Mariah is back on stage

by PETE CLARKE, Evening Standard

The word on the street had it that Mariah Carey was in freefall.

This is a woman who was deemed surplus to our listening requirements, an over-ornamentation on the crowded bangle of popular music.

Mariah - and that will be Mariah with an "h" if you don't mind, mister - has clearly not been listening to the word on the street.

She is right up there, charging £40 a ticket for the right to see her at Wembley Arena.

Outside, the touts are offering front row seats, but they also want any spare tickets. In Wembley Arena terms, this is good business.

The joint is as jumping as this joint gets. Mariah makes a pointless entrance from the rear, like a two-bit boxer. I occasionally wonder why people do this. We know where the stage is, having looked at it for some time.

They know where the stage is, having rehearsed on it for some time. So why mess up the natural order of things by coming in from the back?

Which is a question that might be posed about much of what follows. On the plus side, we have a woman who does not shatter glass either with her voice or her face.

The band can play the notes in the right order and with some emphasis. Some songs have been selected that should not give anyone aural nightmares.

On the minus side, we have a show that has been designed for a small theatre off-Basildon. There are people clumsily pulling big curtains shut.

Someone with a concept has been allowed to fill the stage with pointless dancers, an apologetic marionette being pulled hither and thither by coloured ribbons, and a pair of people on stilts.

Surely someone should have explained to Mariah this was not Covent Garden.

I am being cruelly flippant. Mariah has history. During a heart-rending song called My Saving Grace, we were privileged to learn that Mariah had once been a child.

Imagine the innocent joy of that! Is it true she was signed to the embryonic Baby Motown label?

There was also video screen news of a breakdown.

This must have been serious, because the pictorial evidence revealed it to be a three-sunglasses job.

And at the end of all those life-affirming songs that Mariah does best - and if I can paraphrase here, they all boil down to getting through the torrential downpour of life without a brolly - she pulled off a version of Def Leppard's Bringin' On The Heartbreak that was better than the original.

Top that, Celine Dion.

Most watched News videos