Reflective, intimate show from Kit Chan

REVIEW / CONCERT

KIT CHAN 25 YEARS ON: A TIME FOR EVERYTHING

Esplanade Theatre/Last Friday

The song made Kit Chan a star in Taiwan back in 1994, but she is understandably sick of singing it.

It is Heartache, a song with lots of vocal fireworks.

But at her show last Friday, she breathed new life into the song with a quieter acoustic rendition, which plumbed deeper into the depths of pain and caused tears to roll down this reviewer’s cheeks.

The singer’s latest concert was a reflective and intimate affair, in contrast to her 2015 show at The Star Theatre, which felt more fun and featured glitzier costumes.

“This is my 25th anniversary show and I want it to be really personal,” said the 46-year-old, who performed on Friday before an audience of about 1,800.

She had a second show last Saturday.

Besides marking a career milestone, Chan has entered a new phase of life after ending a long relationship last year.

She mentioned this in passing before performing a new song, Enjoy Loneliness, as photos of her solo travels in Europe flashed on a screen.

Another photo montage showed her from her days at Raffles Girls’ School to her early years as a singer.

Over the concert of nearly 21/2 hours, Chan was in fine form as she serenaded the audience with English songs like Fever and Mandarin ballads like Aaron Kwok’s Should I Walk Away Quietly in her rich and slightly smoky voice.

She also sang several Cantonese songs, such as the melancholic Waiting from the Hong Kong musical Snow. Lake. Wolf.

There were light moments too.

One was the performance of a jazz track called Flexible Man – the sexy song that some in the audience have been waiting for, the singer teased.

In between swigs of water, she also joked about how her black outfit resembled a bathrobe and how she must be the singer who drinks the most water.

The concert venue may be the “serious” Esplanade Theatre, but Chan got the audience of mainly middle-aged fans to sing along to her early hits Worried and Liking You.

She also seized the chance to urge Singaporeans to listen to home-grown music.

She introduced the audience to local band Hanging Up The Moon’s Tiny Moments, a pensive number that asks what have people lost along the way.

But the concert was not all about reflection. There was time, too, for some rah-rah waving of mobile phones during the performance of the National Day song Home.

It was a fitting finale to a personal and intimate concert by a singer often described in the Chinese-language media as a national treasure.

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