Special

The equation has been reversed on CBS’ recent “Grammy Salute” specials: They were traditionally all-star salutes where the legendary artist being feted makes a cameo appearance at the end (assuming they’re alive). But with a recent Earth, Wind & Fire tribute under that banner and, now, a Cyndi Lauper special, we get full-on concerts from those artists, with a selection of guest duet partners. That’s all the better, for anyone who missed Cyndi Lauper’s recent farewell tour — or anyone who didn’t — as she brings more than enough wattage to power two hours on her own in Sunday night’s “A Grammy Salute to Cyndi Lauper: Live from the Hollywood Bowl.” Although, when Joni Mitchell, SZA and Cher turn up, they’re nothing to sneeze at.

“She’s So Unusual,” her first solo album promised us in 1983. This special — exec-produced by Grammys veteran Ken Ehrlich, Recording Academy head Harvey Mason Jr. and Lauper — is so unusual, too. The risk taken is in how close it comes to being a straight transcription of the show she toured around the country this year, give or take a few superstars and niche guests. There are exactly two talking heads who show up during the duration of the time slot: brief video testimonials from Brandi Carlile and Billie Eilish that barely take up the space of a minute between them. The rest of it is unexpurgated Cyndi, on stage, and not in conversation — that decision possibly influenced by the fact that fans already got a big amount of that in her 2023 Paramount+ documentary “Let the Canary Sing.” This time around with Lauper, the show must go on, and, really, only the show, filmed over two nights at the end of August as her goodbye tour wrapped up at the Hollywood Bowl.

As far as the “features” go, she is generally very well-matched, diva-wise and otherwise. Country powerhouse (and recent Variety cover subject) Mickey Guyton proves an ideal harmonic blend for Lauper early on, on what may be one of the less familiar numbers of the night, “Who Let in the Rain.” In a memorably long and glittery black coat, John Legend steps out with her onto the ridge that separates the Bowl’s pool seating area from its other boxes for an up-close-and-personal “Time After Time”; he lends a smoother counterpart to her always slightly rawer-feeling tone. Angélique Kidjo and Trombone Shorty add slightly more regionally exotic touches to the already left-of-pop-center New Orleans bop, “Iko Iko.”

Mr. Shorty returns to sit in with Lauper and Mitchell on the latter legend’s beloved “Carey.” (That’s the one number in which the guest is doing her own number, rather than joining the headliner for one of hers, but in the case of Mitchell, the mountain must come to Mohammed. And Lauper is hardly skipping the chance to use her tribute special to pay tribute herself, to the wolf’s-head-cane-tapping comeback queen.) The presence of SZA adds plenty of extra sparkle on the show’s penultimate duet, “True Colors.” SZA clearly plays well with others, judging from her Kendrick Lamar collab being one of the year’s biggest hits, and she fares just as well belting something a bit closer to the middle of the show-biz road. And there could be no better casting for “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” than Cher, who even got a designer polka-dot pantsuit to match Lauper’s, and makes the star’s signature song sound like it belongs in her catalog, too.

The only collaboration that doesn’t really pay off in these two hours is the one with Jake Wesley Rogers, which gives one of Lauper’s greatest songs, “Money Changes Everything,” an extended coda that is just very… shouty. On the other hand, even if it’s not a musical highlight, you may appreciate that the duet with Rogers ends in a simulated wrestling match, presumably in tribute to Lauper’s early-career friendship with the late Captain Lou Albano (who gets a shout-out much earlier in the broadcast). Wrasslin’ didn’t change everything for Lauper, but it was one of those early signposts that this was an artist who was going to do it her own way, whether that means associations with meaty and beefy types or her longstanding LGBTQ+ allyship.

Did we say a few paragraphs back that this special was not about conversation? Let’s put a substantial asterisk on that, come to think of it, because we only meant it had a (welcome, to us) lack of interview footage. But you will hear her talk. Lauper devoted a lot of her concerts each night this year to storytelling, making it fairly close to her version of a one-woman show, even if she had a full band kicking back behind her while she regaled her audiences with tales of her upbringing, career achievements and setbacks and thoughts about feminism. This “Grammy Salute” offers a surprising amount of those lengthy song introductions, seemingly rendered intact (because the way she tells them, there’d be few easy ways to cut ’em up). All that chat might test the patience of some, but these fairer-weather friends can go do the dishes and come back at 10:50 to hear “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” while fans who appreciate the full measure of her kooky/contemplative personas can settle in for the luxury ride.

Among her solo numbers for the night, however serious her themes will become, nothing comes ahead of the 42 years of pleasure, and self-pleasure, that “She Bop” has provided. (When the cameras cut away to a couple of young girls amid the audience reaction shots, you do wonder what the PMRC would make of youngsters being exposed to this smut, if only they’d survived.) On the other hand, “The Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough” is by no means a requisite part of her set, though it’s fun enough to get it anyway, for pure nostalgia and not much else. (Original “Goonies” cast members Corey Feldman and Martha Plimpton get the reaction shots here.) “Who Let In the Rain” is the occasion for Lauper’s first extended introduction of the night, as she explains she wrote it in 1989, at a time when her career was experiencing a sudden dip and she was getting unwanted advice from men in gold chains: “I found myself, instead of the people that made me famous, sitting with people that I ran away from home to get away from.” Surveying her first post-stardom professional failures, she says, “I forgot that you can’t let one chapter eclipse your whole life.”

As always, Lauper sounds like one tough Queens cookie, even if she might be accused of being a snowflake, by non-fans who happen upon the special and hear her espousing what we can still consider liberal ideals. Says Carlile, in her video clip: “Thank you for everything that you’ve done for all people, particularly women, and that thank you will never be enough thanks to cover what you’ve done for the queers.” Lauper doesn’t expound on that a lot herself, beyond noting that her costume designer encouraged her to add more glamour for the sake of the gays. But at the end of “True Colors,” when she and SZA let a giant pride flag be blown up over them by unseen fans… well, it may not be enough to scuttle incoming network regulatory approvals, but there is still little doubt that it will not be a welcome sight in all of America right now, and that she’s being especially true in waving it.

Other undertones go unspoken but will be obvious to fans, like “Sally’s Pigeons,” with an introduction Lauper makes mostly about her neighbors … but which her followers will know is about a childhood friend who died from a back-alley abortion. (The “21 years” in the originally recorded lyric has now been changed to “52 years,” to establish that the song still takes place the year before Roe v. Wade was implemented.) None of this is put in the casual viewer’s face, but feminists and the gay community can take, well, pride in how Lauper continues to be a poster girl for their revolutions even as she holds court as your basic eager-to-entertain veteran pop star.

One of the most telling stories Lauper offers is about the tradition of seamstresses ran strong in her Italian immigrant family, and how she thought, “If they could do that with cloth ” — sewing together disparate elements, that is — “maybe I could do that with music… I was into deconstruction before it was way happening.” But as much as she did it with a marriage of music styles, she actually did do it with cloth, too, even if she wasn’t the one manning the sewing machines. The music may have ended up pretty danged mainstream, but there’s still an interestingly avant-something quality to her changing costuming during the night. (She credits Christian Siriano and Geoffrey Mack for the tour couture.) At one point, she is just a rooster, and at another, she has what looks like part of a black bodice sewn onto the front of a white dress shirt, and at still another, she is starkly wigless. Fashion may be among the least of the things most people watching “A Grammy Salute to Cyndi Lauper” will care deeply about, but in this case, it does make the woman… or at least render the woman’s lifelong career curiosities symbolically large.