Mariah’s Show in Dallas
Billboard has published the box score for Mariah’s concert at the Nokia Theatre in Dallas, Texas in its 4/10/10 issue.

Date: Thursday, February 18, 2010
Venue: NOKIA Theatre in Dallas, TX
Gross: $347,544
Attendance/Capacity of Building: 5,357 / 6,301
Sellout %: 85.0%
Ticket Price Range: $150.75, $59.75

Mariah’s Show in Detroit
Billboard has published the box score for Mariah’s concert at Fox Theatre in Detroit, Michigan in its 4/10/10 issue.

Date: Monday, January 25, 2010
Venue: Fox Theatre in Detroit, MI
Gross: $284,642
Attendance/Capacity of Building: 3,828 / 4,842
Sellout %: 79.1%
Ticket Price Range: $200.75, $59.75

Source: Billboard, Mariah Daily

Billboard has published the box score for Mariah’s concert at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, Nevada in its 3/13/10 issue.

Date: Saturday, February 27, 2010
Venue: The Colosseum at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, NV
Gross: $552,188
Attendance/Capacity of Building: 4,053 / 4,053
Sellout %: 100.0%
Ticket Price Range: $250, $175, $145, $75

Source: Billboard

Not good, Mimoo!

Mariah Carey was booed after being AN HOUR late for her final concert on the Angels and Advocates tour in Las Vegas. Mimi gave the following BS excuse:

“I’d like to apologize for my tardiness. You probably won’t believe me, and they’ll probably make a big thing of it, ‘oh Mariah had to get her doctor in’, but I got sick yet again because it’s winter, I didn’t think I could come out here tonight.

“But I was very grateful I could get some sleep and we could pull it together. It’s not so glam at 6.30 in the morning when you’re coughing and sounding like a frog.”

We think she’s full of shiz, but it’s Mariah Carey — what did the audience expect!

She wouldn’t be a diva if she showed up on time!

Source: Perez Hilton

Early into her set, Mariah Carey smiled widely as she surveyed the packed Gibson Amphitheatre on night one of a two-night stand. “You sound very, very festive,” she told the audience. She picked up a glass from a table full of beverages. “This is water — don’t get it twisted, please. Now that’s not to say there aren’t other things on the table. This is L.A. And I have been known to have a sip or two in L.A.”

It was one of several moments of feisty self-effacing humor from the chatty singer. Throughout the night, her between-song banter felt light, honest and steadfastly lucid, in stark contrast to recent well-publicized bouts of public babbling. Her intimate connection with her fans was palpable from start to finish.

The evening began at 9 p.m., right on schedule. “I’m usually much more late and people criticize me for that,” she pointed out later in the show. “But tonight, in Los Angeles, was I on time?” The crowd roared in the affirmative. A rousing rendition of “Shake It Off” set the tone for what felt like a celebratory evening.

The band and backup singers stood toward the back of the stage on high platforms, resembling a 1950s dance-show set, which kept the focus on Carey. The crowd sang the “I will hunt you down” refrains back to her, loudly, during “Touch My Body” and kept the participation going throughout the night. Backup dancers disappeared and returned in varying configurations throughout the show.

“I had forgotten about this song the whole tour and I don’t know why. Funny I should forget it, considering the title,” she laughed as she introduced “Don’t Forget About Us.” She stayed dressed in a form-fitting short dress with a flared, tutu-like bottom for the first portion of the night, occasionally using a white mic stand. There were a couple of wardrobe changes into other form-fitting attire.

Mariah took a gulp of champagne (and later shilled for her own upcoming brand) while lying seductively on a chaise that seemed to have been brought out expressly for that purpose before singing “Always Be My Baby.” It was the most symbolic moment of the evening, somehow embodying the many facets of her appeal in a single action: beauty, sexiness, luxury, playfulness and talent.

At one point she complained about a chair being placed too far from the fans — the electric fans. “Don’t you know that my hair naturally blows just like in all of the videos? That’s real,” she joked.

She asked for hair and makeup people to come onstage and touch her up, saying, “I know it’s a diva moment, but I don’t care.” But the vibe of all of the antics was coy and knowing, like a joke within a joke that all of the crowd is in on. “I went to beauty school, so I can do this, too. Five hundred hours! The teacher hated me.”

A few tasteful and well-timed moments of seriousness notwithstanding — “Fly Like a Bird” was dedicated to her late bishop, “Angels Cry” to the people of Haiti — the evening rolled out with a relaxed vibe and the hits kept flowing, including “Make It Happen,” “It’s Like That” and “Up Out My Face.” A male backup singer took over for a cover of Michael Jackson’s “Rock With You”. “The ‘Heartbreaker’ remix was my favorite part of the night,” a 20-year-old fan named Manny told MTV News.

“I wrote it for my husband, who is not here tonight because he had business,” Carey said before “The Impossible,” the night’s only reference to Nick Cannon. “Whatever. Maybe he’ll surprise me one night.” Mary J. Blige was also absent for the text-message-drama song “It’s a Wrap,” which didn’t stop Carey from belting out the entire number herself. “Give it up for the jet skis in the video!” she shouted during “Honey.”

Carey thanked Jermaine Dupri for co-writing “We Belong Together,” which she said he told her was Billboard’s Song of the Decade. It also holds a high honor in the heart of at least one concertgoer, Tiffany, 21. “It’s my favorite song from Mariah. It’s my favorite song, period,” she told MTV News.

Carey returned for an encore, “Hero,” before unleashing the crowd into the night to fend off bootleg T-shirt vendors as they wandered Universal City Walk.

A remixed version of Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel, called Angels Advocate, was due in stores this month but pushed back to March. Carey mentioned during the show that it might be pushed back again.

Source: MTV News

Mariah Carey was doing that diva thing Saturday in the first of two shows at the Chicago Theatre: Poured into a gleaming, silver gown; eyes closed; self-absorbed in the moment of singing how her lover had done “The Impossible.” All the while, a male dancer a few feet off her left shoulder was bumping, grinding and eventually popping his pectorals like a circus act.

Carey didn’t break stride, but then as the song wound down, she cracked up. “Did you enjoy that?” she asked the audience with a laugh, as if to let everyone know she was in on the joke all along.

The singer, who has sold more than 62 million albums in the U.S. in a career that spans two decades, has always had a prodigious voice. But now she’s developing a personality to go with it, and that made all the difference in a concert in which the singer both played up her cartoon image and undercut it.

As the concert opened, Carey descended from the rafters on a swing, like a fairytale princess. Throughout the night her collection of gowns and mini-skirts were so tight-fitting, her heels so high, that she could barely move, a Jessica Rabbit with hair cascading down her back and curves on top of curves. Unlike many of her peers, for whom gyrating like an aerobics instructor is all but required, Carey didn’t so much move as mince a bit, though at one point she was painstakingly hoisted to shoulder level by two of her dancers – a creaky and slightly ridiculous bit of choreography.

“If you’re gonna call me a diva then, damn it, I’m gonna act like a diva,” she cracked as two assistants applied make-up midshow.

She sipped from a glass of champagne and fretted about starting yet another product line. “If I did a shoe line, would you guys buy them?” she asked.

It all made Carey seem a bit eccentric and slightly daft, in the same way that Patti Labelle deflates her larger-than-life status by making fun of it even as she exaggerates it.

Of course none of it would work if Carey didn’t have the voice to back it up. Her latest album, “Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel,” is her best work yet, a warmer and more subtle album that makes her more relatable to those of us who aren’t Mariah diehards – or “lambs,” as she refers to them. The thaw-out carried over into Saturday’s show, and gave new perspective to older songs that once were defined strictly by technique.

For many her defining moment was the 1993 hit “Hero,” her encore. It’s a template for the generation of singers featured on “American Idol,” a singing style that dictates emotions instead of evoking them. On Saturday, she trotted out a few of those dog-whistle trills that she popularized in the early ‘90s, turning Minnie Ripperton’s soul into a vocal tic. In the late ‘90s she flirted with hip-hop, a rhythmic flexibility that carried over into her performances of “Honey” and “Heartbreaker.”

But it has always been the ballads that kept her swimming in bling, and so it was Saturday. Whether ramping up some gospel-style fervor on “Fly Like a Bird” or dialing it down to a near whisper on “Angels Cry,” Carey has slightly less vocal range but is a much better singer now than when she was enjoying her biggest sellers.

Part of it may have to do with her career nosedive circa 2001-02. Things got so bad her record company paid her to leave. The bumps and bruises haven’t changed her assembly-line pop all that much. But as a personality and a performer, the brief tumble from her pedestal has worked wonders. Before that she was a somewhat bland presence on stage. Now she knows how to have a laugh, sometimes at her own expense.

Mariah Carey set list Saturday at Chicago Theatre:

1. Butterfly Intro/Daydream Interlude
2. Shake It Off
3. Touch My Body
4. Fly Like a Bird
5. Make It Happen
6. Angels Cry
7. Always Be My Baby
8. It’s Like That
9. The Impossible
10. Love Hangover/Heartbreaker
11. Honey
12. My All
13. Emotions
14. Obsessed
15. We Belong Together

Encore: 16. Hero

Source: Chicago Tribune

Mariah Carey doesn’t have to be contemporary and she doesn’t have to be old school because she’s both.

At the Chicago Theatre on Saturday, the first of two sold-out nights, she showed the fruits of a 20-year career: a sampling of crossover pop hits spanning R&B balladry to hip-hop soul. Of course, the former suited her natural inclinations more than the latter — for a singer with such a titanic voice, a speed workout like “Obsessed” (a slick toss-off to Eminem, no less), sounded like calculated slumming.

Instead, her skills came to shine in her older material, which in her possession sounded as ferocious as ever. Yes, her voice occasionally scaled into chipmunk territory — a vocal talent as instinctual as her knowing when to turn it on. But what stood out in isolated moments of Saturday’s show was her ability to produce vocal riffs that overtook songs (“Fly Like a Bird,” “Emotions”) and pushed them higher into mighty pronouncements of pain, desire and inarticulate bliss.

These were moments that continue to give Carey such staying power, despite the dingbat award show acceptance speeches, public breakdowns and horrible movie choices of her past. Unlike the spectrum of ladies in her wake, from Barbra to Beyonce, Carey remains the people’s diva. (There is a reason she is the best-selling artist of the last 20 years, behind only Garth Brooks and the Beatles.) On Saturday, she let us know she is one of us — insisting she was sipping water in a champagne flute less anyone think differently — but when launching into song, her voice said otherwise.

Her show featured a four-person band, three backup singers and nine dancers, all of whom provided enough action that Carey did what most singers these days do not: stand still. While lip-synching and intensive dance choreography have made singing a second banana for most contemporary singers, Carey didn’t feel the need to prove she could dance. As if to prove her point, on “Angels Cry,” the visual was handed to two gymnasts who performed aerial choreography — yet even they became distractions to her vocal calisthenics.

Instead Carey’s show kept pace by mixing up ballads and pop hits, with several costume changes and comedic zingers thrown in for good measure. She relaxed on a chaise lounge where she received hair primping and makeup touch-ups; she also played market researcher by interviewing the audience about whether or not she should endorse her own line of shoes.

Those were the human moments of a 90-minute show that occasionally got worn down by too many costume changes masquerading as musical interludes and shapeless ballads (“The Impossible”) that proved even the best singers can’t better inferior material.

By her encore, Carey delivered “Hero,” her signature anthem. Although she started the show in the rafters, lowered to the floor on a swing while donning a princess gown, by evening’s end she slipped into a black cocktail dress and interacted with the audience like she was hosting a party in her living room. Versatile? Like a fox.

Source: Chicago Sun-Times

Superstar diva’s voice still surprisingly strong.

Mariah Carey made her performance debut in Ottawa last night in front of a smallish crowd of 2,900 at Scotiabank Place. Although she arrived on stage late, seemed to rush through songs and took breaks to conserve her energy, these were not simply attention-getting techniques from the famously difficult diva.

No, the superstar had a little cold, she informed us early in the evening, picked up from one of her dancers. It cut into her sleep, she added, “but here I am. The show must go on.”

In a gold-and-sequined princess dress that showed off her ample cleavage, Carey made a fashionably late entrance dangling in a cocoon-like bundle that descended from the ceiling to the stage.

The full-length gown was torn away, revealing a short, leg-baring skirt as her breathy soprano fluttered into Butterfly, then darted from Shake It Off, Touch My Body and Fly Like a Bird.

Her voice was surprisingly strong, despite the sniffles, but there were backup singers and electronic effects enhancing her natural vocal power. A full band and a contingent of dancers accompanied Carey on stage, and she occasionally let them take over while she rested her voice and changed outfits.

“I’m not going to complain because I love everybody,” Carey said, as if to remind herself not to complain. “No matter what you do, you can’t make me hate you.”

At one point, Carey played up her diva reputation with a tongue-in-cheek bit that involved calling her hair and make-up folks onto the stage for a touch-up.

It was evidently supposed to be playful and self-deprecating, but the sense of fun was dampened by her poker-face delivery, probably due to the fact that she repeats the gag every night.

Sipping something from a champagne glass (she said it was water, Carey seemed to come to life a bit later, and made a point of referring to her new line of champagne.

On the whole, though, Carey gave an uninspired performance — one hopes her champagne isn’t quite so flat.

Source: The Ottawa Citizen

Some might still call it rhythm ‘n’ blues, but it’s really the genre’s hip-hop-influenced, weaned-on-pop grandchild that Mariah Carey offered to 7,000 fawning fans Thursday night at a suitably shrunken Bell Centre. As the multimillion-selling, statistic-breaking singer proved one more time, R & B might have become more of a brand name than a meaningful style.At its best, Carey’s music is infectious and cannily persuasive enough to do the form justice. Even after 13 years, you’d have to be a hopeless purist not to be seduced by Always Be My Baby, which was mostly delivered as Carey reclined invitingly in a love seat. And if the hook in Obsessed or the sweet, anthemic We Belong Together don’t do anything at all for you, maybe you’re just not being fair. Not to forget Touch My Body, an irresistibly catchy song, effective even without the video antics of 30 Rock’s Jack McBrayer.

But at its worst, well, God help us. Mawkish muck like the dreadful Hero, which closed the concert, or the over-emoting in the inspirational but uninspired ballad Fly Like a Bird place Carey more in Céline Dion territory than in Aretha country.

Yet maybe that chasm is not as great as we assume. Sure, Carey is a diva. But so is Aretha, who, for all her brilliance, really spawned all the vocal excess of this generation of R & B singers. Carey even had the sense of humour to playfully send up her image Thursday night, after Always Be My Baby, by having two flunkies come out to dab her face and touch up her hair. “Wouldn’t you do the same if you were me?” she asked, to cheers. The star and the little people is, as always, the operative dynamic in a Carey concert.

Incidentally, it’s hard to figure out why the on-stage freshening up would have been needed, even in jest. Carey is not what one would call an energetic performer: finger waves and slinky hand gestures are about it. Her dancers – numbering between three and 10, depending on song requirements – shouldered most of the physicality and visuals.

Should we chalk it up to fatigue? Starting a full hour after she was scheduled to go on, Carey waited a few numbers before apologizing and explaining that she had been up late shooting a video to raise funds for Haiti and got little sleep. The audience members – pretty soldily in the thirtysomething range – quickly forgave the fact that they would lose an hour’s sleep themselves and showered her with love.

If you knock off about 15 minutes total Carey spent off stage for a costume change, she performed for about 70 minutes. With top ticket prices reaching $130 plus extras, it wouldn’t be unfair to raise the question of value for money. But Carey’s fans answered it with adoration. And we didn’t come to argue.

Source: The Montreal Gazette

Mariah Carey was overlooked in this week’s Oscar nominations, took a pass on the Grammys and won’t be singing at the Superbowl this weekend. And what about that incident in Florida last month?

The pop superstar gave a rambling acceptance speech at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, leading to widespread speculation that she was drunk. Millions watched the online video depicting the elegantly dressed Carey. Smiling sweetly, she stumbled over her words and cut off sentences with a throaty laugh as she accepted the “Breakthrough Actress Performance” award for her role in Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire.

What’s going on with Mimi, fans wondered. Are we seeing the exalted diva fade, ungracefully, from the limelight?

Far from it, I’d say. As she begins the year of her 40th birthday, the five-octave singer is a creative dynamo who appears to be making the most of her charmed existence. Her worst sin right now might be that she’s having too much fun.

Among Carey’s many reasons to celebrate are a happy marriage, a hit album, a new fragrance and the satisfaction of a job well done for her role in the movie Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. She plays a social worker, a gig that required her to skip the makeup and fancy clothes. Although Carey wasn’t nominated for an Oscar for her excellent performance, the film is up for six awards, including best picture, and she picked up an award for “Breakthrough Actress Performance” at the Palm Springs festival.

Carey has also embarked on a major tour, her first in three years, pulling into Montreal Thursday, Feb. 4. The “Angels Advocate” excursion follows the release of her 12th studio album, the aptly titled Confessions of an Imperfect Angel, which went to No. 1 on Billboard’s R&B charts and inspired People magazine editors to declare her one of the top 10 most intriguing people of 2009.

The disc is one of her better ones, by the way, full of slow R&B jams and big ballads, including a gospel-drenched cover of the 1980s Foreigner nugget, I Want to Know What Love Is.

As for the love of her life, Carey has been married for about a year and a half to Nick Cannon, the multi-media rapper/comedian/entertainment mogul who’s a decade younger than Carey. In a recent interview with Elle magazine, she’s described as a “smitten newlywed.” He bought her a chalet in Aspen, CO for Christmas last year, and a puppy.

Really, the only reason fans might be worried about her tipsy on-camera behaviour is because she’s been there before, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. In 2001, Carey had a breakdown, reportedly brought on by overwork and lack of sleep. Her behaviour became erratic, and not long after her infamous striptease during an MTV interview, she was admitted to a New York hospital for supervised care.

“The funny thing is, when I realize how young I was when I first started in this business, and how it was all crazy and nothing seemed real; I sort of haven’t taken a break since then,” she said in an interview before the emotional collapse. “So it all seems like one continuous day.”

Until that point, Carey life’s followed a Cinderella-like arc. Born in Long Island, NY, the daughter of an Irish-American mother and Afro-Venezuelan-American father, her parents divorced when she was three. Carey was raised by her mom, who worked three jobs but also liked to sing opera. After hearing little Mariah imitate her, Mama Carey began teaching her to sing.

Carey signed her first recording contract at 17. At 23, she married Tommy Mottola, the much older music-industry exec who discovered her at a party. Although he helped guide her career to superstardom with her first album, the marriage lasted less than five years. She later described him as controlling.

With her first album, Carey helped define the genre of contemporary R&B, taking it into the mainstream with slickly produced love songs like Vision of Love and Love Takes Time, both from her chart-topping, Grammy-winning 1990 self-titled debut. The disc sold millions around the world.

After the split with Mottola, Carey began to introduce elements of hip hop into her music. Between 1997 and 2002, a string of albums with girlie names — Butterfly, Rainbow, Glitter and Charmbracelet — found Carey collaborating with rappers and hip-hop producers. Sales began to slide, though, along with the rest of the music industry, and Carey lost her record deal. She kept writing.

In 2005, Carey released The Emancipation of Mimi, her songwriting energized by the influence of ’70s and ’80s soul and disco. A bevy of Grammy Awards marked her comeback as a pop superstar, and the monster hit, We Belong Together, was declared the song of the decade by Billboard magazine.

Clearly, things have been going well. Carey also has a remix album due next month and is part of Simon Cowell’s fundraising single for Haiti, an all-star version of REM’s Everybody Hurts that also features Susan Boyle and Leona Lewis.

So let’s not judge the American diva too harshly over her latest display of poor judgement. She’s an artist, after all, with the passion and drama of all artists. And besides, she was probably promoting her new line of champagne to everyone at the table that night.

Mariah Carey performs Thursday, Feb. 4 at Montreal’s Bell Centre. Tickets cost $59.75 to $129.75; go to wwwgeg.ca or call 514-790-2525.

Source: The Ottawa Citizen

Songbird’s local show includes grand entrance, no-phone rule and public grooming.

You attend a Mariah Carey concert to be in the dreamlike presence of a super-diva, not expecting to be wooed by artful razzle-dazzle or the singer’s dexterous dance moves. Those aerobics are in her voice, a supreme many-octave instrument that worked for 95 minutes during her “Angels Advocate Tour” Monday at the Fox Theatre in Detroit.

She still nailed that infamous whistle note (several times during the vintage surprise “Emotions,” her hit from 1991), went all bat-shit belty on the wooing “Fly Like a Bird” and made fierce girl-anthem “It’s a Wrap,” a song off her current album “Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel,” sound better than its recording.

The voice wasn’t the only spectacle. Mariah, who seemed especially at ease (with only one glass of bubbly, that we know of), played up the diva image – satirizing it, even – during the simple and classy show: being freshened up on stage, making mock demands and opening it in a way that only the diva of all divas would.

Double the diva
You can sip water from a straw (like Mariah did) and sing a ballad in a bathrobe (like Mariah also did), but what’s more diva-like than doing another diva’s song? Mariah, in a dress and a shoulder piece made of faux-fur, started with Diana Ross’ sultry “Love Hangover” before merging into her own hit, “Heartbreaker.” Sounds familiar, right? The singer did exactly the same mash-up during “VH1 Divas Live” in 2000. These days, though, Mariah’s not just having love hangovers.

“If there’s a camera up in here … ”

Oh the irony of that “Touch My Body” threat, “If there’s a camera up in here, then I best not catch this flick on YouTube.” No clips would make it onto the Web, however, because cameras were strictly prohibited. And, most shockingly, so were phones, which had to be turned off and put away during the performance. You might catch her at a bad angle, and we can’t have that.

Mariah Carey … or Glinda the Good Witch?
There she was, all magically glowing from an adorned swing that descended from the heavens – or was it the ceiling? – as she ate up every scream, applause and bald head. Instrumentals from her ballad “Butterfly” played as she was lowered and a ruffled ball gown threatened to inhale the whole venue. She wore sparkly bracelets and earrings. Even her mic gleamed. The camera/phone ordeal wouldn’t have been one if only she came with one more accessory: a magic wand.

Touch me up
A girl’s gotta look good, and Mariah’s fully aware of that. Which is why, before she launched into the jazzy “Subtle Invitation” (laying cozily on a couch, mind you), she called her grooming team out to, well, touch her body and have them pretty it up. Hair was primped; sweat was dabbed. She acknowledged it as “a complete and total diva moment.” And it was.

Working hard-ly for the money
When Mariah wasn’t gently swaying to “Touch My Body” or “Shake It Off,” she was sitting, lounging or standing in place. In fact, her two fist-pumping arms did more work than the rest of her body, which after “My All” did nothing at all as it was carried off stage by some hot dancer. During “Obsessed,” her dancers lifted her up like she was on top of her own world. She was. We were just momentarily basking in it.

Source: PrideSource