Aphrodite Live: Orlando

Orlando fans greet Kylie with some serious love while she and the dancers send their moms special Mother's Day messages...



Kylie Minogue at Hard Rock Live: Concert review
by Jim Abbott Orlando Sentinel

Sometimes, it was hard to remember that this was the small version.
Yeah, Australian pop star Kylie Minogue had to down-size the epic scale of the $25 million staging of her “Aphrodite Tour” for its current U.S. trek, which stopped Sunday at Hard Rock Live in Orlando.
So there were no multiple stages. No flying. No cascading fountains.
No worries.
Turns out that even without the over-sized special effects, Minogue and her cast of thousands (or so it seemed) were able to concoct a splashy, utterly stylish alternative reality – equipped, of course, with a soundtrack built for a dance floor.
In the scaled-down version, Minogue relied on a trio of enormous vertical video screens behind the stage to set the fantasy mood. In the introduction to the opening “Aphrodite,” the blue-tinted images conveyed erotic, aquatic choreography that combined with a fog-shrouded stage to lend a touch of the mystic to the high-energy song.
There weren’t many lulls in a performance that stretched more than two hours and the opening salvo keep the beat pounding with “The One” and “Wow,” the latter offering the first of many showcases for Minogue’s inventively costumed dancers.
In Minogue’s show, the Aphrodite theme is open to extremely loose interpretation. There were scantily clad Spartans in “Wow,” incorporating their gleaming golden shields in the routine. In “Illusion,” the spotlight was on the female dancers, seductively waving scarves as Minogue belted out the song in front of Chairman Mao-sized portrait of herself on the big screen.
It was hard to keep up with all the costume changes, which put the singer in several varieties of flowing hoop skirts, an ebony feathered-one and a chrome-looking metallic number.
And the feather concession alone for this tour would be a lucrative one, with the dancers adorned in lavish head-dresses that looked like a cross between Las Vegas and Mardi Gras for “Better the Devil You Know” and a few other numbers.


Yet, for all that, Minogue also showed that she doesn’t need a costuming budget to connect.
She delivered “I Believe In You” virtually alone on stage, eliciting a lusty sing-along that sounded genuinely spontaneous.
“Yes, I do!” Minogue shouted to the crowd, adding a personal punctuation to the song’s signature line.
And when she invited a fan near the stage to join her for a brief moment, the interaction didn’t have the contrived feeling that often accompanies such pop-star gestures.
“You’ve been about to cry since I first saw you,” Minogue told the man. “You’ve already cried? Three times? My work is done.”
When the singer unleashed all the assets of her stage production, the effect was equally impressive. The inspired pairing of “Looking for an Angel” and “There Must Be an Angel (Playing With My Heart)” made the segue from winged dancers on stage to a heavenly finale that involved all of the cast members in a chorus line that looked like a gospel rave-up on steroids.
Call it down-sized if you want, but it was something big.


thanks to Mark!Photography!