Can anything about the Jingle Ball — that annual roving holiday pop revue sponsored by a radio conglomerate and a horde of corporate advertisers — feel magical in 2019?
An especially generous energy seemed to be coursing through Monday night’s Jingle Ball at Washington’s Capital One Arena, with thoughtful performances from Halsey, Niall Horan, Khalid, Charlie Puth, Lewis Capaldi and the ascendant boy band Why Don’t We.
Somehow, this was a party without hiccups, potholes, irregularities or irritations — which has never been the case at Jingle Ball. There’s usually some DJ trying to cram an all-night rave into a 15-minute window, or a rapper who’s embarrassed to be onstage, or a singer who only knows how to pander, or Fall Out Boy.
Monday night’s showcase got its auspicious start with Capaldi, a Scottish troubadour in the mode of Ed Sheeran, only with a firmer voice and more self-lacerating stage banter. Sinking an octave below his audience’s collective voice, Capaldi’s baritone felt broad enough to support the thousands of tweenage lungs that emptied themselves during his Grammy-nominated single “Someone You Loved.” By the time he reached the closing line — “I was getting kind of used to being someone you loved” — he seemed to be radiating a more durable, dignified kind of sad.
Dignity and fun weren’t mutually exclusive, though. Onstage, Charlie Puth has grown so comfortable in the froth of his neo-’80s diet-funk, he had no problem ripping into an extravagant keytar solo on a Roland SH-101, one of the nastiest little synths ever built. The only sound more fanciful than that came from the cello of Daniel Seavey of Why Don’t We. He gilded the group’s confectionary ditty “What Am I” with such nonchalance, you’d think every boy band throughout history had a rudimentary fluency in Bach.
The evening’s most kinetic performers pulled in different directions. Flanked by a team of backup dancers who appeared to have done their training in bouncy castles, Khalid was as light on his feet as he was in his music. He knew how to glide around the corners of his songs, and instead of reaching for the high notes, he made them sound as if they were floating down to him. Halsey’s headlining set, on the other hand, was all effort. While punctuating her stage-prowl with stomps and thrashes, that blue flame that always seems to be glowing in the back of her throat burned hot and steady.
And if Halsey was generous with her intensity, Niall Horan was generous with the music itself. During his strongest ballad, “This Town,” the One Direction alum silenced himself during the song’s most pertinent lyric, “Everything comes back to you.”
What happened next confirmed that this year’s Jingle Ball was different: Instead of screaming, the crowd used their voices to complete the song.
