Off in space with Sarah

Sarah Brightman is an extraordinary singer and artist, with an impeccable soprano yet very sweet voice. She made her name worldwide with her immortal role as Christine in “The Phantom of the Opera”, the most popular and probably longest-running stage musical ever.
Brightman might initially have had a hard time erasing the haunting “Phantom” image from her career and also from the public psyche. Yet she has outgrown that episode to become her full self with her solo performance, in which she is involved down to the minute details of every project.
Wednesday night’s show “Sarah Brightman in Concert: Dreamchaser in Bangkok” was yet another captivating and remarkable performance, with which she completed her tour in this region. Bitec Hall in Bangkok’s southeastern suburb Bang Na was almost full.
The first half of the show was devoted to a futuristic type of music, with lavish displays of light and sound and a gigantic screen behind providing more visual effects. This arrangement helped to camouflage the economy of scale in the personnel onstage. Viewers expected an orchestra accompanying her, as they had seen on her DVDs, but instead had to quickly settle down and be content with a small group of backup musicians.
Apart from Brightman and a pair of male singers, there were four musicians onstage – a string player, two keyboardists and a drummer-percussionist – as well as two dancers.
The visuals, lighting and sound added much to Brightman’s spellbinding performance, combined with a theme of searching for a new home in the universe for mankind. It was completely out of this world.
Brightman projected her personification like Diana, the Greco-Roman goddess. Most of the time she stood high over the stage, as if she were floating from the sky, and communicating to us a distinct message of the coming of a New World. And it was she who would lead us from the Old World to the New. In this respect the concert theme should not have been “Dreamchaser” but “New World Usher”. There was a segment in which Brightman stood on a high platform with a spotlight at her back, reminiscent of Diana holding the torch at the beginning of all the Columbia Pictures movies in the old days. The Statue of Liberty in New York is also of a similar mould.
In another scene, the screen projected a spaceship amid glaring stars in the vast universe. It was all in preparation for a long journey to the stars.
The second half brought us back to Brightman’s classic “Phantom of the Opera”. Now we were glued to the familiar Christine, the innocent opera singer groomed by the Phantom.
The show ended distinctly with a farewell message about the end of Planet Earth, amid floating lights and the spacecraft. Brightman’s musical show was the music of the New Age and the coming of the New World.