Review: Celine Dion, Qudos Bank Arena 27th July 2018

I normally arrive at shows early, normally a few minutes before the support act takes to the stage but last night I didn't due to travel delays. The support act was Veronic DiCaire who has been performing for just over 20 years. She has been a good friend of Celine Dion's for at least ten of those years and has previously toured with her. I did catch the last two songs and I have to say I wasn't at all impressed with her. She just did covers and was way too cliched. It wasn't a good performance at all.

After her performance there was a short gap before Celine Dion took to the stage and opened with The Power of Love and then 90s hit, That's The Way It Is. After belting at the song she took the time to apologise to the audience for taking ten years to come back downunder and thanked the audience for going to the show. She sounded genuinely grateful that around 20,000 people had attended and grateful for the support over the last three decades.

It was only natural that her next song would be the celebratory, I'm Alive which she delivered with huge enthusiasm and genuine passion.

Of course, Because You Loved Me was in the set list and Dion encouraged the audience to help her sing the last line. She is a total perfectionist and really wanted to get the crowd enthusiastic so paused to rev the crowd up.

At one point in the show she said that she loves to talk as much as she loves to sing and that she's very grateful that she's able to do so everyday.

One cheesy moment though was when she launched into Aussie crooner, John Farnham's Your The Voice, which even though I don't like the song, Dion did a brilliant job of singing. She did the song justice and showed exactly how you sing that song. 

Towards the end of the show she took time to talk about the death of her husband Rene Angeill after a battle with throat cancer in 2016. You wouldn't really expect it but she told a story about how Pink had written a song for her called Recovering to help her through.  I can't speak for other audience members but having read interviews where Dion has spoken about her husband, I wanted her to make reference to his death in the concert so I was glad she opened up about that difficult time in her life. There are some singers who don't open up to the audience and just sing their songs without much crowd interaction. That was not at all the case with Dion and it made it personal, despite being in a crowd of 20,000 people.

After Recovering, she launched into All By Myself. You could really tell that a lot of preparation and planning went into the structure of the show and the song order.

It's always great when singers have an acoustic section and Dion performed a medley of At Seventeen / A New Day Has Come / Unison before having a short break where her dancers and back up singers took to the stage while she went backstage for the fourth costume change of the evening.

The show finished with Love Can Move Mountains/River Deep Mountain High.

As always though, no show is complete without an encore and Dion returned to the stage and didn't say a word. I'd known what was coming because I always look up setlists online prior to going to a show. The arena was pitch black with just the lights from people's phones and the introduction to My Heart Will Go On, which was the entire reason I had gone to the show in the first place. This was an amazing moment, and was just incredible. The encore was the best part of the concert. While she was singing it, you couldn't help but wonder if she was thinking of her husband while singing it. The stage was lit up with imagery related to the Titanic (actual ship, not the movie).

Again, she thanked the audience and left the stage but returned a couple of minutes later and spoke about how it had been so long since she'd been in Australia and that although going on tour is hard, it's even harder to end a show and that she didn't want to end the show right there. She talked about her children and the sacrifices they've made to allow her to tour. She also seemed to genuinely care about the audience and got teary in some parts of the speech. She was the only one on stage. All her back up singers, dances and the band had left the stage, and she then concluded the show with Can't Help Falling In Love.

You could really tell she didn't want the show to end.

All in all this was a brilliant show and the way she connected with the audience and delivered her encores and her powerful voice control and vocal ability is exactly why she has had a career spanning three decades. She is an amazing talent.

I give the show a 4/5. The only reason it doesn't get a 5/5 is because of one or two cheesy moments being John Farnham's Your The Voice and the medley of 90s tunes including Prince's Purple Rain.