Review: DIONNE WARWICK Dazzles at Cabot Theatre

From the moment Dionne Warwick took the stage at her recent concert at Beverly’s Cabot Theatre, accompanied by a thunderous, sustained standing ovation, it was clear that there was a legend in the house.

Warwick – who had 62 singles, beginning with 1962’s “Don’t Make Me Over,” on the Billboard Hot 100 between 1962 and 1999 – wasted no time affirming just what has made her one of the most successful female pop artists of all time either, opening her 90-minute set with what she “affectionately” called “a walk down memory lane.”

From her vast catalogue, Warwick – dazzling in a pale pink, crystal-encrusted evening ensemble – offered up an impressive hits medley comprised of the Burt Bacharach and Hal David songs she made famous, including “Walk On By,” “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” “Kentucky Blue Bird (Message to Michael),” “You’ll Never Get to Heaven (If You Break My Heart),” and “This Girl’s in Love with You.”

In Beverly, Warwick’s top-notch band included music director and pianist Todd Hunter, drummer Jeffrey Lewis, and percussionist Renato Braza. Her longtime bass player, Danny DeMorales, was stranded at LAX by the CrowdStrike IT outage and missed the show. While DeMorales’s absence was felt, Warwick’s iconic voice, deeper now than it once was, is a musical instrument in and of itself and the six-time Grammy Award knows exactly how to use it.

One of the best examples of that came when the 2023 Kennedy Center Honors recipient performed “Alfie,” the pop hit by composer Bacharach and lyricist David that was recorded by Cher, on the soundtrack of the 1966 film of the same name, and some 40 other artists before Warwick took it to number 15 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1967. With deep affection for both the song and the singer, the Beverly audience all but held its breath as Warwick perfectly delivered every note.

Showtunes were on the set list, too, with Warwick covering two songs from “Promises, Promises,” the Tony and Grammy Award-winning Bacharach and David musical which had a pre-Broadway tryout at Boston’s Colonial Theatre. She did a light and lovely “I’ll Never Fall in Love” in her hits medley, and later a lively “I Say a Little Prayer” as a duet with her son, David Elliot. And although she did not perform them at the Cabot, Warwick also had two other hits on songs from the musical – “A House Is Not a Home” and the title song.

With its soaring vocal crescendos, Warwick’s 1979 hit “I Know I’ll Never Love This Way Again,” by composer Richard Kerr and lyricist Will Jennings – the first single from “Dionne,” her Barry Manilow-produced debut album on Arista Records –– brought the audience to its feet for the second standing ovation of the evening.

The New Jersey native put her own stamp on the contemplative ballad “99 Miles from L.A.,” with music by Albert Hammond and lyrics by David, after introducing it with warm and humorous patter about her good friend Johnny Mathis, who has performed the song in concert for decades.

Following a beautiful rendition of “What the World Needs Now Is Love,” Warwick was again joined by her son along with her granddaughter, Cheyenne Elliot, who had opened the show with a brief set of her own, for “That’s What Friends Are For,” her 1986 Grammy Award-winning number-one single, by Bacharach and lyricist Carole Bayer Sager, that raised more than $3 million for AIDS research and became an anthem of its era.

Photo caption: Dionne Warwick. Photo by David Vance.

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