Yahoo News Kylie Minogue’s Vegas Residency Never Stumbles, Even as She Recovers From an Ankle Injury: Concert Review
After a five-month stint in art deco concert venue/nightclub Voltaire at Las Vegas casino The Venetian, Kylie Minogue has just two more performances left before the conclusion of her concert series “More Than a Residency.” Given the grueling schedule she’s maintained since the beginning of the promotional cycle for “Tension,” her sixteenth album, it feels understandable, even appropriate, for Minogue to take her foot off the gas — especially while she’s nursing an ankle sprain she must ice immediately after every show.
Even so, she poured what felt like 110 percent of her energy into Saturday night’s performance (April 27), delivering a highly-concentrated roundup of hits across an almost 40-year singing career to remind the venue’s 1,000 ticket holders why Minogue remains one of pop music’s most beloved and enduring figures.
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Following an introductory set of house and disco music by a DJ clad in an oversized, sequined suit, the performers of Voltaire’s Belle de Nuit started the show proper at approximately 10:00 p.m. Though the Luxor casino just a few miles down the strip marks the site of “Bodies,” a decidedly more clinical exhibition of human beings’ inner workings, no better showcase could be found in Vegas for the body’s active musculature than among the troupe’s dancers and acrobats.
Across a set that ran just shy of an hour, they exploited the venue’s expressive, stylized lighting both to acclimate the crowd to the genre-spanning blend of dance music that would be included in Minogue’s performance, and to emphasize every one of their gobsmackingly strong muscles. Songs by Jane Birkin (“Baby Alone In Bablyone”), Cerrone (“Supernature”), Frankie Goes to Hollywood (“Relax”) and Gessafelstein (“Opr”) provided a soundtrack as performers contorted, swung and posed, all while stripping down to various levels of not-quite nudity that were at once thrilling and titillating. During some numbers dressed like Catherine Deneuve in “The Hunger” or a Patrick Nagel painting come to life and others wearing only loincloths or see-through bodysuits, the ensemble expertly warmed up the crowd ahead of Minogue’s performance.
Minogue’s set began a few minutes after 11 p.m. with two numbers from her 2000 album “Light Years,” the title track and “Your Disco Needs You.” The combination of “I Feel Love”-echoing synthesizers on “Light Years” and the robust, Village People-esque chants on “Your Disco” were like catnip to the rhapsodic crowd, whose members more than matched Kylie and her backup dancers’ over-the-top theatricality sequin for sequin, rhinestone for rhinestone. Carrying a golden microphone, Minogue waited until after singing her third song, “Supernova” (from 2020’s “Disco”), before venturing down a narrow catwalk to the platform at the center of the venue.
As kaleidoscopic light surrounded her, Minogue beamed while the crowd cheered her arrival. It marked the first of many moments of seemingly sincere gratitude, underscoring her reputation as one of the most approachable pop divas. Then again, that intimacy may also have been the byproduct of Voltaire’s comparatively modest size. But the closeness (both physical and atmospheric) made the diminutive singer seem like an artist performing for friends and the towering international singer who’s sold 80 million records worldwide.
Minogue shuffled through “Vegas High,” reiterating that it was written expressly for her residency as she completed the final tracks for “Tension,” then performed singalong versions of “In Your Eyes” (from “Fever”) and “Get Outta My Way” (from “Aphrodite”) ahead of her first costume change. Returning to the stage dressed in skintight PVC, she performed a pair of her sexiest tracks, “Tension” and the “Body Language” lead single, “Slow.” On the latter, she paired its seductive lyrics with a live performance of the instrumental to Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby” — a welcome callback to one of the many disco singers whose work has inspired and influenced her own. She then paid tribute to her Las Vegas forebears with a cover of Elvis’ “Can’t Help Falling In Love,” whose chorus the audience joined her in singing.
After another costume change, Minogue bounced through “Spinning Around” before reaching all of the way back to 1987 for a rendition of “The Loco-Motion,” the song that first put her on the map. Sandwiching the track between songs from 2000 and 2010, the singer not only reminded ticketholders how long she’s been around, but how long she’s been delivering earworm dancefloor fillers. While members of Belle du Nuit performed more acrobatic movements around her, Minogue easily kept pace with the choreography, a feat made more impressive by the fact that she is recovering from her aforementioned ankle injury and yet still maneuvering around on platform heels.
Though “All the Lovers,” featuring a cascading rainbow light show, ended the third act of the set on an appropriately triumphant note, Minogue returned for three more songs, the biggest of her career: the Grammy-winning “Tension” track “Padam Padam” and her instantly-recognizable “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” plus the Grammy-nominated “Love at First Sight,” both from 2001’s “Fever.” Wearing all white like in the iconography of her “Fever” era, Minogue performed her final few tracks with extra gusto; even on her eighteenth performance of this particular set, she exuded a clear joy on stage, an appreciation to those in attendance not just for joining her in the room but for helping make those songs so popular for so long.
There are pop artists who have made riskier creative excursions than she has in their career, and those end up being the songs left off of set lists like this one (as a case in point, none of the songs from her 2018 country-kissed album “Golden” were included here). But consistency is at least as great a virtue as versatility in the rarified position she occupies in the music industry, and the 17 songs she chose for her residency showcase more than simply her greatest hits. At 75 minutes, “More Than a Residency” purposefully may not include much more than the singer’s best-known tracks. But its all killer, no filler set list guaranteed crowd satisfaction, whether you jumped on Minogue’s bandwagon this year with “Tension” or you’ve been bumping her songs since the days of “The Loco-Motion.”
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