Celine Dion’s ‘Courage’ tour in Atlantic City, on the way to Wells Fargo in South Philly
The Canadian superstar’s tour is named for the 2019 album that’s her first since the death of husband and manager Rene Angelil in 2016. Dion’s performance was full of songs about enduring heartbreak.
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Celine Dion is on the loose.
For the last decade, the French Canadian singer has not toured in North America. Instead, she hunkered down for eight years at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, making fans of her monumentally middle-brow power balladry come to her during an extended residency.
“They locked me up in the Nevada desert,” the titanic-voiced superstar with a goofy sense of humor said at her sold-out Saturday night show at Jim Whelan Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City. “But I escaped.”
Dion is back on the road on her Courage world tour, which played the Jersey shore venue on the way to the Wells Fargo Center on Wednesday. She last appeared in the Philadelphia area in 2008.
The tour is named for the 2019 album that’s Dion’s first English-language collection in six years, and the first since the death of her husband and manager Rene Angelil in 2016.
Like the album, Dion’s two-hour performance was full of songs about enduring heartbreak, and emerging out not only older and wiser, but also triumphant.
She never mentioned Angelil, but songs like Courage’s title cut, cowritten by Miley Cyrus-hitmaker Stephan Moccio, struck themes of finding strength after the loss of a loved one.
“I would be lying if I said I’m fine, I think of you at least a hundred times,” the song began. But as the 17-piece band (including four string players) leaned in and the chorus hit, Dion regained her indomitable will: “Courage, don’t you dare fail me now / I need you to keep away the doubts.”
Doubting Dion is not an option. She’s a force to be reckoned with in performance. But while her taste tends toward the schlocky, and her songs often express Hallmark sentiments, they are not poorly made.
After hearing her flawlessly deploy her three-octave voice while pumping her fist like Tiger Woods, you, too, would likely feel “The Power Of Love” and agree that “Love Can Move Mountains.” The 12,000, mostly female audience gathered on date night under the venue’s dramatic barrel vault ceiling certainly did.
A Dion show resembles an athletic event, at which the 51-year-old singer is the undisputed champion of adult-contemporary pop.
She’s a less breathy singer than at the start of her career, more skilled at taking her time in building up to the big emotional wallop that’s always coming. And while agilely moving in spike heels and singing up a gale storm, she never seemed out of breath.
Starting off in a sparkly red dress, she changed costumes five times. Looks that followed included a tuxedo shirt with giant balloon sleeves that were soon discarded. (“That’s all I’m taking off,” she joked, wagging a finger.) During an encore of Titanic’s “My Heart Will Go On” followed by John Lennon’s “Imagine,” she wore a strapless white gown with an enormously poofy skirt that made her look like a wedding cake.
Dion’s vocals are always technically impressive, refreshingly so at a time when so many arena spectacles rely on prerecorded reinforcement. Her English-as-a-second language phrasing can be awkward, though.
A foray into the blues — in French and English, on “Tous Les Blues Sont Ecrit Pour Toi” — was a kitschy kick, complete with a guitarist dressed in a kilt and the singer playing air guitar. But while she hit and held all the high notes on Eric Carmen’s “All By Myself” — with high-def video screens placing her in a sea of green, at one with nature — she didn’t capture a smidgen of the song’s rapturous melancholy.
Before the encore, Dion brought her set to a close with a doozy of a medley, performed while wearing a silver jumpsuit that shone like a disco ball. It was one great, crowd-pleasing song after another: “Let’s Dance” leading into “Another One Bites The Dust,” into “Kiss,” followed by “River Deep, Mountain High” and “Lady Marmalade.” Far from funky, and not the least bit subtle, it was still strangely compelling. It was Celine Dionicized.