American Airlines Arena, Miami
August 5, 2006

“Miami,” Mariah Carey says, “is not an easy place to begin a tour.” It’s nearly two hours into the sold-out first night of The Adventures of Mimi tour, and for Carey — looking elegant but weary in a skintight turquoise gown — the show has been a not-always-excellent adventure. There have been missed lighting cues, bungled dance moves and uncomfortable pauses while Carey scuttles to the edge of the stage to sip water through a straw. She spends nearly half of “Dreamlover” entreating the techies to turn on giant stage-side fans (“Where are my fans? I need a moment, here!”), knocks her sunglasses askew during “Fantasy” before whipping them disconsolately into the crowd and appears to be singing the wrong vocal part over a backing track in “Don’t Forget About Us.” Throughout the night, she fiddles with her earpiece, at one point begging her sound crew, “If I have to wear this thing, could you please make sure the volume is turned up nice and loud?”

None of these glitches seem to bother the adoring audience at the American Airlines Arena. It’s a notably young crowd — homegirls and their boyfriends, South Beach clubbers, gay couples — proof positive that with the blockbuster The Emancipation of Mimi album, Carey has shed her old Adult Contemporary image and become a hip-hop soul diva. (Some of the biggest cheers of the evening come during the costume-change interludes, when Carey’s turntablist DJ Clue spins rap hits like T.I.’s “What You Know” and hometown-hero Rick Ross’s “Hustlin’.”)

Carey has certainly given her fans a spectacle. The stage set features a curving, opera-house-style staircase, three monster video screens and an enormous light-sculpture spelling out MIMI. There are six hyperactive dancers, video cameos by famous rappers (Jay-Z, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Jermaine Dupri) and a gratuitous appearance by a full gospel choir, who pour out onstage in white robes to sing a few — very few — bars of the set-closing “Make It Happen.” Like all good MTV divas, Carey spends much of the show backstage changing clothes. She sports eight different outfits during the concert, going from skimpy lingerie (a black bikini with boy-short bottoms and a chiffon cape) to a hood-goddess ensemble (painted-on Capri jeans with a bling-encrusted halter top and matching shades) to red-carpet formalwear (those sweeping evening gowns).

Visual razzle-dazzle makes sense for Carey rivals like Madonna or Janet Jackson, whose vocal chops are dubious to begin with. But Carey is a five-octave-range singing superhero; the multimedia glitz feels like a distraction, and Carey sure seems uncomfortable executing tightly choreographed routines surrounded by hoofers half her age. (You can practically see her counting off her steps in the slinky “Shake It Off.”)  

But strangely, Carey’s obvious nerves and the opening-night kinks add to the show’s charm. She has never projected the froideur of Madonna or Beyoncé. She’s the neurotic, human-size diva, the woman who made the god-awful Glitter and suffered a highly publicized crack-up but bounced back in 2005 to trounce the competition with her best record yet.  The concert opens with video footage of a roller coaster and a melodramatic Carey voiceover proclaiming: “My life has been like a roller coaster … I’ve had my ups and downs … and I’ve found a deeper kind of truth.” The show replicates that arc in miniature, moving through tribulations, muffed production numbers and near-nervous breakdowns, arriving at something like transcendence.

Which in this case means the big, gospel-flavored MOR ballads that have earned Carey more No. 1 hits than anyone besides Elvis Presley and the Beatles. Songs like “One Sweet Day” and “Fly Like a Bird” liberate Carey from choreography, letting her rear back and deliver ethereal high notes and great gusts of melisma. Carey’s sheer vocal prowess redeems even the schlockiest material, like the self-esteem anthem “Hero,” the evening’s big sing-along. The show climaxes with “We Belong Together,” a song that perfectly integrates her old ballad singing style with the sleek syncopations of hip-hop-inflected R&B. In an arena thronged with Mariah diehards, more than a few of whom are openly weeping, the song plays less like a breakup ballad than a pledge of devotion between the superstar and audience.  “I love each and every one of you!” Carey cries at the song’s end. It’s the oldest, smarmiest line in the showbiz book, but on this anxious night, it sounds totally sincere.