Cyndi Lauper at Jones Beach Theater on July 19, in New York. She is on a farewell tour that began last fall at Montreal’s Bell Centre and already stopped at Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena before this return visit.Kevin Mazur/Getty Images
Cyndi Lauper closed her concert at Toronto’s Budweiser Stage on Sunday with Girls Just Want to Have Fun, her debut single and enduring statement from 1983. Was that too much to ask for back then, to have some fun? Some thought so.
Lauper is not only a true-blue feminist, she was one in any colour wig you might imagine on a hot night at the amphitheatre: blazing silver, banana yellow, soft pink. Halfway through the show, she wore no fake hair at all − just a black wig cap and a black gown, with a close-up of her 72-year-old face on the unforgivingly large video screen as she talked about Sally’s Pigeons, a song about dreams, control and a back-alley abortion.
Lauper mentioned a time in her life when women weren’t allowed to have their own credit cards or bank accounts and were resigned to lives “standing in front of a sink.” She elaborated on pet pigeons flying during the day, but every night being put back in their pens. As a girl, she just wanted to have the same cool adventures as a man. Then she sang:
I had a fool’s confidence
That the world had no boundaries
But instincts and common sense
Come in different quantities
Over the course of the soulful, celebrative 16-song concert, she chatted in her cartoonish Queens accent almost as much as she sang, stood as much as she bopped. Sometimes it felt like a one-woman show by the late, great Elaine Stritch.
Stritch, by the way, sang the song Are You Having Any Fun? Were we? You bet.
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Lauper is on a farewell tour that began last fall at Montreal’s Bell Centre and already stopped at Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena before this return visit. A concert at Vancouver’s Rogers Arena in August is to come.
Lauper took the stage to a recording of a Blondie hit from 1978. “One way, or another, I’m gonna win ya” seemed as good a mission statement as any − for the concert and for Lauper’s career.
She opened with She Bop, a song about a bodily act that rhymes with aberration. More often than not, the night’s material was presented through a distinctly eighties new wave lens, whether on a cover of Prince’s When You Were Mine or with the movie soundtrack hit The Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough.
Introducing I Drove All Night, Lauper said the notion of a woman behind the wheel of a car appealed to her. Before Into the Nightlife, she explained that the industrial sound was influenced by David Bowie’s Berlin years. Lauper joked that the song represented her Sweden year or, rather, her Sweden week. It was funnier when she said it.
The rock-orientated Change of Heart was a change of pace from the artist, who will be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in November.
During the indelible love song Time After Time, cellphone flashlights lit up the amphitheatre. “A community of light,” as Lauper put it.
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Earlier in the performance, she talked about her career taking a nosedive after her initial blaze of success. On Time After Time, Lauper sang, “After my picture fades and darkness has turned to gray, watchin’ through windows, you’re wondering if I’m okay.” The crowd handled the chorus about being there, waiting.
The main set ended with Money Changes Everything, a pop music answer, I suppose, to the Who’s Won’t Get Fooled Again.
In 1986, Jon Pareles of The New York Times wrote that Lauper possessed “one of the finest voices in rock.” I’m not sure that was true then, but it certainly isn’t true now. The singer seemed to be conserving her voice for a triumphant three-song encore of Shine, True Colors and Girls Just Want to Have Fun.
Lauper waved a Pride flag after True Colors, but that was just symbolic. In her own way, the (heterosexual) singer has hoisted the banner her whole career.
Lauper burst on to the scene in 1983 as a defiant, eccentric and effervescent force in vintage clothes with her smash album She’s So Unusual. Watching young pop star Chappell Roan follow in her footsteps, and seeing today’s female pop artists serving as this era’s rock gods, Lauper is a little less unusual now than she was four decades ago.
That’s a compliment, and a legacy.
