One thing Mariah Carey had working in her favor Friday night was low expectations. “I've heard she's not a great performer,” a couple people remarked in the Miller High Life Theatre lobby ahead of the singer's first Milwaukee concert ever, and it's no mystery where they got that impression. The internet is filled with Mariah Carey fail videos, with titles like “Mariah Carey's WORST performance yet!” or “Mariah Carey's AWFUL performance on New Year's Eve 2016,” one of many mocking her televised Times Square disaster that year. To say the bar was low doesn't cover it; all she really had to do to was show up.
She did more than that. Anybody who expected her to spend the set wrestling with an ear piece or chewing out her sound guy was in for a treat, because Carey was in good spirits and eager to please Friday night. She happily autographed albums for fans from the stage, gamely rapped along with Ol' Dirty Bastard's verse on “Fantasy,” and hit, or at least grazed, some of the high notes. She was pleasantly chatty, muttering jokes to herself and editorializing on the setlist's various remixes and rearrangements (“It's a combo platter,” she said of a medley of “Emotions” and the deep cut “You Don't Know What to Do.”) For the night's most heart-melting moment, she invited her two extremely adorable kids on stage to help her finish “Always Be My Baby.”
When she did play into her prima donna reputation, it was with a wink. She had a couple of guys touch up her makeup, and she made a big display of sipping tea from a canister as sparkly as the dresses she slipped into during the set's many costume changes, which ran the gamut from Disney princess to Jessica Rabbit. Save for a too-long stretch of roller disco songs from Glitter, the notorious 2001 flop that that's less of a fan favorite than Carey seems to believe it is, the show moved briskly.
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At times, though, the concert tacitly acknowledged something that Carey's relentlessly contemporary recent albums haven't: Carey is a nostalgia artist now. From the night's DJ shouting out to all the '80s babies in the crowd to Carey's beefcake backing dancers, whose moves were right out of In Living Color, the night had a clear throwback feel, and often played more like a well done Vegas revue than the acrobatic arena shows Carey's younger contemporaries tour behind. Carey can't give those acts a run for their money, nor did she even really try. But what she lacked in perspiration she made up for in personality. Even when the concert itself didn't soar, she was nothing less than a delight.
