May 5, 200817 yr Author Celine Dion MEN Arena, Manchester Dave Simpson Monday May 5, 2008 The Guardian It has been a bad week for MOR dinosaurs. Phil Collins announced his retirement and Celine Dion is locked inside a metal cage. However, perhaps to her critics' frustration, the iron contraption ascends and transforms into a set of giant plasma screens. Beneath them, a 40-year old woman in a tiny pink outfit teeters on killer heels and sports a waistline so miniscule that if it were owned by Posh Spice she might consider dashing to the chip shop. It is quite a turnaround for the singer usually known for stuffy costumes, interminable caterwauling and slush fund-friendly slushy ballads. However, in her nine-year break from touring (apart from a residency in Vegas), Dion has clearly been abducted by aliens and replaced by CelineBarbie, a dancing sex goddess who makes raunchy smiles at the camera, dances with musclemen, performs rockers penned by Pink's songwriter Linda Perry and, bizarrely, turns Roy Orbison songs into gay disco. The makeover includes sliding floors, computerised flames and at least one billowing white outfit which looks like the sort of thing you drape over the armchairs to do the decorating. There are still some cringeworthy moments. Dion is under the impression that England is just Buckingham Palace, tea and golf, and an unlikely Queen tribute fails in its promise to rock us. But if we must have hilariously overwrought power ballads, then let them be sung at tinnitus-inducing decibels with lungs the size of China. Her version of Alone makes Heart's original sound like a Domino Records lo-fi obscurity, while River Deep Mountain High threatens to reduce Phil Spector's wall of sound to rubble. My Love - which references her husband's successful battle with cancer - is a quieter moment, and CelineBarbie receives a standing ovation when she produces real-life tiny tears. · At the O2 Arena, London on Tuesday and Thursday. Box office: 0844 856 0202. Then touring.Obducted by aliens :rofl: Celine Dion: coltish Celine opens her heart Last Updated: 12:01am BST 05/05/2008 Celine Dion in Manchester, at the start of her first UK tour for nearly a decade Bernadette McNulty reviews Celine Dion at Men Arena, Manchester It is just over 20 years to the day since Québec-born Celine Dion won the Eurovision song contest - oddly, representing Switzerland. Since then she has sold nearly 200 million records, duetted with everyone from Frank Sinatra to R-Kelly and captured a global audience. She's the musical inspiration behind the X Factor oeuvre and has just completed a record five-year, five-nights-a-week residency at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Of all the "VH1 divas" of the 1990s, Dion is the most loved and loathed. Yet outside of her career-defining hit from the film Titanic, My Heart Will Go On, the majority of non-Celine Dion fans would be hard pressed to name a song by her. It as if there are two planets, one on which Dion is revered as a deity who has the voice of an angel, and the other on which she is scornfully perceived as the cheesy, clenched woman who wails like a foghorn. Manchester may have felt cheated when it lost out on the super-casino, but for her first UK tour in nearly a decade, planet Dion brought to the city a bizarre yet intoxicating mix of Vegas showmanship and Euro-schmaltz. The high-tech stage was placed up close in the round and Dion bounded in to greet the roaring audience in a strapless pink mini-dress and silver high heels, belting out a high-energy update of Cyndi Lauper's I Drove All Night. Physically, she is all angles and bones, coltish in the same way as Sarah Jessica Parker - and not, as a journalist once observed, in the manner of a Brazilian transvestite. It looks as though Nancy Dell'Olio is styling her, but Dion's fashion tics (the backwards tuxedo at the 1999 Oscars being the pinnacle) have been ironed out along with the hair, and her umpteen costumes were impressively accessorised by vertiginous spiked heels. All the things that wind people up about Dion were very much present, but somehow in the context of an arena full of adoring middle-aged couples, mothers and daughters and gay men, they seemed endearingly camp and entertaining. She doesn't dance so much as wildly point while scrunching her face in an expression somewhere between anguish and anger. Her phrasing is odd and she has only two volume controls: trembling melodrama and nuclear bombast. Yet her connection with her audience is intense and she kept running out on extended platforms, as if she couldn't get close enough to them. For every tearful ballad, the best of which was Think Twice, there was some up-tempo number, such as a tribute to Freddie Mercury, and one to James Brown and Tina Turner. For the finale, My Heart Will Go On, the arena was bathed in candlelight, but with all the sentimentality there was an admirable lack of ego in Dion's desire to please her audience more than silence her critics. For tour dates visit www.celinedion.com
May 18, 200817 yr Author http://www.celinedion.com/celinedion/english/phovid.html 4 nice pics on the official website
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