CELINE DION FLOATS BANGKOK’S BOAT

Time has done nothing to diminish the diva’s voice

That “sinking boat” song — that’s how Celine “My Heart Will Go On” Dion, joking with the casual humour of a seasoned Las Vegas residency entertainer, refers to her most played, most loved, most karaoke-d, and perhaps most clichéd number. How many times have you heard it? Hundreds, if not more, intentionally or accidentally. And yet, apparently, there’s nothing compared to hearing it live, 21 years after that big boat sank in Titanic, belted out at top octave and lung power by Dion herself, as she did to the roaring crowd at Impact Arena on Monday night in her first-ever concert in Bangkok.

My Heart Will Go On came at the end. The two hours preceding that were a set list of 20-something songs, all the big hits and mild hits, sung with heartening decibels and vocal fortitude. Plus some long talks, costume changes and anecdotes (scripted, but still), notably the one about how Dion was asked by Ryan Reynolds, a fellow Canadian, to sing a soundtrack number for the movie Deadpool 2. She loves singing and telling stories, and her long residency at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas (since 2011, on top of an earlier stretch in the mid-aughts), where she performs nightly, has shaped her into a friendly, talkative stage persona, complementing the vocal authority that built her career in the 1990s.

The hall was packed — the front-row tickets cost 15,000 baht; my friend was set back 3,000 baht for a top-corner seat partially blocked by loudspeakers — proving that the 1990s diva-style crooner still has a solid fan base, most of them having grown up listening to the species as teenagers. The best news — apart from Celine’s quality and professionalism — is the sound in Impact Arena: it was a very good mixing job on Monday night. And from the first song, The Power Of Love, we knew the night would be worth the long wait.

Then she rolled out a string of hits: That’s The Way It Is, I’m Alive, Because You Loved Me, It’s All Coming Back To Me Now, Beauty And The Beast. Dion has sung many hit soundtrack tunes, and that Ashes from Deadpool 2 isn’t a big hit is both a result of the subpar success of the film and the reality that powerful, voice-queen divas, once ruling the charts, have long been replaced by other, “modern” sounds on the popular palette.

Dion also sang her biggest French hit, Pour Que Tu M’aimes Encore, to the delight of many French fans around my seats. She went on with Recovering, a consoling number written by Pink for Dion when her husband, who had long suffered from cancer, died in 2016, and for an emotional continuity, All By Myself which sounded as good as when you first heard it so many years ago.

An acoustic session followed, in which Dion sang with her string quartet. She went upbeat for the final stretch, with Kiss, Purple Rain (a great choice for a cover song), Love Can Move Mountains, and River Deep, Mountain High. Then, of course, the one song everyone’s been waiting for. My Heart Will Go On shows that Celine Dion is still the voice, and it’s a pleasure hearing her.