Garth Brooks Makes Central Park Feel Like Home

Usually on TV when you see an innocent-looking man in New York City introducing his friends as “seven of the nicest people I know,” it’s the sign of either a con or an easy mark. Thursday it was simply Garth Brooks and his band during the HBO telecast of his concert in Central Park.

Yes, Brooks’ down-home-aw-shucks persona seemed out of place. For that reason, director Marty Callner cliched punctuating shots of Manhattan landmarks (Statue of Liberty, Chrysler Building, taxi cab, Billy Joel) throughout the 100-minute show served as both welcome reminders of the locale and odd contrasts to the spectacle.

But other than Joel’s guest appearance--on duets of Brooks’ honky-tonker “Ain’t Going Down (Till the Sun Comes Up)” and his own painfully obvious “New York State of Mind”--and an encore walk-on by Don McLean during his classic “American Pie,” Brooks did little to tailor his show for the setting. That was smart.

Brooks’ greatest gift is as a natural entertainer, and that’s where he kept the focus--just him and his band and 250,000 low-placed friends (according to police estimates of the crowd) having a good ol’ time. Callner, whose credits include Bette Midler and Madonna concert specials, rarely lost sight of that, using remote-controlled cameras on tracks to help keep up with the star’s perpetual motion.

Perhaps hoping not to lose the sense of the event’s scale, though, Callner succumbed to an itchy switch finger at times. At one point Brooks snatched a hand-held camera, first showing his point of view and then turned it on his own close-up mug as he sang. But Callner cut in so many other angles of the scene that we never really got the full benefit of Brooks’ stunt.

Contrasting that was the no-fuss approach during Brooks’ solo acoustic performance of “Unanswered Prayers,” on which the audience sang more than the star. It was here that the simultaneous hugeness and intimacy of the occasion really came through. Maybe next time Brooks should try a whole show that way.