Eventually replacing him with Johnny Gill, a rigorous and ferocious young singer, however, turned out to be a masterstroke. Suddenly, New Edition was not only cool, but serious too.
In the decades since, New Edition has tried various reunions, all short-lived, many marred by ill will. The iteration on display at the Nokia Theater on Thursday night a splinter wing of its best singers dubbed the Heads of State, with Mr. Brown, Mr. Gill and the effortlessly tender Ralph Tresvant was promising and well edited, a union of old-school showmen conceding little to the years gone by.
Here again, Mr. Brown was the selling point no other New Edition member has matched his solo success or his tabloid ubiquity and he was again unpredictable. But not erratic: if anything, Mr. Brown shelved the wounded comic persona he has cultivated in recent years as a reality-television punching bag in favor of jovial camaraderie. The least expected element of this show was that Mr. Brown was happy being just one singer in a group of three.
In an hour and a half the men worked through mostly abbreviated versions of more than 20 solo and group hits, with their dance moves at about 60 percent strength. As ever, Mr. Gills voice was an abrasion, all finely scratched burrs. Old age has given his vocals some of the liquidity of Luther Vandrosss, heard here on Half Crazy, but Mr. Gill is far more appealing as a growler. Near the end of the show, he dotted Rub You the Right Way, one of his signature songs, with vibrant, sharp-edged runs that turned it from seduction to aggression. (No My, My, My, though?)
That was followed, of seeming necessity, by a cooling off with Sensitivity, the biggest hit from Mr. Tresvant, whose pillow-soft vocals have been the template for much of the pop-oriented R&B of the last few years. He was lithe on New Edition hits like With You All the Way and Cool It Now, and by the time he arrived at Do What I Gotta Do, his shirt was unbuttoned, revealing abs Alex Rodriguez might covet. One woman in the audience licked her finger and pressed it to her own chest, hissed seductively, then screamed, Hot!
