Unrestrained by time or artistic discipline, yet never really accepted as one of the cool kids, Cher carved out a career all her own. Hit songs across multiple decades and genres, Academy Award-worthy movie roles, a refined sense of comedic timing, a brash public persona coupled with a colorful and far more vulnerable personal life she celebrated all of it in a flashy show at a full Smoothie King Center on Friday.

Whats YOUR grandmother doing tonight? she asked, a well-rehearsed punch line that simultaneously acknowledged and defied her 73 years.

If anything, Cher's show needed more Cher. For much of its 95-minute span, she was backstage changing costumes and wigs. Wardrobe revelations are requisite at a Cher concert, but her eight disappearances, coupled with a scant 15-song set list, made the show seem shorter, and more slight, than it really was.

Following an opening set by guitarist Nile Rodgers and disco-funk band Chic, Cher descended from the rafters to Womans World, her 2013 dance-club empowerment anthem. As her nine dancers romped as especially glamorous gladiators, she was resplendent in blue hair. Its natural, she joked.

Cher performs at the Smoothie King Center in New Orleans on Friday, Dec. 13, 2019.

Following the second song, Strong Enough, she instructed the audience to sit down. Im going to tell you a fabulous story and its all true.

The ensuing tale involved going to a club for her 40th birthday with a friend. We looked like hookers, Cher said, before clarifying that the friend looked like a hooker. I looked like Cher.

The story touched on Nicolas Cage, tax evasion, David Letterman, being told she was too old for a movie part, and writing in script, a thing we used to do.

She recalled the residency she and Sonny Bono logged at the Blue Room, the supper club in what was then the Fairmont Hotel (which now operates once again under its original name, the Roosevelt). I think it was September, because it never stopped raining, she said.

The moral of the story, in a roundabout way? Don't let your age get in your way. For you older women.wheres your blue hair? Its time to act up, act out, picket, march, get into trouble.

Or, if you're Cher, get atop a mechanized elephant for the Indian-themed set of the disco-pulsed All Or Nothing. She disappeared again to time-travel back to the early 1970s, when Sonny & Cher were pop culture darlings thanks to their hit CBS variety show, The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour.

The nightclub act they honed at the Blue Room cast them as a 60s version of 1950s Las Vegas sensations Keely Smith and Louis Prima. Like the New Orleans-born trumpeter and bandleader Prima, Sonny was the older, goofier male whose antics were routinely dismissed by his younger, unimpressed wife's deadpan wit.

The audience awaits the start of Cher's performance at the Smoothie King Center in New Orleans on Friday, Dec. 13, 2019.

Their divorce was big news, as were their professional reconciliations. When then-Congressman Sonny Bono died in a skiing accident in 1998, Cher delivered a tearful eulogy.

At the arena, clips from The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour prefaced the chestnut The Beat Goes On, for which Cher donned a glitzy, sequined version of her mid-60s style: striped bell-bottoms, broad belt, short, faux-fur vest. (It's a style that contemporary country star Kacey Musgraves seems to appreciate.)

Cher cracked that she thought about saving I Got You Babe, Sonny & Cher's breakthrough No. 1 duet from 1965, for my next farewell tour.

But this tour needed it. I Got You Babe was the shows emotional center. As she did in the early days to quell stage fright, Cher looked directly at Sonny even though he's now just a video and sang directly to him.

It was a sweet tribute in a sweet song, the original recording of which was arranged by New Orleans producer and saxophonist Harold Battiste, Sonny & Chers longtime musical director.

Another costume change prefaced three Abba covers from her most recent album, Dancing Queen, which built on her role in the movie sequel Mamma Mia!: Here We Go Again (which in turn inspired her current tours name).

SOS and Fernando, especially, demonstrated that Chers rich contralto, several registers removed from more contemporary divas high-flying if sometimes hollow excursions, remains intact. So, too, did her hearty cover of Marc Cohns Walking In Memphis.

Cher performs at the Smoothie King Center in New Orleans on Friday, Dec. 13, 2019.

Five musicians and two backing vocalists pumped up arrangements. A guitarist delivered a squalling hard rock solo during the costume change that preceded I Found Someone and the 1989 power ballad If I Could Turn Back Time.

Cher strutted out in a slightly more modest version of the sheer, dental floss-like leotard she rocked in the If I Could Turn Back Time video, shot aboard a battleship stocked with cheering sailors.

For the finale, she fast-forwarded to a club remix of her 1998 hit Believe. As dancers cavorted, two aerialists twirled overhead, the band bashed away and lights flashed, she presided serenely, an especially cool grandmother perfectly comfortable in stylish jeans, sensible silver jacket and deep red hair.

The red, like blue, blonde and other hues before it, wasnt natural. But it was naturally Cher.

Continue reading here:

Review: If you're Cher, being 73 is no reason to stop wearing a leotard onstage - NOLA.com