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Concert review: Jennifer Lopez hasn’t lost her touch

The Montreal stop on her burlesque-inspired It's My Party tour was enthusiastically received by fans on Wednesday.

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It is fitting that pop diva Jennifer Lopez opened her Montreal concert at the Bell Centre on Wednesday night by descending onstage on a ring suspended beneath a glittering wine-glass chandelier, wearing the first of many revealing outfits, in the city where burlesque queen Lili St. Cyr was a major star.

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St. Cyr would have approved of Lopez’s burlesque-inspired concert. The 15,691 Lopez fans in attendance sure did, giving Lopez a thunderous standing ovation following her opening number.

“It’s a birthday suit!” Lopez said, teasing the audience with her mostly exposed derrière. “It’s one cheek — that’s all you get!”

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After wrapping up her three-year All I Have residency at Planet Hollywood Las Vegas last September, Lopez — who turns 50 on July 24 — launched her 2019 It’s My Party Tour in June, replete with umpteen glitzy Vegas-style outfits, pyrotechnics, balloons, confetti and fireworks.

Though Lopez performed more than 20 of her hits, I’d venture to say few fans buy concert tickets just to hear Lopez sing. J-Lo is no Aretha Franklin.

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What the fans come in droves to see is Lopez the glamorous perfectionist and her 20 dancers deliver a tightly choreographed dance show. This concert’s stripper routine even has Lopez lap-dance for a lucky male audience member, set to her song Girls.

The dancing was flawless and Lopez — who famously began her career as a Fly Girl dancer on the early 1990s sketch comedy TV series In Living Color — showed why she is a favourite of drag queens worldwide: Lopez worked that stage like a catwalk and the undisputed diva she is.

That said, the charismatic Lopez hasn’t lost her human touch: She gave a young girl in the audience her mirrored baseball cap after singing Jenny from the Block, and Lopez sounded most authentic when she sang in Spanish, notably the Selena ballad Si Una vez.

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Other vocal highlights were the understated cover of the Sara Bareilles ballad Gravity, and J-Lo dueting with her 11-year-old daughter, Emme, at the end of Limitless.

The concert went into high gear with the four final songs: Lopez, her dancers, five-piece band and three back-up vocalists banged out high-energy versions of her hits Waiting for Tonight, Dance Again, On the Floor and Let’s Get Loud, which Lopez performed atop a three-tiered birthday cake.

“You guys have given me a summer I won’t forget!” Lopez told the audience.

And Lopez gave her fans a concert they won’t soon forget either.

Twitter.com/bugsburnett

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