I must be getting more broad-minded and tolerant or something.  A few years back I would have gladly filled my ears with molten lead to avoid listening to an entire Celine Dion concert, but the other night that is exactly what I did. ((Watch the concert. Not fill my ears with molten lead))

One of the TV channels was showing the film of Celine Dion’s show at Caesar’s Palace.  I figured that as she had been in residence there for three years, filling out a 4,000-seat theatre for 600 performances I should see what all the fuss was about.

I can’t deny that it was spectacular, but it could hardly fail to be with about 50 dancers, state of the art lighting, multiple costume changes and the world’s biggest LCD screen as a backdrop and all in a venue specifically designed for that show.  It was also very slick, although it would be a shock it had been anything less than perfectly executed.

The trouble is that most school plays would be enormously entertaining if they had those sorts of resources.  I remember seeing a company’s panto in the city.  I think it was a pretty wealthy financial operation and they had a proper live band in the orchestra pit, a wealth of fantastic props, special effects and a budget which was probably larger than that for the total of every play I have ever been in.  The result was that it was good eye-candy despite average performances.  So the show was impressive but I reckon it would have been just as good with any session singer doing the songs. Just as even the worst film in the world ((Forrest Gump)) might look good on an IMAX screen.

Of course I don’t know a lot about Celine Dion so it would have made no difference to me anyway – I guess its different for fans.   They seemed to be ecstatic, but I don’t know if I would fancy going to see a singer I really liked do a set of songs which was dominated by straightforward versions of other people’s songs.  If I went to see Paul McCartney or Elton John I would expect and want to see them singing their own songs – or one’s they had already made their own like Pinball Wizard.  At a pinch an imaginative cover of another song would be OK.

And I’m not sure about the choice of songs to cover either.  She may be a competent singer, but even the best singers have a particular range or style they are most suited to, and she picked some songs that were well outside her range.  River Deep Mountain High was where she really seemed to be struggling.

With all those platoons of dancers all in formation and singing along it reminded me most of  childhood light entertainment shows where groups of dancers would dance in formation while singing a bland cover of some contemporary hit.  They used to have names like “The New Generation”.

The LCD screen was fantastic though.  It allowed the show to be performed with basically an empty stage but it looked like a new vast set for each song.  Just imagine what someone like Jean-Michel Jarre or Pink Floyd would be like with such a toy at their disposal.

The key word in all the above is, I think, “competent”.  The whole show was professional, slick and competent but had no passion or soul to it.  It also only lasted an hour on TV.  It may have been edited down, which often happens when a concert that is available on DVD is shown on the telly, but even so it did not look like value for money. I’m assuming the tickets were not cheap.  Apparently it grossed $400 million and 3 million people saw it so thats an average of $133 a seat.

Still, it passed an hour and was not as bad as I feared.  Sometimes its good to confront your prejudices and see something outside your normal comfort zone, like when I watched a Take That concert on TV one Christmas and got totally amused by their covers of Pink Floyd and the Sex Pistols.
I do feel sorry for the dancers though.  After going through the same routines dozens or hundreds of times to make the whole thing possible they seemed to be excluded from the credits – unless I missed a list of 50-odd names in there somewhere.  I did notice credits for a couple of accountants, the website manager, box office staff and special thanks to 5 doctors for looking after the Dion throat amongst the novel-length credits though.

A perfect metaphor for business generally, where all the attention goes to those at the top or who ‘add value’ and those who actually do the work get ignored.

Verdict: not as good as the Kylie concert I saw on TV a few months ago.