No wonder Il Divo’s Broadway debut is subtitled “A Musical Affair”: That refers less to their concert of show-stoppers than to the steamy relationship between the hunky quartet and their female fans. Not since Sinatra packed the Paramount has there been such an explosion of estrogen on the Great White Way.
Assembled 10 years ago by Simon Cowell in what may well have been a laboratory, the four combine gorgeous singing with a kind of Disney-prince handsomeness that had most of the women in the audience snapping away with their cellphones.
Make no mistake: Il Divo knows the drill. Composed of Urs Bühler (Switzerland), Sébastien Izambard (France), Carlos Marin (Spain) and David Miller (US), they clearly spend a lot of time at the gym, and they look great in a succession of perfectly tailored tuxedos.
They certainly have beautiful voices, which blend together perfectly in intricate vocal arrangements. But for all the gorgeousness of the singing, their heavy-handed style makes everything sound the same. Several songs are performed in Spanish or Italian, but even the English renditions sounded like a foreign language. Each number is delivered with full bombast, rising to inevitable crescendos. You may well feel the urge to smoke a cigarette after.
You don’t need to be a Broadway regular to recognize the songs: “Tonight,” “Some Enchanted Evening,” “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,” “Memory” and other standards. Granted, it’s a stretch to include “Unchained Melody” from the short-lived musical adaptation of “Ghost.” And “My Way” isn’t really a theater song, even if it was featured in Twyla Tharp’s “Come Fly Away.”
Fortunately, special guest star Heather Headley was there to show what real theater singing is about. Performing several duets with the group as well as a few solos — “Home” from “The Wiz,” and the Whitney Houston song “Run to You” from the musical “The Bodyguard,” in which she starred in London — she gives the evening an emotional depth and vocal dexterity that is otherwise lacking.
The production itself is pure Vegas, with so many starry, outer-space backdrops that you half-expect George Clooney and Sandra Bullock to float by. Director Brian Burke likes to start most numbers the same way — with one of the singers alone onstage, the others eventually wandering on, as if they were just getting back from coffee breaks.
Each man gets a monologue (Malcolm Williamson is credited as “speechwriter”), which are meant to be sincere but mainly seem canned. The cheesiest by far was Spanish baritone Marin, who proclaimed, “To me, singing a great song is like making love,” which was greeted by a thundering chorus of shrieks.
Resistance is futile. Il Divo obviously fills a deep need in its target audience — women of a certain age, who respond with ecstasy. For the men squiring them, there may be a payoff after the curtain drops on this musical aphrodisiac.