SALLY YEH INTIMATELY YOURS CONCERT 2013
Review Concert by Nancy Koh

The Max Pavilion, Singapore Expo/Last Saturday

Qu Wanting or Sally Yeh? I had tickets to both pop concerts held last Saturday and it was a delightful dilemma: piano-plonking princess or razzle-dazzle queen?

The earworm chorus of Qu’s current chart-buster rang in my ears even as I chose vintage wine and elbowed my way past aunties and uncles into The Max Pavilion.

Yeh, 51, proved she is still a slick entertainer. Her show was a deafening explosion of sound, smoke plumes, pyrotechnics, confetti, friendly banter and, oh, sensuous Latin dancing too.

From the opening Cantopop number Wo De Ai Dui Ni Shuo (Telling My Love To You) to the ending number, a cover of Stevie Wonder’s I Just Called To Say I Love You, the concert was clearly a love letter to her fans, whom she called “friends”.

Hong Kong-based songstress Sally Yeh showed off her sultry moves

Take away the blinding lasers and this was like a BFF get-together, with Yeh sharing some of her intimate secrets through videos during her five costume changes in the close to three-hour show.

Here’s the goss: Being naturally garrulous, the Taipei-born, Canadian-raised, Hong Kong-based singer-actress had once wanted to be a lawyer. She dislikes seafood but loves fries and chips. Her first boyfriend was a Caucasian who had “protected” her, the lone Asian in the Canadian class, since first grade.

She blasted her way through 40 songs, some covers and others from her over 30-year discography of hits, switching seamlessly from Cantonese to Mandarin and English tunes.

The 5,000-strong audience of mostly babyboomers reserved the warmest applause for familiar evergreens including Heart Of Fire (movie theme song for A Terracotta Warrior, 1989, starring Gong Li), Dawn, Please Do Not Come (theme song for the 1987 film A Chinese Ghost Story, starring Leslie Cheung and Joey Wong), Ten Past Midnight (the song that singer-husband George Lam wrote for her) and Cool Walk.

Yeh’s entourage was certainly cool: six musicians, 10 dancers and four backing vocalists, as well as her sexy Latin dance instructors, Hong Kong-based Russians Alexander Nishakov and Dmitriy Arsiriy.

After a seven-year break from concerts, her current tour has touched base in Hong Kong, Malaysia and Connecticut in the United States, with Las Vegas up next. But this is definitely not her last pop hurrah. “Retiring has never crossed my mind. I love to sing,” she declared in one of the stage videos.

Her sensuous dance moves and pretty little pout as she flopped down on the floor after running through the crowd singing Ge Lan’s 1958 blockbuster Wo Yao Ni De Ai (I Want Your Love) must have raised more than just temperatures. The audience wolf-whistled and called her name as she paused to catch her breath, chest glistening with sweat.

Her voice was in good shape, her bod and biceps even more so.

She confessed that her standard of Chinese is poor – one of her stage videos showed her rehearsing from a songsheet with romanised phonetics – and she used to simply belt out her songs.

But having been through ups and downs in life, she said she could better express the depth of some lyrics. After all, she has won Hong Kong’s Most Popular Female Singer award four times.

Mr Leonard Tan, a Yeh superfan since 1995, told Life!: “Every time I go to her show, she touches me and I become a hero.” The Singaporean was dressed in a beige suit with headband and white gloves and said he was “as old as my country”.

He had broken out into an impromptu dance in the aisle, startling the audience and catching the star’s attention. She urged the crowd to get up and shake their booty like him.

Her effervescence had that magical effect. She and her Salsa Club bounced around the auditorium right into the back stalls in a raucous finale, leaving fans on a clapping, dancing, videoing high.

The Straits Times | January  21, 2013