For her current tour (which apparently should have been sponsored by Ozempic), Shania Twain is doing her damnedest to both embody a new image and to turn back the hands of time, and the enthusiasm on hand for her sold-out Hollywood Casino Amphitheater concert on Sunday night proves that ’90s nostalgia is giving Twain a big boost. With a 70 percent female audience, the show was marked by gaggles of girls drinking show-specific watermelon margaritas (“space cowgirls”) and wearing light-up cowboy hats and “Let’s Go Girls” T-shirts.
Twain, who turns 58 this summer, looks entirely different from when she was selling zillions of copies of Come On Over as the fresh-faced crossover queen of country-pop in the ’90s. When the show started, Twain popped up out of a huge wagon being pushed through the aisles in the middle of the crowd by beefy security dudes while wearing a shiny black trench coat, pink sunglasses and a blonde wig and singing “Waking Up Dreaming” from her latest album Queen of Me as she was paraded through a sea of fans frantically filming her.
Once on stage, the trench coat came off to reveal an ensemble in a Hello Kitty color palette. The wig, overtly synthetic and in need of deep conditioning, was Mennonite-long. With a black leotard under silver bejeweled cups, a blowy pink-chiffon train and trashy baubles around her neck, the whole look resembled the stuff you’d pull out of your kids’ dance recital trunk.
So the sweet country girl was gone, replaced by a pop-star parody in bubble-gum pink. Not that she didn’t scratch the itch of those wanting to party in the past; she played seven songs from Come On Over (compared to five from the new album) all supported by stage razzle-dazzle, like a giant crowd-tickling sign that read “Missouri” in lights and a backdrop that made it look as though she were playing at the “Twain Town Saloon,” which sounds like a joint that belongs in Hannibal, Missouri. At one point, a CGI horse came galloping through the saloon, later followed by what appeared to be a baby alien running for its life.
It was all glitz all night, including a gimmicky tap-dance showdown by her two dancers, one of whom had no business being up there, which stalled things out. That kind of interruption ended up being a recurring motif, like an awkward sequence when Twain brought a six-year-old girl named Avery on stage who refused to talk into the microphone, so her mother answered for her. Or when she brought out a group of “VIP” fans who paid for the luxury of standing on stage as she sang “From This Moment” on a platform far above them. Or when some guy named Matt was invited on stage to bring the show to screeching halt by reciting his favorite song.
Then, there was her voice. Before “You’re Still the One,” she told the crowd that there was a time that, due to her Lyme disease-related vocal loss, she didn’t know if she would ever sing again. It was clear on Sunday that the ordeal has indeed taken a toll, and kudos to her for pushing through as her voice lacks the clarity and range that once defined her vocals, and she now sounds more like Tanya Tucker singing Shania Twain songs. Still, it didn’t seem to matter to a crowd that took over much of the singing anyway, and there was enough visual pop to keep crowd happy, like when Twain writhed on a horse-shaped motorcycle while singing “I’m Gonna Getcha Good!” from 2002’s Up! or stood on what looked like a multicolored spinning CD — an effect caught from an overhead camera and projected onto the venue's video screens — while performing a medley of lesser-known tracks.
Musically, the show was not without highlights, and a crack band gave it all a sheeny polish while still making room for first-rate playing, especially from flashy fiddler Cory Churko and hard-hitting drummer Elijah Wood. And it’s impossible to punch holes in some of these big songs, most effective when she revisited Country Shania by burning through “Any Man of Mine,” “Whose Beds Have Your Boots Been Under?” and “Honey, I’m Home” all in a row.
Of course, holding her biggest smashes, “That Don’t Impress Me Much” and “Man! I Feel Like a Woman,” for the encore — with Twain now decked out in a black coat and top hat — ensured a severe traffic jam trying to get out of the parking lot. Still, despite a concert that offered a mixed-bag of moments, she still did enough with her glammed-out reinvention to satisfy her forever-and-for-always fans.
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