The French singer is a delight in her biggest Southern California show yet.
Two songs into Christine and the Queens at the Wiltern on Saturday the French singer grinned at the packed crowd in the sold-out theater in appreciation of their raucous welcome.
Those numbers, “Comme Si” and “Girlfriend,” were aimed at getting the audience warmed up, said Héloïse Letissier, who after starting her career as Christine and the Queens now also goes by short and simple Chris. But you, she told the Wiltern fans, already are oh so very hot.
And why wouldn’t they be? Since her self-titled debut album in 2014, an impressive Coachella performance in 2016, and a critically acclaimed second album, “Chris,” in September, Christine and the Queens has increasingly broken through in English-speaking countries.
Paul McCartney and Madonna are fans. Rolling Stone recently declared she is “shape-shifting pop’s future.” Variety predicted a Grammy for Best New Artist at the next ceremony.
So yeah, the crowd was more than eager for her L.A. return and in a show that ran 20 songs and 90 minutes she was magnificent, or magnifique, depending, whether like the songs she performs, you prefer the English or French versions.
After the funky “Le G” and a shout out to the crowd to fight for your true identity (Chris, like Janelle Monáe, with whom she shares some musical qualities, also identifies as pansexual), slowed things down for a song with the gentler “Make Some Sense.”
That pattern continued for the night. A dance groove like “Science Fiction,” a softer song like “Paradis Perdus,” in which she mixed together pieces of the early ’70s French song “Les Paradis Perdus” with Kanye West’s “Heartless” and made something new, a bilingual vocal, lovely and vulnerable.
In addition to Kanye, other musical hat tips in the night included snippets of Queen’s “Radio Gaga,” Michael Jackson’s “Man In The Mirror,” and Janet Jackson’s “Nasty Boys.”
Her best-known song, “Tilted,” showed up midway through the show, a bold position for the one track everyone in the theater knew. (Present in the room on Saturday was actress Pamela Adlon, who recreated the music video for that song for a set piece in her FX series “Better Things.”)
There’s a strong theatricality to a Christine and the Queens performance. She was a drama student before taking up music six or so years ago, and has clearly studied a lot of dance over the years too. As the four guys in her band started to play the seductive synth-pop that runs throughout her music she and her six dancers worked through the crisp, creative choreography that makes her shows so visually rich.
The production design also had at times the feeling of a play or musical. A pair of large, painted backdrops evoked a 19th century romanticism – when she stood, small and alone, facing a stage-width image of a roiling sea as she sang “Here” you got a strong “Les Misérables” vibe.
Other highlights of the show included “The Stranger” for which the dancers all moved in precise slow-motion, “Goya! Soda!” for which swirls of green smoke twisted above the stage before her embrace of the dancer who shadowed her ended in a burst of white smoke, and “La Marcheuse,” which closed the main set, a softer number with a beautiful visual trick that made it appear beams of spotlighted sand were falling from the rafters to the stage.
The encore found Chris in the crowd, singing “Saint Claude” and then back on the stage for “Intranquillité,” one more big dance number that would look great on a Grammy telecast if an artist out of left field, or more precisely, France, should ever have that chance.
When: Saturday, Oct. 27
Where: Wiltern Theatre, Los Angeles
