Review: Alicia Keys plays to a captivated audience in Toronto
Alicia Keys
July 14 at Scotiabank Arena, Toronto
For her second performance in Toronto in less than a year, Alicia Keys was in the mood to celebrate – from the first note.
Performing at the Scotiabank Arena during last August’s Budweiser Stage, the collective audience heard Keys before they saw her; the woman’s impeccable voice echoed as she sang the a cappella intro to “Fallin'”, the 2001 chart-topper that first introduced her music to our ears.
The lights came on with a jolt as she walked over to her sparkling white, plexiglass-topped Yamaha grand piano, where she stood to play—Keys Caress the Keys—while a rotating stage offered a 360-degree view. It was quite a grand entrance.
Ever since the elegantly dressed singer, songwriter and pianist — dressed for her first set in a pale green pantsuit, running shoes and complemented by a pair of luscious sunglasses that might have been worth a week of most of our salaries — decided that her “Keys To The Summer” tour was best suited to be performed ‘in the round’, her diamond-shaped stage was flanked by two catwalks that ran the length of the arena, one end of which led to a staircase leading to a second platform close to the Maple Square side of the building.
And if you still struggled to see her, there were two huge video screens, along with a few smaller ones, that provided close-ups and even more 360-degree visibility.
This was not so much a concert as a marathon. For just under two hours, Keys pretty much kept the music flowing with very few intermissions, combining hits and deep cuts from her eight-album studio catalog — as well as a trio of well-chosen covers that took the sweet spot of the estimated crowd of 12,000.
Keys didn’t stick to her piano station either. After completing “Fallin'” and part of the soulful “New Day,” she spent most of her time dancing, grooving, and swinging to her particular mix of R&B and pop as the five-piece crackerjack band of the 15- times Grammy winner the musical basis of the evening.
And it would almost be criminal to identify singer Norelle Simpson as her supporting singer; she played a much larger role on the show, serving as Keys’ vocal foil and filling many of the gaps with her formidable lungs when the protagonist focused on twisting and turning.
Keys is pretty versatile too, as she leaned into the dancehall riddim of “Limitedless” from 2012’s “Girl On Fire” and melded it with “You Don’t Know My Name,” though the latter was a bit of a letdown. the cascading piano passage that sounds like raindrops was left to a monster in lieu of the superstar’s ivory prowess for public reproduction.
It should be noted that while most of Alicia Keys’ songs deal with matters of the heart when it comes to romantic trials and tribulations, the subtext of the concert was also about authenticity, pride and empowerment.
For her second set, Keys — this time wearing a gold pantsuit with silver boots and a silver Phoenix medallion hanging around her neck — played an upright piano on stage two for a solo cover of the late Prince’s “How Come U Don’ t Don’t call me again.
As she finished the song, she promptly advised the women in the audience that, “if he doesn’t call, it’s time to move on. You don’t have to beg for love.”
Unsurprisingly, that performance transitioned into “A Woman’s Worth” and “Superwoman,” as if to make it clear that no one should settle for second best, whether it’s love or fulfilling one’s dreams.
There were plenty of full-fledged rhythmic highlights, including an energetic climax that began with “Girl On Fire” and continued with a lavish “Empire State Of Mind (Part II)”, with Toronto serenading its love for the Big Apple to one of its most festive inhabitants. A throbbing cover of The Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)” melded with an energetic “In Common” kept the party at a fever pitch.
However, the show was not flawless.
There were a few moments when the audience didn’t immediately respond to Keys’ request to sing along to songs like “Un-Thinkable (I’m Ready)” or “A Woman’s Worth”, and it was because they couldn’t hear her . when she spoke. The sound had its murky and cavernous moments, largely due to the unusual angles of stage equipment distorting the overall clarity.
The other downside was the appearance of a male dancer substituting for a duet partner on “My Boo,” the 2004 hit that Keys shared with Usher. Whenever they synchronized their choreography, they were fine, but when left to his own devices, whatever he uttered seemed to promote more dramatic desperation in those leaps and bounds than tasteful artistry.
Either way, the muse people paid to see was impeccable in her performance of the 30 or so songs on her setlist. As the zealous crowd partied all night long with the encore of “I Ain’t Got You”, it was clear to see that individually and collectively they had found their keys to happiness.
