REVIEW | Sarah Geronimo shows newfound maturity, sophistication in ‘Perfect 10′ concert --- Repost from "Interaksyon Entertainment"

You can now stop calling Sarah Geronimo Popstar Princess. She effectively became Music Queen last Friday night via her “Perfect 10″ concert at the Araneta Coliseum.

It’s not that the show was another sold-out affair — her third out of three in the same venue within the span of one and a half years. It’s that with this concert she came of age as a performer and into her own as an artist.

“I’m not who I was before,” she crooned with soulful defiance on the opening song, Alicia Keys’ piano ballad “Brand New Me”. “Don’t get mad / It’s just a brand new kind of free / I’m just a brand new kind of me.”

There was no getting mad at this new Sarah who sang with a newfound maturity and sophistication.

Gone was the mimicking, which she explicitly acknowledged by playfully demonstrating how she used to out-Dion Celine Dion and out-Bassey Dame Shirley Bassey when she was still a professional kontesera during her younger years. Gone, too, was the showboating (in fairness to her, she has long moved on from shoutboating), and the posturing that played to the rafters.

The new Sarah of “Perfect 10″ was all about nuance, deep understanding of meaning, and often intense feeling, such that oft-performed classics in the Geronimo Songbook such as “How Could You Say You Love Me”, “To Love You More” and “Forever’s Not Enough” sounded fresh.

Of course it helped a lot that the new Sarah was also quite open like she had never been before. She intimated personal anecdotes for the first time for many songs. In fact she was quite chatty, playfully peppering her spiels with amusing and colorful but relevant asides that proved that she had a very clear grasp of her material.

These moments not only provided levity to the mostly downbeat concert. Although there were less than five upbeat numbers in the almost 30-song repertoire, at the end of the show it did not feel like two hours and 15 minutes had passed.

Of course, credit also goes out to the direction which kept things highly visual with eye-popping imagery on the big LED screen backdrop onstage, the creative video interludes, including a sponsors’ clip that was delightful both for the clients and the audience, and the streamlined movement of the guests. (Almost all were kept as a surprise until they came onstage and started to perform.)

In a concert filled with several highlights, the most showstopping numbers were Sarah’s medley of two heartbreak ballads “Sweetest Mistake,” “Eyes on Fire,” from her current album, the surprise piano-led and intense rendition of Radiohead’s “Creep,” which included a chorus of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and the Streisand medley featuring guests Regine Velasquez and Lea Salonga, which was rewarded with an enthusiastic and much-deserved standing ovation.

As a pop spectacle, “Perfect 10″ was far from perfect. Then again it was apparently not designed to be one. It was mostly a small, intimate, “MTV Unplugged”-size concert that was meant to herald the birth of a mature artist. In that measure it was as close to perfection — real, riveting, revelatory — as a local major concert by a pop royalty can get. That Sarah made it work, and work well in such a monumentally huge venue, is proof of her artistic growth.

“Perfect 10″ will have a repeat on November 30 at the Mall of Asia Arena and at Waterfront Hotel Cebu on December 7. Tickets are available at www.ticketnet.com.

This is a repost of the article from Interaksyon Entertainment by Chris Dante posted on November 18, 2013!