Music
Kylie Minogue
Edinburgh Castle
Keith Bruce
*****
TEAM Kylie knows that a setting like the Castle Esplanade in Scotland’s capital is a gift to acknowledge. With a backdrop second to none, Australia’s ageless pop princess simply popped a perfect proscenium arch theatre show in front. Step back in time? We were TRANSPORTED, darling.
If the immaculate, precision staging – presented in four “Acts”, with a costume for each and an inevitable cheeky gold number for the encore – would have sat happily in the Festival Theatre, most of the capacity crowd for her added second night in Edinburgh would have been left outside. On their feet for much of the 90 minutes and demonstrating a varied vocabulary of moves, there can be few audiences of the age-range, and other manifestations of diversity, at a Kylie show. Youngsters whose parents were unborn at the time of the Neighbours wedding recollection that set up Act Four, were welcome at the reception, more than 30 years on. After Especially For You, the nuptial sequence included a superbly reworked The Locomotion and pleasingly pitch-perfect All the Lovers.
This was a production that rewarded careful audience attention as well as some serious hip-shaking, with many references to the passage of time in the film and animation projected behind the seven-piece band, and those stage pictures skilfully cropped and coloured for the images on the big screens on either side. Act Two’s gallery may even have included Vettriano’s Singing Butler, while the tireless eight-strong dance-troupe dropped a momentary reference to the choreography for The Gap Band’s Oops Upside Your Head onto the disco dancefloor. The cover of Kraftwerk’s Man Machine, meanwhile, gave the inspiration for the superb mash-up of David Bowie’s Fashion and Kylie’s 2003 chart-topper Slow, opening a scarlet jump-suit featuring Act Three that culminated in Can’t Get You Out Of My Head, via a crowd-pleasing Kids.
Last year’s Nashville-inspired Dancing, an upbeat musing on mortality from her 14th album Golden, and an ecstatic Spinning Around closed a show that was a diminutive diva’s compact demonstration of portion control.
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