Enrique Iglesias, Jennifer Lopez to kick off tour in Montreal, Toronto
By: Jessica Vitullo, The Canadian Press
Posted: 9:54 AM
Enrique Iglesias and Jennifer Lopez will share the stage during a co-headlining tour this summer, which launches in Canada.
The first two stops: Montreal and Toronto.
Iglesias performed in Canada during his Euphoria Tour in Windsor, Ont., and Montreal last February.
During a conference call, Iglesias asked Lopez if it would be her first time touring in Canada.
"It might be, yeah," she said. "Canada, I don't think I've ever gone there, have I? Oh God. I don't remember."
Actually, she has been here before. Lopez visited Toronto and Montreal in October 2007. She performed on stage with then-husband Marc Anthony on their El Cantante tour.
Meanwhile, Iglesias spent time in Toronto while recording his first album.
"You're gonna love it," he told Lopez over the phone. "I love Montreal. It's quite a city and then Toronto has always been good."
It's the first time the two singers have toured together.
"We probably share some fans, but (we're) definitely going to introduce each other to a whole other set of fans," Lopez said. "It really is a gift for the fans to be able to see a few different artists they like or be exposed to a new artist."
Iglesias and Lopez did not disagree on anything during the interview — except on who should close the show.
Lopez argued the screaming girls would enjoy it if he closed the concert, while Iglesias said he wouldn't mind watching her perform from the audience.
The summer tour begins on July 14 and 15 with two concerts at the Bell Centre in Montreal, followed by two performances at the Air Canada Centre on July 17 and 18.
Concert review: Jennifer Lopez and Enrique Iglesias at the Bell Centre; July 14, 2012
July 15, 2012. 2:10 am • Section: Words And Music
Co-headlined arena concerts aren’t competitions, but of course they are: two commercial giants, sometimes with egos to match their sales, claiming their territory on the same stage. Even if Jennifer Lopez and Enrique Iglesias hung out in the dog park together every day, there would surely have been some friendly unspoken rivalry when they kicked off their joint tour with a sold-out show at the Bell Centre on Saturday. So, who had the edge? Lopez if you’re swayed by buff dancers and flames and trap-door mechanisms and production numbers and general big-budget insanity; Iglesias if you’re swayed by baseball caps and the thrill/danger of pulling random fans out of the crowd without debriefing them earlier.
Lopez’s set came first, which meant that instead of easing everyone into the evening, the show began with a lavish old-Hollywood dance and video sequence. When the screens parted and the star descended from the rafters on a cherry picker, with a smattering of fireworks and a “hello lovers” greeting, the thought wasn’t “where does she go from here?” so much as “where does Iglesias go from here?”
Get Right’s ritzy sax sample was accompanied by a retina glaze of purple lighting and pyramid dance formations. A funked-up Love Don’t Cost a Thing came on its heels, with strident vocals helping to prove Lopez’s strength lies in showmanship. There was plenty of it, with almost every number given its own unique staging. Lopez had plenty of space to work with, including a catwalk jutting out to a secondary platform, which made the cramped choreography on a moving stage-upon-a-stage seem like a wasted opportunity during Waiting for Tonight.
Things got loopy with an extended boxing scene set to Louboutins, acted out in a swiftly constructed ring — one of several opportunities for costume changes. Lopez tried to tie it in to a back-to-my-roots medley when she re-emerged: “When you fall down, you get back up. Even if you fall down and it’s on CNN for three days straight.” The presumed allusion to her tumble at the 2009 American Music Awards confirmed that she can laugh at herself, and that she is utterly out of touch with what it means for most people to fall down. She had the good sense to take off her gold championship robe before proclaiming “I’m a simple girl from New York City — the Bronx,” kicking off the hip-hop-heavy medley, highlighted by a hyper excerpt of the ode to denial Jenny from the Block.
The production numbers reached an apex with Hold It Don’t Drop It, staged as an old-school soul revue, complete with an approximation of James Brown’s cloak routine and Lopez’s intentionally comedic refusal to be carted off stage. She deserved a breather afterward, so she’s excused for sticking to her script:
“Shall we slow it down a little bit?”
(Half-hearted applause and audible “no”s.)
“Okay, let’s do that.”
An acoustic If You Had My Love was a pleasant enough recasting, but couldn’t compare to Let’s Get Loud’s cabaret routine or the thundering intro to Papi. Those, in turn, couldn’t compare to the frenzy prompted on stage and off by On the Floor, its absurdly infectious Lambada resurrection bringing out the best in Lopez’s dancers and making the Bell Centre feel like a nightclub. How to top that? With a batty video of a masked Lopez proclaiming her belief in love and the tireless Dance Again, whose restorative power fully justified the prolonged firing of confetti cannons.
Show’s over, folks. Time for the other show. A 50-minute intermission would usually be inexcusable, but considering the complete overhaul of the stage for Iglesias, it was downright punchy in this case. Lopez’s staircases and vertical screens were gone, replaced with horizontal screens above a set-up that put more emphasis on the band. Makes sense — Iglesias doesn’t need as much room to move. But it wouldn’t kill him to move more than he does.
The enduring memory of a 2004 Bell Centre show by Iglesias is of the singer planting his head in the lap of a fan during what should have been a seduction but looked more like a nap. He didn’t approach that level of lethargy on Saturday, but especially after Lopez’s here-there-everywhereness, and considering the horndog lust in so many of his songs, Iglesias was overly casual.
Tonight (I’m Lovin’ You) kicked things off with a robotic Auto-Tuned vocal apropros of a singer who hadn’t sprung to life yet. “Can I get a little crazy?” he asked before switching to the dirty version of the lyrics (Tonight I’m F—in’ You — because chivalry is not dead). Craziness for J. Lo: boxing rings and onstage block parties. Craziness for E. Ig: douchy profanity.
The hammer-headed techno of Dirty Dancer was again at odds with Iglesias’s energy, and he came off as a little too self-satisfied, a little too entitled to applause after Bailamos — slightly more hot-blooded, though still too cool. But he excelled in a sit-down acoustic segment, first vowing to “teach Spanish 101″ with Cuando Me Enamoro and then scanning the crowd for someone to hoist on stage.
“Pick a guy who’s not even supposed to be here,” he told a bandmate. They settled on 22-year-old Joshua, and if audience interaction leans toward the choreographed at arena shows, this time it was clearly unrehearsed. After some good-natured banter (“You came here to see Jennifer, right?” “Yeah.” “I knew it.” “…and you!”), Iglesias plied his visibly nervous new friend with booze and helped him through a singalong of Stand by Me. It was endearing, and highlighted the finest aspects of Iglesias’s off-the-cuff demeanour.
The fan-friendly interaction continued after Joshua left the stage and the band got back up on its feet, with Iglesias borrowing cameras for quick self-portraits during Escape. (There are at least three Montrealers who now have close-ups of Enrique Iglesias’s forehead on their iPhones.) He sang the encore of Hero at the back of the floor, picking another fan out of the audience and encouraging her to feel him up while encouraging those in the stands to come closer. He finally raised his energy to the level of his crowd-pleasing ability for the bump and thump of I Like It, before reprising Tonight (I’m F—in’ You) for no apparent reason other than Swearing Is Fun. (The obvious closer would have been a duet or two, but contrary to their pre-tour intimations, Iglesias and Lopez didn’t sing together.)
Both artists would have benefited if their 70- to 80-minute sets had been flipped: Iglesias wouldn’t have been eclipsed by Lopez pulling out all the stops, and Lopez would have had the glory of the big show-ending moment rather than the glory of the big pre-bathroom-break moment. (It should be noted that Iglesias did discharge the confetti cannons to cap Escape, and balloons tumbled from the roof during I Like It, but it seemed perfunctory after Lopez’s everything-goes largesse.) As it was, Lopez won by showering everyone with riches, and Iglesias scored a partial victory by paying attention to the faces in the crowd.
Jennifer Lopez and Enrique Iglesias perform again at the Bell Centre on Sunday, July 15. Tickets cost $47.50 to $164.50. Call 514-790-2525 or order at evenko.ca.
Jennifer Lopez could take some charisma tips from Enrique Iglesias
RENE JOHNSTON/TORONTO STAR
Jul 18, 2012
It’s billed as a chummy co-headlining tour by two Latin-pop superstars, but you’ve gotta wonder how long it will take for this Jennifer Lopez/Enrique Iglesias road show to degenerate into a behind-the-scenes battle of egos between Diva and Heartthrob.
Maybe the degeneration has already begun. A mere three days after the joint J-Lo/E-Ig spectacular’s debut in Montreal this past Saturday, the bill was subjected to an unexpected, last-minute flip for the first of its two Air Canada Centre stops on Tuesday night. Advertised opener Lopez didn’t appear at the appointed hour, eventually replaced by descending video screens displaying the letters “EI” and then, nearly 60 minutes after her scheduled start time, by Enrique Iglesias himself. Dame Lopez didn’t actually make it to the stage until around 10:15 p.m., which isn’t particularly late by pop-music standards but not at all common in a venue that’s typically beholden to a curfew of 11 unless Axl Rose or Prince is passing through town. Did someone have a hissy fit after reading the press from Montreal and demand to close the show? Did someone else then, in turn, have another hissy fit and refuse to go on before such-and-such an hour? I like to think so — and, for the record, all of the above is pure, hopeful speculation — just because that’s the sort of show it was.
Jennifer Lopez seems like the sort to have hissy fits, anyway. Her tautly choreographed, gratuitously overappointed set on Tuesday was such a monument to unbridled narcissism that one genuinely feared for the lives of whoever was in charge of the single LED-lit step on her midstage catwalk that fell out of illuminated line with the rest for part of the night or the (ahem) gilded throne that rose from its trap door prior to “On the Floor” tilted at a precarious, 75-degree angle towards stage right. Heads must’ve rolled, man.
Ah, I kid. Maybe. Lopez’s (drag) show was perfect for what it was, a theatrical, multi-costumed advertisement for the Vegas casino spectacle it ultimately revealed itself as aspiring to be when “Let’s Get Loud” and “Papi” were garishly presented towards the end of the night before, yes, a casino backdrop.
Flanked by a dozen dancers — 10 of them male and ripped in tacit, Kylie-esque acknowledgement of her enormous gay following — Lopez descended from the ceiling in a shower of fireworks for “Get Right” at the dawn of her performance and proceeded to dance her heart out, occasionally singing, in a series of revealing, sequined outfits for 75 businesslike minutes that played up her Hollywood-fired star power while skilfully brushing aside her limited vocal capabilities and even more limited onstage charisma.
The big singles, from “Love Don’t Cost a Thing” to “Waiting for Tonight” to an unplugged “If You Had My Love,” were represented and appreciatively applauded by the 15,000 mothers, daughters, mother-and-daughter combos and gaggles of giddy fellas in attendance. Really, though, no one was cheering for the tunes — as pleasurable as some of them might be — but for the sight and the presence of the vertically integrated entertainment product acting as a human vessel for their calculated perfection. Right? If it was about the music, after all, no one would be chatting around the water cooler this morning about the boxing match the J-Lo dancers staged in slow motion on the proscenium mid-set to remind us of that movie Enough but about how strong her voice sounded on … umm … well, she did get through “If You Had My Love” without a guide vocal.
You get what you’re going in for, in any case. You really do. Even the entire “I’m just a simple girl from New York City” charade perpetrated for “I’m Real” and “Jenny from the Block” is excusable in its own, ludicrous context. You want nothing less than the absurd in these situations. Which is why you can stomach the 42-year-old Lopez repeatedly parading her 25-year-old boy-toy/tour choreographer Casper Smart before the crowd, but maybe why you don’t necessarily want a treacly salute to Jennifer Lopez’s greatness as a mother — complete with a montage of her four-year-old twins — like “Until It Beats No More” thrown in on top of all the other, overarching salutes to Jennifer Lopez’s greatness. Keep it unreal. Humanity feels false.
Enrique Iglesias has a touch of the diva about him, too, but he camouflages it well.
Tuesday night’s set marked the Spanish-born smoothie’s third Toronto appearance in 18 months and was arguably the reason so many misbehavin’ ladies of a broad range of postpubescent ages came out to the ACC on a school night to carry on like 11-year-olds gifted with front-row tickets to Justin Bieber. He invited the girls in my section to come dance at his feet at one point and I was, quite literally, knocked to the floor by a woman who could have been my mother as she hurtled towards the stage. ‘Nuff said, I think.
Iglesias’s set hit all the same marks as his last ACC gig: global mega-singles such as “I Like How It Feels,” “I Like It,” “Dirty Dancer,” “Bailamos,” “Tonight (I’m Lovin’ You)” and a salsa-fied “Rhythm Divine”; graciously pulling fans of both homo- and heterosexual dispositions onstage for a personal serenade; and reminiscing about the year he spent recording his first album in Toronto at 18, albeit this time with Little India supplanting Chinatown as the neighbourhood in which he indulged in appropriate ethnic foods, “watched a lot of ****” and lost his virginity.
You can forgive Iglesias such Vegas-entertainer behaviour, however, because he’s charming enough to sell it, in a self-aware manner that would make Neil Diamond proud. He tries very hard, in his standard ball cap, jeans and t-shirt attire, to present himself as Mr. Everyman while at the same time kinda-but-not-quite making a joke of his beefcake status. Somehow it works. I’ve no idea how, but Lopez would do well to take some notes on charisma while they’re on tour together.
Box office update: 'Ice Age' freezes the competition with $16.5 million on Friday
by Chris Nashawaty
No surprises here. The weekend’s only wide debut, Fox’s Ice Age: Continental Drift, was the top dog at the box office on Friday, earning $16.5 million. That solid bow puts the fourth chapter in the studio’s animated sequel on pace to not only win the weekend, but also to finish in the high-40s, assuming parents don’t mind keeping the kids indoors on a summer Saturday. Assuming those predictions are correct, Continental Drift should land between the second and third installments in the franchise, but fall short of its animated summer compadres, Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted and Brave, which both finished their first weekends with $60 million or better. But that’s only part of the picture, Ice Age has already proven that it’s a hit overseas, where it’s on track to collect an additional $250 million by the time the weekend comes to a close.
Sony’s The Amazing Spider-Man held up fairly well, coming in second with $10.3 million on Friday — a drop of 50 percent from last week. The big-budget Andrew Garfield-Emma Stone reboot has made $176.2 million so far and should finish the weekend with a take in the low-30s. But it’s still lagging behind all three Sam Raimi Spidey flicks at this point in its run.
In third, Universal’s Mark Wahlberg comedy Ted snagged an impressive $6.9 million, bringing its total to date to $143.7 million. Less stellar, but still good enough for fourth place, was Warner Bros.’ male-stripper comedy Magic Mike, which made $3.4 million — whether not that sum came in the form of crinkled, booze-stained one dollar bills wasn’t known at press time. Last but not least, Brave rounded out the top 5 with $3.2 million, bringing its total to $188.1 million.
Enrique Iglesias and Jennifer Lopez to heat up the stage in Newark
Thursday, July 19, 2012
BY ALEXIS TARRAZI
STAFF WRITER
The Record
WHO: Enrique Iglesias with Jennifer Lopez and Frankie J.
WHAT: Latin pop/rock
WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Friday
WHERE: Prudential Center, 25 Lafayette St., Newark; 973-757-6600 or prucenter.com
HOW MUCH: $29.50 to $250.
FOR MORE INFORMATION: enriqueiglesias.com, jenniferlopez.com
This may be perfect timing for Jennifer Lopez. She left "American Idol" to focus on her singing career, which will be on display this week as her tour with Enrique Iglesias comes to Newark.
Lopez made her "Idol" announcement last week, a day after fellow judge Steven Tyler announced his departure, to rededicate himself to Aerosmith.
During a recent telephone interview with Lopez and Iglesias, conducted before Lopez's announcement, she said her time on the show had impacted her own performances.
"I think it's not about being hard on yourself. It's about remembering all the things that you're teaching, you know what I mean – like all the things that you say. And it's a really great experience because it's this exchange where you're actually learning more and more as you're teaching, and trying to help," said Lopez. "And so you definitely walk away with – I know I do – just thinking, like, about all the things that you have spoken about through the year, of how to be a good performer, a good live performer, and a great singer, and how do you do all those things, and so it's pretty – it's pretty great."
Lopez and Iglesias, speaking before the start of the tour – which kicked off Saturday in Montreal – said performing together this summer was a no-brainer. They have been each other's fans for years; Iglesias said his favorite Lopez song is "If You Had My Love," while Lopez cited Iglesias' "Bailamos" as hers.
"I just loved it," Lopez said. "I just always remember him. That's a very iconic moment for me for Enrique, maybe because it was his big kind of entrance into the market. … But it's those moments that, like, stay stuck in your head, that the person just becomes a part of pop culture."
Both singers say co-headlining should work out well for them and their fans.
"That's really what we're there for, in the sense that Jennifer has her fans. I have my fans. And hopefully, by the end of the show, you know, Jennifer's fans will be my fans, and my fans will be Jennifer's fans," Iglesias said. "And at the same time, we know that economically, you know, the U.S. and around the world is not – it's not the best of times. So fans do get to see two acts for the price of one, which is also a great thing."
In Montreal, Lopez took the stage first, clad in a skin-toned rhinestone-covered outfit, according to the Montreal Gazette. Surrounded by buff dancers, she performed hits "Get Right" and "On the Floor," old favorites like "Jenny from the Block" and an acoustic rendition of "If You Had My Love."
After an hour-long intermission, Iglesias came out in a hoodie and baseball cap to perform "Tonight (I'm Lovin' You)" "Hero," "Dirty Dancer" and "Bailamos."
"Well, Jennifer's show [is] a little more synchronized, a little more – I don't want to say elaborate in a way, but obviously more dancers, more costume changes," Iglesias said. "I'm a guy, so when it comes down to costume changes, I get a little more lazy.
"I guess one's more a Madonna show," he added. "The other one's more a U2 show."
Never get tired of seeing this.
