Barry Manilow: Blenheim Palace, Woodstock, Oxfordshire

IN ONE OF the season's most outrageous pieces of theatre Barry Manilow, the boy from Brooklyn, played his weekend concert before forty thousand people at the Duke of Marlborough's humble Blenheim abode. Manilow may lack something when compared with other ballad singers but he and his audience share a mutual sense of occasion. Picnicking families, grandmothers in tow, oohed and aahed at appropriate intervals while the ample ladies from Manilow's ample fan club wandered into realms of ecstasy at every change of key or shirt.