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PROVIDENCE — One has to admire the nerve of Elvis Costello. Undeterred by the limitations of a rough singing voice that's alternately chesty and nasal, he's game enough to play solo and showcase that voice as if he had the natural gifts of the original Elvis.
Up to a point, Costello made it work before a full house at Brown's echoey, concrete hockey rink. Like a baseball pitcher who relies on guile rather than God-given heat, Costello served up an assortment of tricks — booming crescendos, hushed whispers, and long, quavering vibratos — to create the illusion of pop bel canto. "Poisoned Rose" cast that illusion with fine intimacy.
But at times during his two-hour concert, Costello's repeated vocal devices and his unadorned acoustic guitar strumming became tiresome with repetition.
Costello pal Nick Lowe's brief warmup set displayed an amiable wit and featured solid, unaffected acoustic versions of "The Rose of England" and "So It Goes."
Costello, flanked by assorted props, including a miniature bar with stools and a television set that stayed on throughout the show, also kept the mood light. No longer a bilious young New Waver, Costello was the emcee in a cozy lounge, an entertainer who wryly acknowledged the artifice and manipulation inherent in his business.
The second half of the show spoofed the "entertainer" pose by inflating it: Costello became "Napoleon Dynamite," a garish game-show host who invited a procession of audience members to spin a wheel of fortune to determine song selections.
The music had similarly playful touches. Costello spliced songs by the Beatles, Buddy Holly and Van Morrison onto his own numbers to acknowledge sources, threw in one-line snippets from Burt Bacharach and Prince, among others, and added new lyrics to his own "American Without Tears," pausing to narrate the growing saga as he went along.
The intense Elvis emerged from time to time, particularly in the obsessive "I Want You," convincingly done except for a bit of ranted overacting at the very end. For the most part, though, the solo Costello was a devoted crowd-pleaser — one willing to rig his spinning wheel so that the audience's cries for "Alison" wouldn't go unrewarded. He had a knowing excuse for that bit of legerdemain: "If you can't cheat in Providence, where can you cheat?"
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