Todd Rundgren and Other Singers Deliver ‘Burt Bacharach Songbook’: Review

So, you say you like melodies? Putting your priorities there may consign you to minority status among 2025’s wider bloc of pop fans. But for the sonorously starved among us, a bit of manna from a more euphonious heaven has arrived in the form of “What the World Needs Now: The Burt Bacharach Songbook Live in Concert,” a multi-artist outing whose generous setlists are, fortunately, as long-winded as the tour’s title. For anyone nostalgic for a time when a guy who couldn’t sing could become a kind of pop superstar just through his command of chord progressions, it’s about 2 hours and 45 minutes of bliss.

The tour hit L.A.’s Wiltern on Sunday night on just its second night out, following an opening night in Ventura. There are not nearly as many nights left (about 20 in all) as Bacharach devotees from areas that are being bypassed might wish. This is where trains and boats and planes come in handy, as “What the World Needs Now…” is worth at least a short trip for the Burt buff who is not likely to get this solid a tribute again any day now. It’s solidly cast, with Todd Rundgren as perhaps the only true marquee attraction but plenty of other voices who do the catalog just as much justice, and it’s especially solidly anchored, with Bacharach’s longtime music director/conductor, Rob Shirakbari, making sure that everything sounds exactly as you’d hope, even with a fairly modest lineup of nine players and/or singers on most nights. You’re in the best hands possible: Shirakbari knows where the bodies are buried, so to speak, in all those exquisitely nuanced ballads and Burt’s occasional bops.

Rundgren has participated in a few other multi-act tribute tours in recent years — a White Album-based show that also passed through the Wiltern, a separate “Rubber Soul”/”Revolver” tour with some of the same participants, and a David Bowie salute. He was terrifically suited to all of those, having pretty well nominated himself by doing so many covers on his “Faithful” album once upon a time. Still, you might have wondered if these were really his heart’s desire… if they represented passion or a paycheck. Probably just enough of both, between his regularly scheduled tour regimens. But it’s not hard to see that paying Bacharach back would involve greater novelty as well as karmic debt and allow for the good vibrations of doing justice to a repertoire that is not such a staple of oldies or classic-rock radio.

Rundgren had nine songs in Sunday night’s show (seven solo, two duets), and you can tell he’s had a good time rifling through the Bacharach discography — or at least whatever list of likelies Shirakbari presented him — to cover a fun gamut. His vaunted Philly-soul side is appropriate for the ballads he fronts, and may also help explain why the one tune he sings backup on is “You’ll Never Get to Heaven (If You Break My Heart),” a song that became a hit for the Stylistics a decade after it was one for Dionne Warwick. Rundgren kept warning the audience that he was about to make them sad, as he took on familiar downers like “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” “A House is Not a Home” and the Elvis Costello collaboration “God Give Me Strength” in the first half. But after an intermission, he took a childlike glee in declaring he was exiting a melancholy mode and acting out parts of the delightfully ludicrous Act 2 kickoff, “What’s New, Pussycat?” He also turned that frown upside-down in saving the night’s finale, “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” for himself.

Rundgren was somewhat unique among the night’s repeat singers in that he doesn’t really vocally resemble anyone who is famous for singing Bacharach. That allowed him to do a gusty version of the rock-soul style he rings to his own material. But “What the World Needs Now…” does also benefit greatly from the presence of a couple of female frontwomen who are absolute ringers for the forebears whose shoes they’re filling, or who at least can be, when called upon. In short: Wendy Moten is Dionne Warwick. And Tori Holub is Karen Carpenter. But there’s an obvious imbalance there: The Carpenters only did one Bacharach song, “(They Long to Be) Close to You” — while Warwick did close to 100, by some counts. So one way to redress that is, yes, to give some of those Warwick hits to Rundgren… but to also have Holub cover the sprightly “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” and the Vietnam-era lament “Windows of the World” as if they’d been Carpenters hits.

Moten is best known for her second-place finish on Season 21 of “The Voice,” and in Nashville for less showy duties like her stint in Vince Gill’s Time Jumpers. Clearly she’s the definition of adaptable, but she may never be better-suited for anything than she is to interpreting this songbook. You can hear her ease in passages that would throw so many other vocalists, like the fast-singing, conversational code to “Walk On By,” which Moten really does make look like a walk in the park, when it’s more of a quiet sprint. It’s hard to think of many other maestro/muse professional relationships in pop that are quite as extensive as Warwick’s and Bacharach’s; that might be the most important thing to nail in a tour like this, and Moten does it so effortlessly that the rest of the show could almost coast.

Holub sounds so close to Carpenter at times that she has in a short time become a cult favorite of the Carpenters’ fan community. With reportedly only a few live shows under her belt, and still in her early 20s, Holub will have to take care to emphasize not being a Karen, as she stretches her wings further. (And the online evidence is that she has plenty of other tones to her voice she can rely on.) But for this particular instance, an audience can enjoy the resemblance fully guiltlessly. Holub’s voice, like the one she’s paying tribute to, has that uniquely comforting tone that can make you feel like everything is right in the world — even when she’s singing about how it isn’t, in Hal David’s quasi-protest lyric for “Windows of the World.” These days, we’ll take an easy-listening sound bath like that while we can get it.

There are several other singers in Shirakbari’s arsenal, some of them instrumentalists who step up to the plate occasionally to sing; the Wiltern show also included a few one- or two-night-only guest vocalists. The two-man horn section (both of whom also played multiple other instruments) was made up of Brian Wilson Band veteran Probyn Gregory and Woody Mankowski. And while Gregory stayed in the back at all times, Mankowski came up front on four occasions to deliver light/gritty pop-R&B lead vocals good enough that those could’ve been the sole reason he was hired. On “Arthur’s Theme,” he was able to assume the roles of Christopher Cross and original sax man Ernie Watts, achieving some kind of MVP status.

Drummer Elise Trouw obviously has a following of her own — hence the signature sticks that were for sale alongside the tour T-shirts in the lobby — and did some double-duty herself, singing “My Little Red Book” and “The Look of Love” from behind the kit and eventually “Alfie” in front of it, the latter as a duet with Moten. The vocal resemblance to Karen Carpenter is not great in this instance, but of course the idea of a singing female drummer is implicitly a tribute in itself, even though Trouw earns her keep just on the drumming part alone. Obviously she’s not getting to get too thunderous in a Bacharach-themed show, but sounds like the ideal of a Broadway pit-band percussionist nonetheless, her tom-tom fills nicely reinforcing just how crucially analog nearly all this music is.

Rundgren fans got a bonus in having his longtime sideman on both solo and Utopia stints, Kasim Sulton, get a prominent role in the show beyond just bass duties. Sulton earned the lead vocals on “This Guy’s in Love With You” “(There’s) Always Something There to Remind Me” (the latter done, perhaps surprisingly, not in a ’60s mode but in the synth-happy new wave arrangement popularized by Naked Eyes in the early ’80s). For all their collaborations over the years, Rundgren and Sulton have not done that many full-on duets, so Todd fans were delighted to see the rest of the band briefly exit the stage so that Rundgren pick up an acoustic guitar and trade verses with his partner on a folky version of “Trains and Boats and Planes.” That one sounded slightly rough, this early in the tour, and wasn’t any the less charming for it.

Sunday’s L.A. show, like the opener in Ventura the night before, had two guest spots: Colin Hay of Men at Work fame got the plum assignment of “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself” (returning it more to its AC roots after years of the song being most often covered by Jack White). And Lady Blackbird and Chris Pierce teamed up for a “That’s What Friends Are For” that was surprisingly compelling, even if you spent the last 40 years thinking you’d probably heard that song enough in a lifetime.

Was there any limit at all to just how great so many songs that rockers once dismissed as easy-listening could sound, now that we and the tunes all have a few more years on us? Well, actually, yes: “Heartlight,” co-written and recorded by Neil Diamond in 1982, and sung by Sulton here, remains one song that is tougher to redeem than the rest. (It might’ve been nice to hear one more track from Bacharach’s Costello collaboration, or “Wives and Lovers,” in place of this, if any votes are being taken.) On the other hand, the movie song “Making Love,” sung by Moten, once seemed like a forgettable piece of the catalog but with a little time and distance now comes off practically as one of his masterpieces.

Maybe throwing in some instrumentals comes naturally when a non-singing keyboard player is at the helm, but kudos to Shirakbari regardless for making sure that the show was dotted with a few ditties that didn’t benefit from the complementary genius of Hal David. These cheaper thrills included a “Casino Royale” score excerpt and the night’s most unexpected choice: the ABC Monday Night Movie Theme from the glory days of ’70s television instrumentals.

“What the World Needs Now: The Burt Bacharach Songbook Live in Concert” setlist, at the Wiltern in Los Angeles, March 23, 2025:

Set 1
Any Day Now
Baby It’s You – Todd Rundgren
Walk On By – Wendy Moten
I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself – Colin Hay
I’ll Never Fall in Love Again – Tori Holub
A House Is Not a Home – Rundgren
Message to Michael – Moten
You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me – Woody Mankowski
Do You Know the Way to San Jose? – Holub
Anyone Who Had a Heart – Rundgren
Making Love – Moten
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid Theme
Promises, Promises – Mankowski
God Give Me Strength – Rundgren
Reach Out for Me – Moten
The Windows of the World – Holub
My Little Red Book – Elise Trouw
(There’s) Always Something There to Remind Me – Kasim Sulton
What’s New Pussycat? – Rundgren

Set 2
Make It Easy on Yourself – Rundgren
On My Own – Moten and Mankowski
Heartlight – Sulton
Casino Royale Theme – instrumental
The Look of Love – Trouw
Are You There (With Another Girl) – Holub
Trains and Boats and Planes – Rundgren and Sulton
Nikki/ABC Movie of the Week Theme – instrumental
One Less Bell to Answer – Moten
Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do) – Mankowski
That’s What Friends Are For – Lady Blackbird and Chris Pierce
You’ll Never Get to Heaven (If You Break My Heart) – Moten
This Guy’s in Love With You – Sulton
(They Long to Be) Close to You – Holub
I Say a Little Prayer – Moten
What the World Needs Now – Rundgren, Lady Blackbird and cast
Alfie – Moten and Trouw
Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head – Rundgren

The remaining tour dates:
3/25 Del Mar, CA – The Sound
3/26 Phoenix, AZ – Celebrity Theatre
3/28 Dallas, TX – Longhorn Ballroom
3/29 Houston, TX – Heights Theater
3/31 Nashville, TN – Ryman Auditorium
4/01 Akron, OH – Akron Civic Theatre
4/02 Detroit, MI – MotorCity Casino – Sound Board
4/04 Bethlehem, PA – Wind Creek Event Center
4/05 Atlantic City, NJ – Music Box at Borgata
4/07 Munhall, PA – Carnegie of Homestead Music Hall
4/09 Boston, MA – The Wilbur
4/11 Englewood, NJ – Bergen Performing Arts Center
4/12 Ridgefield, CT – The Ridgefield Playhouse
4/13 Patchogue, NY – Patchogue Theatre
4/15 Glenside, PA – Keswick Theatre
4/16 Annapolis, MD – Maryland Hall
4/18 Indianapolis, IN – Murat Theatre at Old National Centre
4/20 Atlanta, GA – Buckhead Theatre
4/22 St. Petersburg, – FL Mahaffey Theater
4/23 Fort Lauderdale, FL – The Parker