News

Leonard Cohen

At the Beacon Theatre

In New York on Thursday Outside the Beacon Theatre on Manhattan's Upper West Side, a man wandered up and down Broadway on Thursday evening, his spirit flagging as the minutes ticked by. “I'm looking for that miracle,” he sang out. “Looking for that one ticket to Leonard Cohen.”

For the 2,800 faithful who were already seated warmly inside for the sold-out show, Cohen finally in New York was miracle enough. It had been more than 15 years since their poet of pleasure and pain had last played in the United States, which may be why they leapt to their feet at the end of Dance Me to the End of Love, his opener, and then again for a reflective Bird on the Wire, and a flamenco-inflamed Who by Fire, and again and again through the glorious night, as if to defy not just his absent decade and a half but their own creeping mortality too.

The show is more or less the same one Cohen opened in Fredericton last May, a shimmering and generous 31/4 -hour stroll through his four decades of music, performed with a depth of feeling an Oscar-winning actor would have trouble matching. Even most of his patter is the same – he quips that the last time he played this town he was just “a 60-year-old kid with a dream,” and runs through his various prescription medications – yet, just as with the songs he has performed thousands of times, he delivers the spoken reminiscences as if discovering them anew.

Of course, some of the songs have acquired new relevance and renewed urgency since he hit the road. Everybody Knows, with its calling-out of fraudsters and charlatans (“Everybody knows that the boat is leaking / Everybody knows that the captain lied”) is a menacing indictment of our time that opens up into a cathartic exaltation in the instrumental conclusion. As he stands at centre stage, microphone clasped with two fists tightly in front of his mouth, growling out the words with constrained fury, you wonder if we couldn't have used his moral indignation over the years.

And more of his class. At 74, Cohen puts the young 'uns to shame with his stamina, soulfulness, poise and professionalism. When he defers to the individual members of his band – the enchanting duo known as the Webb Sisters performs a strangely uplifting If It Be Your Will – Cohen remains on stage and listens attentively, paying homage to their talent with a fedora held over his heart, even as he stays in the shadows. When he leaves at the conclusion of a set, he skips off like a kid who has never lost the joy of making people joyful.

After nine months on the road, he and his six-piece, three-singer backup band are as perfectly tuned as a Swiss watch. On Tower of Song, his singers chirped their backup lines with a kind of languid focus, just a flicker behind the beat. The layered, bluesy tension in Famous Blue Raincoat and The Partisan felt like something out of a pulp novel, always threatening but never quite managing to break out.

Cohen is an old-fashioned showman without any of the unctuous polish that implies. He brings his audience along on a journey of narrative and emotion, delivers them to ancient lands with folkloric numbers like The Partisan, makes them swoon with the spoken word poem A Thousand Kisses Deep, and reminds them of their youth with the melancholy Suzanne. “I hope I leave you satisfied,” he sang at the show's conclusion. As if there were any doubt.