http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2015/07/bette_midler_barry_manilow_neil_diamond_barbra_streisand_the_last_days_of.html

The day of the last show in his “One Last Time” tour, Barry Manilow turned 72. “When my grandfather was this age, the best he could do was bring up phlegm,” he said that night from behind a piano at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, doling out a canny folksiness that’s served him since the 1950s, when he was a skinny kid playing accordion favorites for his parents up the street in Williamsburg (which Barry correctly described as “now all fancy schmancy”). In many ways, Manilow is still playing that skinny kid, getting loving ovations simply for hitting high notes, and eliciting hoots and whistles from female fans for the kind of PG-rated come-ons that everyone always knew weren’t actionable. It’s all just a show. But what was once mere easy listening, an exemplar of irredeemable uncoolness, has taken on weight and poignancy with time. A once dominant, very American-melting-pot mode of popular entertainment is about to pass into history. These are the last days of the great American showpeople. How will we remember their bellow-to-the-rafters, bear-witness-to-my-talent era?