Ex-cruise ship crooner Jane Macdonald was in fine voice at Fairfields concert hall on Sunday night, October 28.

Truth be told, Jane's voice soared to R Kelly's I Believe I Can Fly, after opening the show with a medley of Burt Bacharach numbers including Walk on By.

Her band was truly bombastic with enough piano tinkering for the jazz numbers and cymbal crashes for the likes of What Becomes of The Broken Hearted.

The stage was flooded with shades of red, green and then yellow, but it was Jane standing in the spotlight clad in shiny turquoise bellbottoms and silver sequins to dazzle the eye which made me hungry for a buffet.

And that was the problem.

Her voice and the band were at full sail but her string of songs by other artists kept her in the B-list unable to climb any higher and the below par offerings from her new album left me wishing she would return to songs like The Way We Were.

She's not one to throw herself around the stage and is more into moderate swaying, so Tina Turner is out and so too is

Lulu s pizazz and joie de vivre.

At times I was expecting Des O'Connor to leap out and join her for a song as if it were all part of a live broadcast of the Royal Variety performance.

Her performance reached the middle aged and white-haired pensioners seated in the audience and what began as a few head nods and foot tapping in the first half extended to whoops and rhythmic claps after they'd been egged on by Jane.

Jane catered for her audience but left me wondering whether this was as good as it got for the star who rose to prominence through the BBC documentary

series The Cruise.

Judging by Sunday's concert I would say yes.

December 3, 2001 13:00