced kid crooning "Danke Shoen." Even at 20 he was an anachronism, beloved by grandmothers and anointed by muckity-mucks like Jackie Gleason and Frank Sinatra to guard the shrine of Adult Entertainment. He still does, presiding over a subterranean land of the lost with a production that, give or take a few special effects and sexual innuendoes, would've been perfect middlebrow fun for the Eisenhower era. He looked fit and happy at the November 30 show, though his voice is shot; the notes just won't come out, but who cares? From the set's start (he still does seven a week), the 58-year-old Newton coddled the pipes. While his band trod water during the Elvis tribute "Suspicious Minds," he waded through the audience for about 15 minutes, smooching women and needling their husbands ("If some Indian were kissing my girl, I'd be pissed off"). Then he asked, "Is anyone in love tonight?" Well, of course: the needy Newton and everyone in his loving, mostly middle-aged and elderly audience.

But he can't sell the songs anymore, so he sold us his own Wayneness. That meant stylized machismo (panties hanging from his microphone cord), endless, self-referential banter (mild ethnic humor, ex-wife jokes), and, on schlocky tunes like "Endless Love" and "I Want To Hold You Again," an emotiveness so sweet that the complimentary drinks should have been spiked with insulin. He distributed bons mots and bottles of champagne to couples in the crowd with the whimsy of a god. There was the obligatory barbed by-play with his band (back-up singer and cut-up Jeff Brandt did wicked impersonations of Willie Nelson, Tom Jones, Elvis, and his boss). And Newton's once "famed" musical versatility was reduced to a series of goofy, half-assed gestures: tossed-off piano snippets of "Great Balls of Fire," tortured violin work on the chugging showstopper "Orange Blossom Special." Yet though he tells lots of jokes, he's too humorless to get the biggest joke of all: his own kitschiness. He's self-conscious without being self-aware. He genuinely believes he's the "Midnight Idol," and who would dare disagree with him in Wayne's World? That absence of irony ultimately makes him endearing, disarming, even subversive. It allows for sublime moments, when Newton's work does one of the most important things art can do: evoke a response along the lines of "What the hell is that?"

He did it twice that night. For years, Billy Joel has refused to perform "Just the Way You Are" live, on the premise that he's sung it so many times it's meaningless. In contrast, when Newton finally swung through a finger-snapping "Danke Schoen," his ruined voice fading in and out like a weak AM radio station, the effect was liberating: song-as-pure-ritual, pure Wayneness, pure acceptance, pure bliss. On the closer, the garishly weird "MacArthur Park," he clenched his fist, closed his eyes, and hung on every gibberishy word and note. (You think Bob Dylan could pull off lines like "My passions flow like rivers through the sky?") The orchestra descended mechanically; blowtorches hissed; sheets of fake rain fell, and the King of Las Vegas was left alone on stage, spent and exposed and vulnerable for an instant ("What the hell was that?"). A wave and a grin. Then he ascended his white stairway, a perfect metaphor for the old-school idea of show biz he represents. It's the notion that celebrities aren't like you and me, despite what you read in US magazine profiles, and that we're lucky when they want to spend a couple of hours here on earth with us. And you know what? We are.