Rita Macneil Live in Concert (Canada, 1993) DIR: John G. Smith.
I set out here to ‘get’ Macneil, a Canadian icon who doesn’t have much to do with my tastes, and the turning point was when her keyboardist/bandleader busts out a honkytonk style solo with classical flourishes. This is Pop with a capital P, absorbing its various banal influences into a twinkly homogenized essence of production values, a few years behind its times sonically, as befits its off-center Maritime regionalism. The flourish-free documentation of her live show puts Rita the Performer up for evaluation, and she works her stage moves hard with conviction but obvious strain – she has a strange habit of flashing quick ingratiating smiles at the audience between lines. Her strength is in her concise, surprising melodic sense, which I enjoyed passively during the rock and blues and country derivatives that kick things off, less so as the set inexorably slouches toward the sentimental commonfolk hymnals that are her real meat. Guys wearing miner hats get trotted out as usual. (Viewed on VHS by Big Pond Publishing)
JC Culp
JC Culp is a collage filmmaker and the founder of Unpopular Arts, which provides media production, preservation and presentation.