Mariah Carey News

Mariah Carey: Coasting on a comeback

Review: A revitalized Mariah Carey continues to delight squealing fans, but her show skimps on songs.
By BEN WENER
The Orange County Register

There are two ways of looking at Mariah Carey's biggest tour in years, the one that didn't quite pack 'em in at San Diego's ipayOne Center at the Sports Arena Wednesday night but which is guaranteed sellouts at Staples Center and the newly christened Honda Center (formerly the Pond) this weekend.

Which view you prefer, however, depends on how charitable you wish to be toward the street diva and her predictable "Adventures of Mimi" outing.

Those who insist it's high time Mariah got her due – those thrilled that her wildly overvalued album "The Emancipation of Mimi" was both last year's sales champ and an inexplicable Grammy darling – surely have already determined these shows are the culmination of her comeback: a well-earned victory lap for a show-biz survivor.

That it is in more ways than one, and only a jealous hater would deny that she isn't deserving of this celebration. Five years ago, when Mariah's sudden and erratic descent into tabloid purgatory began, it seemed unthinkable that she'd ever crawl back to a stature half as significant as she has now.

Her record-contract woes, the catastrophe of "Glitter," her frequent canceled shows, hospital stays and too-public temper tantrums – plus what very recently appeared to be the premature deterioration of her unearthly five-octave vocal range – all seemed to spell the end of her days as an omnipresent powerhouse. Everyone loves a comeback, but the reality is that they're increasingly rare. Just look at Whitney Houston, the still-suffering giant Mariah was once modeled after.

Yet, picture-perfect as ever and healthier to boot, a well-handled Mariah has rebounded to score still more chart-topping singles; having tied Elvis Presley for second place with 17, she likely will surpass the Beatles' record 20 before she's 40. What's more, thanks to a rekindled romance with MTV, she has (somewhat surprisingly) become a symbol of sexual liberation and female empowerment for a whole new generation of young women, the clear majority of attendees in San Diego.

Fostering that connection, Mariah has rarely seemed as down to earth as she does on this tour, routinely striving to reach out to the audience more literally than figuratively – even going so far as to invite an Australian fan on stage for a hug, break into unrehearsed a capella choruses of shouted requests and, for three numbers, performing on a disco dance floor raised in the center of the arena. (That's now an old trick everyone from Madonna to the Stones employs, but up to now Mariah, like Streisand, has remained removed from her audience. The close proximity this setup affords is sometimes startling.)

Best news of all: She hasn't sung so powerfully since she began, and back then she never matched her innate force with so much nuance.

Yes, I still find her rain-falling finger-twiddling moves – the ones she whips out when she's at her most melismatic – as annoying as ever. But the last time I saw her, at a 2003 Christmas show in L.A., she had to strain to hit her famous dog-whistle notes, most of which came across hoarse and screechy. Here, however, with no apparent tape-track sweetening, she soared again and again, adding soulful grit to her lower register and effortlessly scaling demanding vocal heights on past favorites, be they slow and sultry (the now-classic "Vision of Love"), breezy ("Dream Lover," "Honey") or funked-up and strutting ("Heartbreaker").

Fans here justifiably ate it up, squealing for her every change of skimpy outfit as if they had just spotted Justin Timberlake streaking. So I doubt many will share my second view of Mariah's meager spectacle – as a bit of a consumer ripoff.

No one would expect her to dazzle with theatrical staging à la Madonna or awe with frenetic choreography à la Janet Jackson. Mariah's got only slightly more groove in her teetering step than rhythmically challenged Whitney, and as a dancer, well, she's good at shimmying her voluptuous curves against a pole and writhing alongside a lighted MIMI marquee – and that's about it.

(Because of that lack of physical exertion, by the way, this 36-year-old bombshell may have very few years left of sashaying in nothing but boy shorts, bikini bras and six-inch heels. Her body as golden as her oft-blown-back tresses, she's still a knockout, but right away you could tell she's growing self-conscious, as she kept not-so-casually covering her barely clad backside with a sheer shawl, so as to hide the effects of gravity.)

Apart from her sex appeal, then, she has only one weapon: a litany of hits. That's what I'd figure people paid triple-digit figures to hear. Yet after an hour of her roughly 90-minute set, Mariah had performed a mere eight songs, not all of them smashes. And after a pleasing revival of her remake of the Jackson 5's "I'll Be There," she then turned the spotlight over to duet partner and backing vocalist Trey Lorenz.

For three songs. Including useless covers of Luther Vandross' "Never Too Much" and Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy." Combine that with not one but two DJ intervals, filled with snippets of crowd-rousing old-school hip-hop, and a handful of dancer-distracting costume changes, and that's close to a half-hour of dead space that could have been given to a half-dozen more songs.

Maybe I'm crazy, but I assume some people might want more Mariah for their money. As it is, the second half of her set seemed like a replay of the first half. The tunes were different, of course – the inspiring (to some) "My All" and "Fly Like a Bird" were earlier, "Fantasy" and "Hero" were later – and her clinging dress with midriff cutouts was canary colored the first time we saw it, turquoise the second. Otherwise, the routine was the same. Step, step, preen, pose – preferably in front of wind machines at the footlights, the better to make her look like the cover of her "Mimi" album.

And any sense of a concert-as-a-life's-summation, which a video intro to her show suggested might come, was also quickly abandoned. What resulted was just a more grandiose version of what she's done in the past, on a much larger stage adorned by a gargantuan M.

Which really would have been fine – she needn't have undergone an extreme makeover – if Mariah had simply offered more material. Ultimately her show grew tedious. And, frankly, I'd have sacrificed at least a pair of eye-popping outfits if it would have meant she'd stay on stage longer, stood at a microphone – and sung her tail off some more.

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