Here is a Freedom Hall Review by Jeffrey Lee Puckett.
Here is the link:
http://www.louisvillescene.com/2004...ert_shania.html
Shania Twain
SHANIA! gets "Up!" in Freedom Hall
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By JEFFREY LEE PUCKETT • May 21, 2004
jpuckett@courier-journal.com
The Courier-Journal
Shania Twain's comparatively low profile in the past five years — and anything would be lower than her run of total domination in the 1990s — has led to some interesting results.
When Twain returned to the music business after a brief layoff with 2002's "Up!" album, she had put a little distance between herself and the country music culture. While country radio and fans remain her bedrock supporters, Twain basically returned as a Top-40 singer with a double-disc set that featured two versions of the songs: country-pop and pop-pop.
It wasn't a dramatic departure from the music that had made her a star, but the album, combined with Twain's break from the spotlight, allowed her to come back as simply SHANIA!, feisty girl-power entertainer with an insatiable appetite for exclamation points. Her already tenuous connection to country music became almost a moot point.
It's a better fit in most ways, and Wednesday night at a nearly full Freedom Hall, SHANIA! delivered a performance that expertly combined show-business flash with a personal touch that was charming given her super-duper, multiplatinum star status.
The flash aspect was similar to SHANIA'S! 1998 tour, her first, with an emphasis on crowd-pleasing hits as performed by a slick band with Las Vegas in their future.
Songs such as "I'm Gonna Getcha Good!," "Man! I Feel Like a Woman," "(If You're Not In It for Love) I'm Outta Here!" and "Up!" were given 10-foot-tall readings. The sound drifted toward 1980s rock 'n' roll a few times, especially on "Honey, I'm Home," which should be renamed "Honey, I'm Home (Pour Some Sugar on Me!)."
For every rock-star moment, there were two or three genuine instances of down-home fan interaction. SHANIA! signed dozens of autographs while singing, which is unheard of, and brought fans on stage several times for photos and/or playful duets.
She even slipped into the audience to sing "The Woman in Me (Needs the Man in You)," with security nearby to ensure that the man in you came nowhere near the woman in her.
Opening act Emerson Drive definitely lives in a post-SHANIA! world. Although it's a country band in terms of marketing, airplay and magazine covers, Emerson Drive's sound is as close to 1980s pop as you can get without being the Little River Band. They covered U2's "Where the Streets Have No Name" and dropped a chunk of Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" into "The Devil Went Down to Georgia."
Draw your own conclusions.
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