Twain: Not the One

If I’d spent the last 20 years under a rock and didn’t know who Shania Twain is, I’d have spent Wednesday evening wondering who this person was, why she was headlining a Caesars Palace show … and couldn’t they have found somebody better? Let’s cut to the chase: Twain’s voice is shot, unreliable of pitch, limited in range and decidedly parched of timbre. For most of Shania: Still the One, she’s barely audible over the large and spirited band. The latter is perched atop three abstracted “boulders,” which my wife thought looked like turds. I decided that two resembled half-baked dough while the third bore a disconcerting resemblance to a sideways pair of testes and a John Thomas.

It was as though the headliner was indisposed, so they sent on a backup singer instead — except that Ms. Twain’s backup trio is in far better estate than she. It’s their work that makes the vocals sound as good as they do. Hence all unceasing “production value” distractions, laid on by director Raj Kapoor, starting with a series of video vortices that were like being on an acid trip and not a good one, either. The show carries Twain, not vice versa. There is so much video glitter thrown in our eyes, unremittingly, along with three confetti showers, that it scarcely mattered who the headliner was. You’d certainly need a stronger, more idiosyncratic vocalist — someone like Reba McEntire in her prime (than which there is no primer) — to put across a series of largely unmemorable, rock-inflected C&W songs … alternating with C&W-tinged rock ones, like the anthemic finale, “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!”

Twain genuinely seems to enjoy working the crowd and isn’t thrown by anything — not even when she brought some indescribably inebriated Canadians onstage for the campfire segment (emphasis on “camp”). And, unlike some of her predecessors — *cough*Cher*cough* — Twain acts like she genuinely wants to be playing Vegas. And, at 105 minutes, it’s a generous serving of Shania. Unfortunately, the show itself isn’t tailored to the audience interaction that is its greatest strength. But if you want to see a jaw-droppingly kitschy extravaganza that is the weirdest spectacle put on the Colosseum stage since Franco Dragone‘s pretension-fest, A New Day, by all means make tracks to Caesars.

I’ll spare you a blow-by-blow. Still the One probably fails to qualify as Camp, since it’s deliberately kitschy and calculatedly over the top. We get an Aboriginal Spirituality interlude as well as a “Western” set that seems to have emerged from a Hee-Haw time warp and probably should have stayed there. It all makes Elton John‘s Million Dollar Piano look monastic and Céline Dion‘s eponymous show downright self-effacing. Still the One should sell like hotcakes but you’ll leave humming the visuals.

Caesars bills its resident crooner, Matt “Gossy” Goss, as “Britain’s answer to Frank Sinatra.” (A wan rejoinder, if that’s the case.) However, in this douchebag festival, which I belatedly discovered and of which a mercifully abbreviated version is posted above, the role of Chairman of the Board has been usurped by Sean “Puffy/P. Diddy/Diddy/Puff Daddy” Combs. Goss and his porkpie hat are relegated to the periphery of the revels. It’s like he’s that Rat Pack member who stands off to the side and doesn’t do much. Guess that’d make him the Peter Lawford of our day — not a niche for which there’s hot competition to fill.