Michael Bublé delivers off-kilter performance

If you're a Canadian singer with a warm, syrupy voice, sleepy-eyed good looks and known for performing standards from the American songbook, there's really no need to deviate. The list of songs to ply is endless.

Still, crooner Michael Bublé makes a valiant effort to mix in his own pop tunes with the classics.

Oddly, though, original songs such as "Everything" and "Home" resonated the deepest Saturday night with the mostly female audience at Bublé's nearly sold-out performance at the St. Pete Times Forum.

It has to be a dilemma: Go for the classics, or swing with original hits?

Saturday night, Bublé delivered an off-kilter set with no common theme that bounced between decades, genres and styles (Billy Vera and the Beaters at one point mixed with Michael Jackson and "Georgia on My Mind.")

Buble's first song, "Cry Me a River" was a case in point. The song is man's lament that the woman he loved shunned him for another but now wants him back. A vulnerable set of lyrics, to be sure, but Bublé's choice was to dance around doing a kind of epileptic Frankenstein moonwalk stomp.

Working in Bublé's favor were his stage presence and rapport with his 13-piece band. His stage patter proved to be the evening's highlight as he charmed the room and sympathized with the men in the audience.

"I know a lot of you guys out there are feeling like you got dragged here," he said.

But even those engaging moments came off as disjointed. After announcing his engagement to applause and a tsunami of "Awwww," Bublé threw in a Tiger Woods joke. Thirty seconds later, he was greeting an 8-year-old girl in the front row with a hug. The "Awww" quickly shifted to "Ewww."

How off-kilter did things get? Bublé finished his encore with Leon Russell's low-key "Song For You" by ditching his microphone and projecting his voice a capella to the back rows. It was a move out of the Tony Bennett playbook.

The result was some of the weakest encore applause I've ever heard.

It was a wet paper towel finish on what should have been a swinging torch song of an evening.