Kylie Minogue @ Sydney Entertainment Centre
Sydney, June 7, 2011
Review Adam Cubito
When you were a kid did you ever have Sea Monkeys as pets? Well, Kylie Minogue's Aphrodites Les Folies spectacular at the Sydney Entertainment Centre reminded me of what would've happened if you accidentally dropped a Berocca into the Sea Monkeys tank.
When I first walked into the venue I noticed the mammoth stage, a Greek Parthenon with LED's and flowing blue material. Instantly I was taken back to a night I had at a bad Greek restaurant in Corfu back in 2008. Let's say I'd had a bit too much Ouzo to drink and ended up on the floor doing a weird tribute dance and draped in a blue tablecloth.
From the moment the countdown began, Minogue came out in a full-frontal colourful assault on both eyes and ears. Now would probably be a good time to mention that I'm not the biggest Kylie fan in the world. I own two albums of hers and like a few of her songs (“Confide In Me” is an amazing song) but nothing could prepare me for the Kylie-fest that rolled out over the next 2.5 hours.
It was like a bad Seafood Marinara had come to life on the stage. Kylie rose from the stage in a giant gold clam while her dancers, barely clad in Supre-style togas, writhed around her.
Ms. Minogue herself is a diminutive powerhouse - a tiny girl with massive amazing costumes and an equally massive voice that she often used to colour outside of the lines of most songs - to prove she was really singing. And I have to say, she sang pretty sensationally.
There's no denying though, that she's an Australian music legend with a back catalogue of hits that everyone knows and she had the crowd up and dancing more often than not. Songs like “Get Outta My Way,” “Better The Devil You Know,” “Love At First Sight” and “I Believe In You” were crowd pleasers and had me doing a bit of a chair dance myself.
The outfit changes came quick and fast; one minute Minogue was in a sparkly barely-there dress, the next minute a black-feathered gown, the next a holographic number that I was entranced by, but then again, I'm like a bird and I often get distracted by shiny things.
The Rock Esteidfodd-like props that came out throughout the show made me cringe at times - a golden chariot, a giant golden horse, a half-man half-angel - the list continued. I couldn't work out if it was like The Little Mermaid on acid or a rejected Ferrero Rocher advertisement.
Now I'm not that good at French but a quick look at Google Translate lets me know that 'Les Folies' (the name of her show) is French for the fun/humour - so maybe the over-glittered campness and cultural crisis of the concert was just her way of having a bit of a laugh.
While her song list was a wide and varied sampling of her greatest hits (with some new songs in between), ironically her best performance was of a song that wasn't her own - a cover of The Eurythmics’ mega-hit 'Angel' which began with Kylie soaring over the audience on her half-man/half-angel friend and landing with an embrace. The moment was definitely magical and the crowd rewarded Minogue with a standing ovation.
While the show verged on soft-core porn most of the time, and I often couldn't tell if we were meant to be in Greece or Spain or in a fluro Zumba class, it was definitely a choreographed feat. The big finale, a massively impressive display of staged waterworks made it feel a little bit more like Las Vegas than Sydney and it definitely made for an amazing goodbye.
After I left the venue thinking of the sights and sounds I'd just experienced, I had a moment to flick around on Twitter and looked at the hundreds of adoring comments her fans were posting - Kylie had left them feeling full of happiness, love and energy... and at the end of the day that's really who Kylie was performing for, the people that love her - and boy did she deliver.
Photo: Getty/ Getty Images Entertainment/ Mark Metcalfe
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