Sorry this post took so long, but I was hit by a terrible cold/flu of some sort in the middle of last week, so I spent must of the last few days unable to lift my head from the pillow. But I feel better now, so on with the Ree Ree concert review!
In short, it was awesome! I wasn’t sure it was going to be – my boyfriend warned me that the reviews he saw were not kind, and that she’s been known to end a show after 20 minutes.
Things started off really rocky. First, at show time the theatre was, at best, 2/3 full. This was not a big venue, people – the capacity of the entire place was less than 4,000. And this is the first time I’ve seen anyone there when the show wasn’t sold out (I tried to see Jill Scott there earlier this year – she played it for 3 nights and I still couldn’t get tickets!). I felt bad for Aretha.
Then the Queen comes out, dressed in a sparkly white frock, and gives a half-hearted rendition of Respect before admonishing the theatre’s staff to “Turn off the air.”
“It’s specified in my contract” Aretha said. “No air. If you don’t turn the air off I will have to leave the stage.” Okay.
So after a better-than-tepid rendition of Rock Steady, Aretha told the audience that she knew we paid lots of money to see her, and that she wasn’t going to give a poor show because the air conditioning stifled her voice. And off the stage she went. Gone.
My boyfriend leans over to me and whispers: “Diva!”
Her orchestra – and it was just that: a HUGE band with a full brass section, half a dozen backup singers, the whole shebang – didn’t really know what to do. After a few moments, the musicians started playing the Jeopardy theme (hilarious!), but they played it really, really quietly – probably so Ree Ree wouldn’t hear them!
Then after 10 minutes or so, when the room was noticeably warmer, Ree Ree came back and went on to do a really, really good show. She sang Chain of Fools (which got the whole crowd on their feet), Something He Can Feel (So cool!!), Jump To It, among other hits.
She chose not to sing a BUNCH of songs that I thought she would: Freeway of Love (not disappointed about that!) Do Right Woman, Do Right Man, (You Make Me Feel) Like A Natural Woman, Until You come Back to Me and others.
Instead, she sang several songs from her upcoming holiday album. I wasn’t very psyched about that until she gave her rendition of my favorite traditional Christmas song Hark, the Herald Angels Sing. Which made me cry. Real tears. Beautiful!
She also sweetly asked for a moment of silence from the audience to remember her friend Levi Stubbs, as she hummed the refrain of her rendition of Bridge Over Troubled Water.
But the show stopper by far was Ain’t No Way. Seriously. That alone would have been more than worth the (hefty) price of admission. She KILLED it!! I feel like I can scratch off a huge item off my bucket list for being about 20 rows away from seeing Aretha sing that live. Amazing.
Oh, that that wasn’t the best part of the show, if you can believe it! At one point Ree Ree says: “I’m going to sing a song for you. I don’t know it very well” Audience chuckles. “But I hear it when I’m at the gym.” Audience chuckles again, although I don’t think she meant for them to. “It’s at the top of the charts, and I want to sing it for you.”
Then girlfriend breaks out with Mariah Carey’s Touch My Body!! I am not lying!!! It was an absolute riot.
She sang most of the first two versus and choruses, even making a Psycho-like stabbing gesture on the lyric: “I will hunt you down.” She did skip some of the more racy lyrics, explaining afterwards: “You know I was brought up in the church! I can’t be singing all that stuff!”
But, she added later: “Just because I was brought up in the church, doesn’t mean I don’t want somebody to throw me on the bed… Now, if somebody tries to throw me on the floor, we are going to have a problem. We ain’t doin’ nothin’ on no floor! You heard of Mohammad Ali? Well, it’ll be Mohammad A-Ree!”
God bless the person who did have a camera up in there!! Check it out. Must see:
[...] of the first black president, and leave everyone talking about her hat?! Oh, and she will NOT perform with the air conditioner on, people! You betta [...]