Reality check: Fans dig British tenor Potts

Click here for a Complete Paul Potts Article by bostonherald.com

Paul Potts seemed surprised to be on the Berklee Performance Center’s stage Sunday night. Plucked from obscurity by England’s equivalent to “American Idol” and recently retired from mobile phone salesmanship, Potts is an amateur operatic tenor starring in the surreal musical drama of his own life.

In his set of well-tested chestnuts from operas by Puccini, Verdi and others, odes to drinking from “The Student Prince” and “La Traviata” were particularly rousing; he encored with the moving “Nessun Dorma” that rightfully put Simon Cowell’s eye-rolling in its place.

Potts’ renditions of popular songs and show tunes were less sure, as if they had been penciled in to give his vocal cords a break and his audiences an Anglophone toehold, though R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts” felt strangely apt translated into Italian and into an idiom hospitable to plus-sized emotion.

###