TV Special Director: Marty Callner
Executive Producers: Joe DeCarlo, Bill Sammeth
Original Show Conceived by: Cher and Kenny Ortega
Original Show Director, Set Design, Choreography: Kenny Ortega (he directed and choreographed the  Caesars Palace shows)
Musical Director: Gary Scott (did the Monte Carlo show and Celebration at Caesars special)
Associate Choreography: Dorian Sanchez (she will go on to choreograph future tours)
Cher’s Costumes: Bob Mackie
Costume Designer: Ret Turner and Mike Schmidt
Make-up: Leonard Engelman (we will get to know him better in the 1990s Saving Face video and Aquasentials infomercial)
Hair: Renate Leuschner (a.k.a. Renata) (She’s been with Cher since the Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour)
Band: Paul Mirkovich (keyboards and duet vocals), Elijah Blue Allman (guitar), Dave Amato (lead guitar), David Shelley (guitar), High McDonald (bass), Ron Wikso (drums)
Backup singers: , Darlene Love, Pattie Darcy Jones, Edna Wright
Dancers:  Bubba Carr, Aaron Cash, Bill Holden Jr., Trish Ramish, Michelle Rudy, Peter Tramm, Eyan Williams
Cher Impersonator: John Elgin Kenna
Filmed at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada (4 February 1991)
Aired: CBS in 1991 or 1992 (sources conflict, 1991 sounds more likely since it was filmed in early 1991)

It’s hard to remember what the original special set list was (unless we all dig out our old VHS bootlegs from that night), but the set list seemed to follow closely to the Heart of Stone tour set list and the official VHS listing, but not the DVD listing which has songs inexplicably scrambled and some of them moved down to “Bonus” songs. So we’re going to use the tour set list here.

This CBS special captures the Heart of Stone tour that began on 16 August 1989 in Atlantic City and went across America and then to Ireland, England and Australia, finally ending on  4 December 1990 in Las Vegas, Nevada. I saw the show in St. Louis on 1 June 1990.

This was the very first time I was in the same airspace as Cher. I was 21 years old and this was a big deal for a fan since 4 or 5 years old. During those dry years of the late 1970s and early 1980s, another Cher tour seemed unimaginable. And when I started going to a lot of shows in the 1980s, getting up at the crack of dawn with a friend to be the first or second in line at the St. Louis Checkerdome box office (early arena-branding from the local Ralston Purina Corp., later changed to the St. Louis Arena), I never dreamed I would be using those ticket-buying skills for a Cher show. I finagled floor seats in the 15-20th row. (I have that stub somewhere.) My college boyfriend Terry stayed up all night one day to win tickets from a local radio station. I was very surprised and grateful but the radio tickets weren’t as good as the ones on the floor so we gave them to my bff at the time Lisa, who took her boyfriend (at the time), a not so nice guy who would tell her things like she wasn’t very pretty. Oy. Anyway, I took copious notes at the show which I have since also filed away in a forgotten place (along with the VHS of the special and the ticket stub). But I loved every minute of this show, except the times Cher wasn’t on stage….which turns out was a lot of times and we’ll get to that later. But overall, I was really happy after the live show.

I can’t say the same about the TV special and we’ll get to that later, too.

The Celebration at Caesars show was so colorful and well, Vegasy. By the mid-1980s Cher was trying to seem more serious. It was a new era of her trying to establish her rock credibility and that seems to mean self-seriousness. Like Bob Mackie noted in his upcoming documentary, Cher wasn’t wearing crazy, over-the-top gowns during this period. It seemed the right thing to do, looking back. I wanted Cher to have rock credibility, too. And I loved her more somber looks during this era. I loved the Mask outfits, as well. Tough chick Cher was a good thing.

But it also seems a shame looking back. And Cher fans would be very glad when the big, loud outfits came back a few decades later in the Believe tour.  The Heart of Stone-fits seem like the same “serious actor-fits” (or even “serious rock singer-fits”) Cher had just mocked at the Academy Awards in 1986. This show boasts not a single over-the-top headdress! At least worn by Cher herself The symbolic color for this show was black, lots of black because I guess this is the color of rock credibility. Honestly, it did seem cool at the time but we would also appreciate all the return of colors to the Believe era where dance music seems to encourage it.

A lot had happened since the last TV special in 1983. Cher is now an Oscar winner and a bona fide movie box-office draw. She has a new record label, Geffen, that has allowed her to relaunch herself as a rock singer with the help of producers like Peter Asher. To jump from the last TV special to this one would probably give you whiplash. Cher looks so different. But fans have already seen her look evolve through all the 1980s movies by now, from smaller to bigger curly black wigs. The looks of this show seemed very organic to the Cher of the time.

Intro: We see the Cher plane with Cher painted on the back wing with flowers and some dramatic flights over the Grand Canyon, Lake Mead, into Las Vegas and past The Mirage hotel, finally with a plane-pov landing all while Cher sings “After All,” which was a very recent hit. I love this opening. Cher descends like an angel with a private plane. A bit ironic considering Cher was once so terrified of flying, Sonny had to drive them to shows in other towns. The intro ends with the Cher flower logo looking like one of her tattoos.

Cher was quoted somewhere saying the show was a cross between Phantom of the Opera and Metallica. Maybe Bon Jovi more than Metallica.

I’m No Angel (cover of Gregg Allman, 1987)
There is no big descent from a chandelier or larger than life staircases. No big stiletto heels or elephant props. Cher comes down on a riser from the middle of a tangled set of scaffoldings. She wears white pants and a glittery white jacket and long, white glittery earrings and a 1980s style big black curly wig. She sings with a handheld microphone. We catch glimpses of her son, a teen Elijah, on guitar. He never looks up.

It’s worth remarking again what a conservative outfit this is. We all accepted it as the new “serious” Cher. She says, “Okay, come on! You’re not really that excited!…My God! You’re really alive, aren’t you? How ya doin?”

The famous Darlene Love is singing backup. You can really tell. She’s like a duet partner for Cher for much of this show. Allegedly she was on hard financial times and she has since thanked Cher publicly for giving her a job at this time.  Pattie Darcy will be one of Cher’s longtime backup singers for many tours ahead, until she died tragically of a brain aneurysm in  2007 at the age of 54.

Shots of Cher are intercut with black-and-white footage of the band and backup singers.

The Mirage stage has two tongues that curve out on either side. Cher struts around the tongues. At one of the instances of the lyric “let me show you my tattoos” she does, in fact, show us her right arm tattoo. It’s a good reminder that this was back when only sailors, bikers and heavy metal musicians had them.

Cher is covering husband number two here with a recent Allman single. Has she ever done a Gregg Allman song before besides that duet on the Cher show? This is a great example of how a song can change its meaning just by who is singing it. When Allman sings it it’s kind of an eye-rolling understatement. When Cher sings it, it works the text of her new image.

Hold On (“Baby Hold On,” cover of Eddie Money, 1977)
Cher continues to work the tongues. She does some pointing and a few mic drops and catches. She changes the lyric to “Mama said, Cher, money can’t buy you love” (which honestly doesn’t sound like something Georgia would really say.)

Cher talks about the pre-show prayer circle (“God, let me do a good show”) and making that pant-zipper check. She says “this is a clothed as we ever get again in the whole show.” This will become a point of contention for my friends who saw this show and felt there were too many outfit changes considering the show was only an hour long, This included Lisa, her asshole boyfriend, my later Sarah Lawrence friends, Julie and Christopher who would point out to me the running time and the ticket price and the calculated cost-per-costume-change. In fact, Christopher declared he would never see Cher live again after this show and he did not until I took him to one of the Farewell shows in Las Vegas where he finally recovered from the monetary assault of all those costume changings (but only because that show was longer and I paid for his ticket).

Cher says the show is strange, “bizarre like me” and she announces, once again, the delayed official beginning of the show.

Dancer Interlude: Unlike the ingenious Celebration at Caesars show, costume changes all happen offstage and from this show onwards we are made to see these somewhat chaotic and freestyle dancing interludes. (Ok, you can see I’m not a big fan of these.) The dancers hang on the scaffolding and do a bunch of 1980s moves. The lighting is dark. There’s lots of leather-esque outfits and spandex.

One of the issues with the DVD version of the special is all the 80s-style fast cutting that chops up all the performances. You never get a good sense of the stage as a whole. I’m thinking this might just be an issue with the DVD version because the online clips seem much better.

We All Sleep Alone (from Cher’s album Cher, 1987)
The dancers come out with one of those parachutes 1980s kids probably all remember from gym class. Cher has changed into a full-body lace leotard. She has on a less-curly black wig. The dancers cover Cher with the parachute and dance under it. The leotard goes right up her ass. It’s one of the raciest, yet simple, outfits she’s ever worn live. She takes the riser up to the second story of the scaffolding. She sings and grabs the scaffolding similarly to how she grabs the apocalyptic bedposts in the related MTV video. There is hand hanging.

We’re so used to Cher doing cover shows these days that hearing her perform one of her own hits feels novel at this point. During the guitar solo, Cher does a seductive dance with one of the young male dancers. Cher has already been through the media-drama of her first younger boyfriend, Robert Camiletti. (Gregg Allman was technically a younger partner too, but everyone was so freaked out by Cher dating Gregg Allman at the time that nobody seemed to notice.) She comes down the scaffolding’s side staircase (the riser would be too slow). She stands in the center of the parachute while the dancers move it up and down and she finally collapses into it (an image which reminds me too much of the Wicked Witch of the West melting at the end of The Wizard of Oz). Oh wait, I just got it. The parachute is supposed to be like a bed sheet.

During the commercial breaks, we see scenes of the Mirage, dolphins, the marquee and white tigers from Siegfried and Roy’s Mirage show.

Bang-Bang (from Cher’s album Cher, 1987, cover of her 1966 hit “Bang-Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)”)
Cher gets a chance to throw husband number 1 some love here. This is the first time she’s done older material since she went solo in the late 1970s. Fans are pretty excited about this. Cher starts by miming pointing a gun towards the audience. She’s now wearing the second incarnation of the hole-fit, an 1980s version of the 1979 Take Me Home tour outfit. This time she also wears a leather jacket similar to the one she wore in the “Turn Back Time” video instead of the pink boa she used in the late 70s. She wears tall boots and the hole-fit shows off the big butterfly butt tattoo.

Cher comes down on the riser. She has a huge but longer wig and a headset mic. She falls on the dancers. They grab at her. They do gyrating bends and jumps, all the chaotic 80s moves. Cher disappears for the guitar solo.  At the end a group of them take the riser up the scaffolding. The song ends with Cher again miming a cowboy blowing the smoke off a fired gun. Cher’s gunplay in this performance are some of the iconic images that keeps showing up in Cher documentaries and reels.

She sings the changed lyrics to match the 1987 album version, a little less victim-y. Cher wears black this time and there’s an added line at the bridge after “music played and people sang” with the new lyrics “after echoes from a gun, we both vowed that we’d be one” and then later “you shot me right between the eyes. You meant to paralyze” and the final addon, “I’m layin on the ground. But I ‘aint ever goin down.” This is really a great song.

I Found Someone (from Cher’s album Cher, 1987)
Cher takes the jacket off. She does some more hanging hand. She skips around singing the song, slaps some hands. It’s frustratingly hard to see the big picture in this DVD version, all the performers dancing of a piece. Not long-enough long shots. Cher is intercut with images of backstage footage, Cher walking around with Richie Sambora, dancers making faces, Cher in rehearsals.

Cher again retreats upstage during the guitar solo. Is all the Sambora to say Cher has replaced Camiletti? Cher and Camiletti broke up in 1989, just before the tour began.

Perfection (from Cher’s album Cher, 1987)
Darlene Love does the intro to the song, just as she does on the Cher 1987 album. A Cher impersonator appears on the second story of the riser wearing the 1986 FU Oscar dress without the headpiece (until later in the song when the dancers put it on). From the body language, you can tell it’s not Cher on the TV special. During the live show, it was harder to see this and thus a bigger surprise when Cher came out. The impersonator covers another dance interlude with guitar solos. Cher comes out with a white half-shirt and shredded blue jeans with backwards suspenders. (Half shirts were all the rage in the 1980s. I had about 15 of them myself.)

Casual, “real” Cher confronts the impersonator Big CHER. She has no observable mic and just now watching this again it seems too close to the record. Cher lip syncs the whole song except, it seems, the intro, which just seems bizarre. It’s also an interesting inclusion in the set because it wasn’t a hit or single.

And I lied. This show does have big props. During this song the dancers run around with props of the show biz: a big paparazzi camera, a big phone receiver a big pencil, a big contract, what looks like Jose Eber, (Cher’s 1980s famous hairstylist before Lori Davis in the 1990s), with a big comb, a big guitar, a big walkie talkie and a big heart (nice touch). With all the fast cutting, it’s hard to see all the props but live this was all pretty cool.

The oversized contract brings to mind another oversized contract image from an early MTV video (and who wore it better?)

Tougher Than the Rest (cover of Bruce Springsteen, 1987)
This was one of the highlights of the show for me. Dancers are playing pool on a table at the second level of the scaffolding. Cher comes out in this beautiful red, velvet dress and her hair piled up in a crimped wig. She’s a vision of a saloon barmaid from a technicolor Western. You can hear her singing before you see her. Where is she?

Those legs! She does some lip licks. She forgets to change the gender of the song (which she often does, see “Way of Love”). In Cher’s rendition, the song tells a story of boyfriends vs. girlfriends. She takes the stairs up to the pool table. She wanders around the table, talks to the boys playing pool. She’s looking so pretty. She leans on the table. Two girls to the side of the pool table get into a fight. Cher comes back down the riser with the pool table to the arms of her girlfriends, the backup singers, who all give the song a powerful girl-power finish.

It seems Cher changes the lyric from “get what you can get” to “you get what you can give.” Cher is so convincing here. “All you gotta do is say yes!”

After All (from Cher’s album Heart of Stone, 1989)
A screen drops down and Cher continues the video montage tradition from the Monte Carlo show. This time we see Cher’s baby and childhood pics, Sonny-era pics, Chastity’s birth pics, Gregg Allman pics, Elijah pics, scenes from her movies to date (Mermaids and Moonstruck are out of order). Cher comes out in the big white fur-fit with the Venetian headpiece. Thankfully, the fast cutting stops for this song. This is the official torch-song moment of the show. Paul Mirkovich covers the Peter Cetera spot and from here on out will be her duet partner on subsequent tours.

Take It To the Limit (cover of the Eagles, 1975)
This is the third concert special in a row that Cher has performed this song. She covered it in the Monte Carlo show and the Celebration at Caesars but she did not perform this song during the live shows. This was only on the special according to the Wikipedia pages. (I cannot, myself, remember if she sang this in St. Louis.) This continues a trend Cher stared with the Caesar’s show, the stripped down outfit songs with Cher singing from a stool. She’s still doing this bit in the latest shows although the songs change (from “Take It to the Limit” to “Walking in Memphis,” “The Shoop Shoop Song” and/or “Just Like Jesse James.”)

In this incarnation, she comes back out in a mini-black dress and a shorter wig. She wipes sweat off with the back of her hand and talks about how peppy the audience is, even the old men. She does the Cher laugh. She says she isn’t sure from her own experience about peppy old men, (which is a joke about dating younger men). She says, “I’m an old gal…and I’m peppy” and she raises her eyebrows. “Come along Rabbi,” she says to Paul Mirkovich.

The song starts slow but she belts it out a lot louder in this show. Darlene really backs her up at the end and it almost becomes a duet. I love hearing Cher sing this song.

If I Could Turn Back Time (from Cher’s album Heart of Stone, 1989)
The marquee cover of this special is misleading. She never wears the MTV video duct-tape-fit in this show. And from Believe on, she’ll wear versions of the hole-fit for this song. For this special, Cher keeps her little black mini-dress on.

Most annoyingly the special cuts away from Cher’s performance of this song with clips and outtakes from the MTV video.

Cher asks, “are there any sailors in this audience?”

A convention begins on this tour of fans throwing up sailor’s hats onto the stage and Cher bending down to choose one and wear it while she sings the song. This bit continued until the night Cher tripped and fell over one of the strewn hats. I think this happened on a Farewell show. And fans were prevented from throwing up their hand-spangled hats thereafter. But it’s a pretty cool moment of this special and later-day shows. It was like underthings for Tom Jones, but hats…for Cher. She wears one of the hats for a while, waves if around for a while. Then she throws it back out to the crowd, all mimicking the video. A pretty memorable piece of rock and roll theatrics it was.

“Good night everybody. God bless you,” she says. She bows a few times and disappears behind a curtain in the middle of the scaffolding.

Encore
This is the first TV special that is basically a live touring show. The two previous shows may have toured as part of the Take Me Home tour, but the specials were part of the Las Vegas show milieu. This is the first of many TV specials that was basically just a document of Cher’s current touring show and so this special carried the conventions of live shows, like an encore, in a way the Vegas and variety show specials would not. Technically the Monte Carlo show did have an encore (Bob Seger’s “Aint Got No Money”) but the convention really feels more organic to live road shows.  I love the encore convention. It’s such an easy thing to do to make an audience happy and not have them leave with any lingering feelings of disappointment that their cheering requests were denied. Cher sang three encore songs during this show.

Many Rivers to Cross (cover of Jimmy Cliff, 1969)
This was another cover highlight for me. Cher comes out in black sequined sweatpants and matching shirt. She wears the silver 80s belt you’ve seen in magazine shots of the time.  I think she wore it in the “Main Man” video, too. Lovely song and I think Cher’s rendition is very emotional.

Heart of Stone (from Cher’s album Heart of Stone, 1989)
This was excluded from the TV special. Cher would pick it up again for selected dates on the Believe and Farewell tours.

The Fire Down Below (cover of Bob Seger, 1976)
“Here’s a little ditty for you,” Cher says. Wikipedia doesn’t list this from the live shows, only the TV special. But I do remember hearing this song for the first time in St. Louis, writing it down and looking it up afterwards (just like I did for the Bruce Springsteen and Jimmy Cliff songs). I could be remembering this wrong. This song is all-belting and overall sounds not remarkably different from her cover of Seger’s “Aint Got No Money” from the Monte Carlo show. She delectably pronounces “Moline.” The writhing dancers are too much. It seems hard to film this morass of dancing. It seems like they’re going for “dancers at a frat party” moves.

Takin’ It to the Streets (cover of The Doobie Brothers, 1976)
Paul Mirkovich does the first verse. Darlene Love does the second verse. Cher sings the choruses. Cher does a bit of synchronization with her dancers. They all look like they’re having fun. Cher says good night and shakes some hands in the audience before waving goodbye and disappearing through the middle of the scaffolding while the dancers and backup singers keep dancing for a few minutes and then depart, which always feels very, very anti-climactic to be left Cherless for the last few minutes of a show presumably while Cher runs to her bus.

 

The rehearsal show extra actually feels more like the live shows. You can see the dancers, singers and band (and Cher) laughing. Cher wears jeans and a white shirt. She has a new and empowered lip lick and some new “don’t fuck with me” looks.

The fuzzy, dark rehearsal show is more compelling than the TV special for a few reasons:

  1. It’s more interesting to see Cher sing without all the trying-too-hard cuts to black and white. She does better holding our attention than editing tricks.
  2. You see proof that “Perfection” is, for the most part, a whole lip-sync thing.
  3. Cher seems to be having more fun and she smiles more.
  4. Cher can really rock jeans and a t-shirt.
  5. The rehearsal includes all the songs in the correct order. With all the costume changes, the DVD order just feels senseless.
  6. Cher announces the band, singers and dancers in the rehearsal and bows to them. Kenny Ortega comes out.

The DVD is a mess in some ways. The features are inconsistent and hard to use. You can flip back and forth between TV special footage and the rehearsal footage by watching for a crown icon and hitting a remote button, but the crown icon never came up for me the second time I tried it. In the segregated “bonus” section you can also see Heart of Stone tour footage and rehearsal footage by hitting a different button. And between the three captures you can see costume differences, where Cher might have shed a jacket or wore a different wig.

The TimeLife version, like the DVD version, is out-of-order but like the DVD includes a blooper segment where Cher comes out and the mics don’t work (I couldn’t quite catch a blooper apart from that technical malfunction), an alternative open without the plane landing, replaced with clips of the show (a not very interesting version), a tour commercial and two home movies made by the dancers and crew talking about what it’s like to work with Cher.

The home movies are very interesting interviews with the dancers backstage and in dressing rooms, including Cher’s dressing room and table. We get footage of Renata Leuschner (nothing like the imaginary Renata in my head). Some of these dancers will carry through to the Believe and Farewell tours. They’re all asked what food Cher reminds them of? They say things like lasagna (she has so many layers), chop suey, pretzels, Jell-O. Renata says “she’s very special.” Darlene looks like she’s having a great time. Personal assistant Angie tells the story about one show where Cher’s wig fell off during “We All Sleep Alone.”

Both the DVD and TimeLife also have grainy Heart of Stone tour footage in New Jersey where Cher and Richie Sambora sang a duet of “Heart of Stone.”

The TimeLife is missing all the “bonus” songs, the commercial and the photo gallery (which isn’t much anyway, mostly photos from the “Turn Back Time” video instead of the tour and TV special). It’s better to find the previously released DVD I guess.

This is an important show, a time capsule of the Cher at that time. I just wish the production of the DVDs was better.  Watching the DVD again, I wasn’t sure exactly what was on the original CBS special.

Primetime Live did an interview at the end of the tour which goes behind the scenes.

 

Highlights: Although the special was somewhat disappointing, it did capture the new rock singer Cher and some very iconic moments of Cher during this tour.