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Smokey Robinson lights up the new Lido

Smokey Robinson performed Saturday night at the Lido Theatre in Newport Beach.
(Leslie Smith / Daily Pilot)
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<i>This post has been corrected, as noted below</i>

The venerable Lido Theatre and Smokey Robinson are nearly the same age — 75 and 74, respectively — yet the legendary Motown singer proved to be a lively, engaging and still seductive swain for what Robinson referred to as the venue’s “virgin date” — the movie theater’s debut Saturday as a concert hall.

Robinson may have been singing 50-year-old songs in a 75-year-old building, but both showed a lot of promise for the future.

Booking Robinson for such a gig was a real score. He is one of the most lauded and successful songwriters of the 20th century. Bob Dylan once called him America’s greatest living poet, and he influenced the songwriting of the Beatles and numerous others.

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It was at a teenage Robinson’s urging that Berry Gordy started Motown Records. Robinson wrote and produced dozens of hits for the label in the 1960s, songs that helped bridge the gap between white and black audiences in that divisive era. His singing is no less a matter of legend. His laurels include a National Medal of the Arts and being a Kennedy Center honoree.

Robinson is no stranger to the world’s great concert stages and arenas. But it’s also no great surprise that the Lido seemed like such a comfortable fit for him Saturday. When he began performing at age 15 in Detroit — and even after his band changed its name to the Miracles and began touring nationally — a lot of gigs were in old movie houses which, like the Lido, originally were designed to also host musical performances.

The Lido, with its 622-seat capacity, was never much of a showcase for touring bands in its early days, and only occasionally has been used for live performances since, though, as recently as last September, Bill Medley performed his lupus benefit concert there.

Robinson’s show was different in that it was a debut rather than a one-off: The theater’s new operators, Lido Live, intend to make concerts a regular feature, along with other cultural events and the usual movie fare. (Next up is a Halloween-themed show Oct. 24.)

For Saturday’s show, the sound, lights and sight lines were splendid, and movie-theater seats are a decided upgrade from the cramped and rickety seats of some other O.C. concert venues.

Robinson came onstage in a white shirt, slacks and a jacket so glittery it probably could be seen from space. He and his nine-piece group got right down to business with his 1981 smooth groove hit, “Being with You,” followed with a one-two punch of his 1960s Miracles hits, “I Second That Emotion” and “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me.”

Did the audience sing along? How could they not, this having been the soundtrack for their lives? In the ‘60s, Motown billed itself as “the sound of young America.” For the Lido’s near-packed boomers-and-beyond crowd, it is also clearly the sound of a happily aging America.

The 15-song, 90-minute set continued in that manner, alternating between Robinson’s ‘60s heyday with the Miracles and equally estimable later releases such as “Cruisin’,” “Quiet Storm” and his sultry “That Place,” a 2009 song celebrating “a part of you that’s mine alone” that was as rife as any Prince song with spiritual and anatomical implications.

The sole tune of the evening that Robinson didn’t pen was a respectable version of the standard “Fly Me to the Moon.” Three of the best-known songs he sang were ones he originally had written for the Temptations: “The Way You Do the Thing You Do,” “Get Ready” and “My Girl.”

He also assayed the Miracles’ favorites “Tears of a Clown,” “The Tracks of My Tears” and “Ooo Baby Baby.” In the ‘60s, that latter song was Robinson’s tour de force, where his falsetto would send its lyrics of loss and hope skittering through the treetops and clouds, with what Beatle George Harrison once described as Robinson’s “effortless butterfly of a voice.” That was still very much the case Saturday, where he hit such an emotional plateau early in the show that when the song ended Robinson joked, “Well, I guess that’s it,” and feigned leaving the stage.

By the time he actually did leave, seven songs later, it was after the aforementioned “Cruisin’” had most of the audience standing, dancing and singing along; all in all not a bad way to break in a new concert venue.

[For the record, 4:15 p.m. Sept. 30: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that the band Dead Man’s Party will perform at the Lido on Oct. 24. In fact, the theater plans to host a musical event titled “It’s a Dead Man’s Party” that night, but the band is not scheduled to perform.]

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