Monday, February 27, 2017
A CLASSIC TOUR JACKY CHEUNG 学友.经典世界巡回演唱会
25 Feb 2017 (第57场)
Over the last weekend, I had caught the best concert I've ever watched in my life. No joke. Jackie Cheung was THAT impressive.
He's not labelled 歌神 for nothing. But it's also not just the songs. It's essentially the entire thing, from his dance steps, to the massive team of 24 dancers, to the 30-ish musicians and vocals, to the one thing that wow-ed me so much that night -- the 四面台.
There rarely comes a concert with a 四面台, simply because you don't have so many top-notch singers that are confident to sell the entire venue out. The capacity of the Singapore Indoor Stadium, configured to an all-around audience, is 10,000 pax. When configured to a 3-sided audience, it can pack 8,000 people. Guess how many nights did Jacky Cheung sing at the all-around stage in Singapore? THREE. Guess how long did it take to sell out the 30,000 tickets? Half a day.
Ok, back to the 四面台. I had always innocently thought that an all-around stage would be a boring setup, because you can't have a screen that can beam images. So I expected it would just be the singer on a boring stage, taking turns to face each direction. I was terribly wrong. The 四面台 possibilities were actually limitless. Just imagine the stage to be a moving platform, capable of rotating, ascending and descending, and it being an entire screen by itself, on the horizontal part as well as the vertical part. Cannot imagine? Try YouTubing "A Classic Tour". I can't tell you how impressed I was by the technology and the visual impact I received. EVERY.SINGLE.SONG was a stunning performance that included a different stage effect, from a giant cake, to a volcano, to all sorts of settings.
Oh yea, we got ourselves one of the Green seats, at 340, the cheapest range. For usual 3-sided stage concerts, it would be considered quite remote and out-of-action. But this being the 四面台 configuration, we were elevated but still pretty much close!
Alright enough of the visual impact, let's go to the concert content. Jackie Cheung (JC from now) started off with some faster numbers in Cantonese and started the show in style. I must add that there were quite a number of fast songs that he danced in, and I am very impressed by his stamina -- at the age of 55, he didn't go breathless at all!
He began addressing the audience in Cantonese, and then asked the Singapore audience if it was ok to do the talking entirely in Cantonese. The local audience were so happy and high, like some deprived animals. I appreciated it too, given that the speaking of dialects over the mainstream media had been banned by the gahmen. I understood 70% of his Cantonese, so I was really ok.
Let me share with you the song list. I read that this song list was kept entirely identical for all his concert shows in this series:
Quite a comprehensive song list over the entire span of his career, especially to the Cantopop fans. I had not been exposed to much Cantopop music, and would not have heard most of his Cantonese songs. But there wasn't a moment that I felt bored or got drifted away, because I could appreciate the effort that he put into each song and how each song was performed to perfection.
The 友情歌1985-2015 segment was a half-hour 14-song medley of some of his greatest hits over 3 decades, which I'm sure got the entire stadium singing and reliving memories. He ended the perfect concert with a re-arranged Jazz version of 如果·爱, and ending it with style again.
Additionally, I must mention that he DID NOT have any lyrics prompter anywhere around the stage, unlike many other singers. We could tell from our elevated seats. He committed all those songs to memory, which is not easy. Probably having sung 56 shows prior to our show, he can even do it backwards? By the way, this concert tour is packed till the end of 2017, so he's definitely going to hit at least 100 shows.
This is definitely one concert that I will not easily forget. Best concert in vocals, in dancers, in visual effects, in effort, in quality and style. Everything. I was blown away. If he does an encore show, I will be grabbing people to watch again.
人生是黑白的.
9:53 PM <3
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