She had faith, well-placed, that for the better part of two hours no one would stop staring at the high-level-lingerie look underneath her overcoat. Until the encore segment, in fact, Twain surprised probably everybody by wearing the same costume throughout - but when you’ve got a costume like Twain’s on Saturday, it might seem criminal to switch it out. When her two male backup singer-dancers broke were left alone early in the set to do a mimed joint tap-dance, it seemed like the occasion for Twain’s first refreshed outfit of the night, but it was really just a time-out to roll that faux chopper out on stage. The expectation coming into a diva-type show is that there will be multiple costume changes, but that proved not to be the case. She sits astride it - or lays astride it - for the length of a song early on, and then for the rest of the show, there are some super-cheesy electronic backdrops, like an animated cowboy saloon on fire, but really it’s about sashes and heels and wigs from then on. There is one giant prop that appears early in the show: a gigantic faux motorcycle that looks like something off a vintage Meat Loaf cover, partly configured in the shape of a horse, to invoke the stallion that Twain used to ride onto the stage at some point in her original Vegas residency in the early 2010s. (It is a contrast her audience is willing to live with and embrace.) This touring production won’t set any records or break any molds for being the most elaborate show on earth, nor does it need to be, when Twain is her own ongoing special effect, and a set of stairs and single giant LED screen will suffice as set design. Twain did her best to live up to those expectations and present as a Marvel-level immortal Saturday, visually, anyway, although her between-song chatter always breaks the illusion by having her sound like a Normal Lady, not demigoddess. Shania Twain at the Hollywood Bowl (Randall Michelson / Hewitt Silva-Live Nation) For as long as there are women, and gay men, and straight men relaxed with themselves enough to buy “Let’s go, girls” T-shirt and diode-blinking pink cowboy hats, Twain will own rights to the ultimate ladies’ night anthem, just as surely as she owns the federal trademark on exclamation points. It’s a song that may never have truly peaked until all the generations represented at the Bowl this Memorial Day weekend have passed away and/or the day the prerogative to have a little fun has been codified into the criminal as a felony. When she pulled it out as her inevitable final encore number Saturday, it still felt like it was cresting. That was a few weeks shy of the moment that her signature song among all signature songs, “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!,” peaked on the charts. She had that figured about right - the calendar shows she last played America’s most favored amphitheater on May 6, 1999. “It’s been about 25 years since I stood on this stage,” since Shania Twain, not long after the kickoff to her set Sunday night at the Hollywood Bowl.
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