joooory' date='Oct 17th 2010, 9:47 PM
Most of it is good.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/music...ew-Adam-Lambert
Gig review: Adam Lambert
COME CLOSER: Adam Lambert performs at Trusts Stadium in Auckland.
Sometimes not winning something can be the best prize in the world. Just ask American Idol runner-up Adam Lambert.
After losing to the nice, sensible, wholesome choice in the 2008 final of the reality show, Lambert has gone on to make quite a name for himself as a serious, self-confessed rock diva.
And he did his best to prove that reputation to an amped-up Auckland crowd last night, with lashings of melodrama, flamboyance and glamour.
It seems Adam Lambert's Glam Nation Tour is the whole shebang. You get singing. You get dancing. You get costume changes. You get theatre. You get glitter. You get a sermon on love and self-acceptance. You come away a little bit of a better person than you when in.
Well, that's the theory, anyway.
There is no doubt, Lambert can sing. Boy, can he sing. His voice was a soaring powerhouse during tracks like For Your Entertainment and If I Had You. But it was during the stripped back tracks, including an intimate version of hit single Whataya Want From Me, that the pure talent shone through.
And throughout the set, Lambert proved he is the complete package - an entertainer in the extreme.
But there were moments, particularly when the newly minted pop star took his foot off the throttle, that the boredom started to creep in and attention began to wander.
While his band is obviously good, a five-minute guitar solo every time the pop prince needed an outfit change - there were three - got pretty old, pretty fast.
And at times, it would have been easy for the audience to wonder if they had stumbled into an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, complete with faux operatics, but smaller.
Perhaps this was because the show had a scaled down feeling; like everything had been trimmed just a little to fit the undersized Trusts Stadium stage, a venue that time and time again lets down quality acts with below average sound and atmosphere. And disappointingly, last night was no exception.
But Lambert made the most of it, and the crowd lapped up his every hip thrust and hair flick.
Of course, it's all part of a carefully thought out plan - you can take the boy out of Idol, but you can't take Idol out of the boy - but by the end of the show the sold-out crowd had been taken on a trip through every version of Lambert's idea of what love is and back again.
And it was a special rendition of those other recent visitors, Metallica's Enter Sandman, to celebrate the birthday of one of Lambert's band that rounded out a spectacle of a night.
All in all not too bad for America's second choice.
