Brian McKnight wondered aloud if the crowd was asleep. Not just in the concert-cliche, get-'em-to-cheer way, either. The R&B star really seemed to think the crowd was sleeping.

        He had good reason. After the sustained, uproarious greeting opening act Tyrese received, Mr. McKnight, the headliner at the Taft Theatre Sunday night, was treated to a steady dose of nonchalance and ear-splitting silence from the very same crowd.

        The problem wasn't the audience. Mr. McKnight proved to be a talented musician who could sing circles around his warm-up act, but as showmanship is concerned, Tyrese destroyed him.

        It became evident through the 1 1/2-hour set Mr. McKnight wants to transcend his image of a love-song balladeer, even though ballads are his bread and butter. The female-majority crowd, however, wanted slow jams, not the 1-2 show-opening punch of the balladeer playing the guitar riff to AC/DC's “Back in Black” and rapping a few lines of Craig Mack's “Flava in Ya Ear.”

        Mr. McKnight gave the crowd its share of slow jams, but the crowd's response to those songs was nothing compared to the reception for the raunchier R&B flavor of Tyrese's romantic stuff. In fact, people were filing out of the room during Mr. McKnight's big ballad hit “Back At One,” the last song of the set. If he'd returned for an encore, he would have been playing only to the sound man.

        It was strange happenings that made the show interesting. A video response to Sept. 11 accompanied his song “Win.” On a video screen, images of American icons flickered upon the backdrop of the Stars and Stripes. Shots of King, Kennedy, Lincoln, Washington and Tiger Woods rolled by without drawing a peep from the audience. Then came a shot of Michael Jordan, followed by a roar. It's believed Juanita Jordan was not in attendance.

        The video screen provided a second oddity. “My Kind of Girl” is Mr. McKnight's mid-tempo pop duet with "NSync's Justin Timberlake. The duet went off Sunday, with Mr. Timberlake's part recreated by video. The lyrics were as dumb as the title, but a more dangerous implication of the performance is that Mr. Timberlake could end up video-taping himself singing even more, then popping up on concert video screens unexpectedly for years to come. It's a thought a habitual concert-goer can't bear to consider.

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