Concert review: Prince makes it rain at the Air Canada Centre
Nov 26, 2011 – 4:04 PM ET | Last Updated: Nov 27, 2011 9:09 AM ET
Laszio Balogh / Reuters
Prince performs during Budapest's Sziget music festival this past August. Did the one-time unpronounceable artist bring down the house in Toronto Friday night, too?
Prince's show Friday night in Toronto broke a number of records. First, there was the record time spent by ticket-holders waiting outside the Air Canada Centre — although tickets cited an 8 p.m. start time, doors didn't open until about 7:55 p.m., sparking more than a few grumbled un-Princely conversations. Fortunately, the rest of the statistics are of the sunnier sort: At nearly three hours and 15 minutes, the show surely broke a record for the Toronto venue, no doubt due to the astounding number of encores (six, but it got hard to keep track of come encore No. 3).
Another record to mention? The number of times Prince exclaimed, "Toronto!" The man definitely knows how to play to his audience. Not that a little CanCon love was a bad thing — after all, the show was a homecoming of sorts for Prince, who used to own a mansion in the city's tony Bridle Path area (rumoured purchase price: $5.5-million). Still, by the end of the night, his constant refrains of "Toronnnnnnto!" got a little tiring, if not just a wee bit patronizing.
OK, no more petty sniping, though: Once the house lights (finally) came up, it was clear Prince Rogers Nelson knows how to put on an exhilarating, epic and exhausting show. Coming just one night after Kanye West and Jay Z performed a (by all accounts) equally grand two-night spectacle, Prince turned the cavernous ACC upside-down, showing roughly 14,000 fans that he could still out-funk anyone at the ripe ol' age of 53. Yes, the Purple One is a musical machine — not once did he show signs of breaking a sweat, his lithe frame boogieing back and forth across the stage at breakneck speed.
Opening the first show of his cross-country tour (he's also returning to the ACC Saturday night), the artist formerly known as that weird indecipherable symbol pulled out all the stops, and then some. With a truly unique in-the-round stage set-up, shaped like the aforementioned indecipherable symbol, Prince and his band, the New Power Generation, had the audience eating of their hands from start to finish. From the opening, lengthy funk-tastic intro to nearly every single you could want, there was an undeniable party-writ-large atmosphere. And if you didn't feel like partying that night? Well, Prince doesn't take no for an answer.
"What do you have to do tomorrow?" Prince asked the crowd about 30 minutes in. "Alright if we stay here a while?" The audience roared its approval, so stay Prince did. Blasting through tracks from Musicology, D.M.S.R. and, of course, Purple Rain, the musical ring-leader and his band (which got a boost from Maceo Parker on alto sax) delivered a master lesson in live music.
Generous to a fault, Prince not only performed the singles everyone came for (Raspberry Beret, I Would Die 4 U, an extra-long Purple Rain), he twisted each one into something new — breaking down Little Red Corvette into a smooth slow jam, or boosting When Doves Cry into an audience-assisted masterpiece.
"Do you know how many hits I have!?" he shouted between encores No. 3 and 4. "Ain't nobody have to go home tonight!"
The man was right: he does have a mammoth amount of hits — but he was also surprisingly open to performing covers. From The Cars' Let's Go to Wild Cherry's Play that Funky Music White Boy and a thrilling, if brief, riff on Michael Jackson's Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough, it felt at times like Prince was hosting the world's best, and largest, dance party. This theme extended, literally, to the two occasions in which audience members were invited to come up and dance on that oddly shaped stage.
This was live music for the people, with just the right dose of ego behind it all. And we haven't even got around to mentioning the riotous bursts of purple confetti, Prince's numerous costume changes, his more-than-solid backup singers, Parker's devastation with a saxophone or the yes-this-is-really-happening performance of Morris Day and The Time's Jungle Love. (Oh, and Prince was also fond of dancing atop his grand piano, and blithely flinging his guitar to various stage hands, as if he didn't care whether it was caught or not.)
Perhaps the only true criticism you could level at Prince was that the man is a dirty liar. After all, who exclaims, "Good night, Toronto! Have a good night!" half a dozen times before coming back onstage to perform yet another awe-inducing encore? Hey, no one's perfect.
Prince performs in Toronto Saturday night before playing Canadian cities including Halifax, Montreal, Ottawa and Vancouver.
• Email: bhertz@nationalpost.com | Twitter: HertzBarry
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