REVIEW / CONCERT

KIT CHAN SPELLBOUND HOMECOMING CONCERT 2016

Singapore Indoor Stadium

Last Saturday

What did the addition of Homecoming to the concert title mean for local singer Kit Chan's show?

For starters, instead of the more intimate The Star Theatre, where she kicked off her regional Spellbound tour last June, the venue this time was the Indoor Stadium.

Production was ramped up with more lighting and stage effects, but they never swamped the star of the show and her luminous voice. She sounded great throughout the 21/2-hour show - the audience could hear every nuance of tone and emotion in her singing. Even her cover of David Huang's You Make Me Drunk, a song that is in danger of being overexposed, felt fresh.

It had been 15 years since she last performed at this venue, yet she owned it as if she had never been away.

In between songs, she chatted easily with her fans like they were her old friends. At one point, she thanked celebrity hairstylist David Gan for his bird's nest soup, quipping that he gave it away like complimentary coffee.

Since the previous Singapore gig, Chan has released her first album of original material, The Edge Of Paradise, in 12 years. Apart from the track Spellbound, she added three songs from it to the show, including the jazzy Don't Ask Me Why I Love You, originally written for the late Leslie Cheung.

Quite a few things remained unchanged, though.

Her choice of covers to illustrate her ease in English and Cantonese remained largely similar. They included the Prince-penned Nothing Compares 2 U, Lana Del Rey's Young And Beautiful and Cheung's Left And Right Hands.

Nevertheless it was still a joy listening to Chan as she made the songs her own.

What could have done with some updating were portions of the scripted banter. The introductions to emo ballad Dazzle and Marilyn Monroe's My Heart Belongs To Daddy would have been all too familiar to those who went for the previous show.

None of it mattered anyway, because Chan went into full chanteuse mode and turned the Hollywood bombshell's number into a slinky and cheeky showstopper, earning a round of thunderous applause.

After the entire stadium surprised her with an early happy birthday song, she told the audience of 7,000: "Thank you for having been with me for such a long time. The scenery along the way has been beautiful."

Ditto the accompanying soundtrack of her songs over the years.