Director: David Mallet
Executive Producers: Roger Davies, Anthony Eaton (Isis Productions)
Original Show Conceived by: Cher
Tour Director, Choreography: Dorian Sanchez
Musical Director: Paul Mirchovich
Cher’s Costumes: Bob Mackie
Costume Designer for Dancers: David Cardona
Lighting Design: Allen Branton
Make-up: Leonard Engelman (of Saving Face video, Aquasentials and Extravaganza: Live at the Mirage)
Hair/Wigs: Renate Leuschner (since the Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour)
Band: Paul Mirkovich (keyboards and duet vocals), Darrell Smith (keyboards), David Barry (lead guitar), Don Boyette (bass), Mark Schulman (drums)
Backup singers: , Stacy Campbell, Pattie Darcy Jones
Dancers: Bubba Carr, Aaron Cash, Suzanne Easter (who will go on to sue Cher in 2014), Kristin Willits, Tovaris Wilson, Addie Yungmee
Tour Charge d’Affaires: Cher’s sister Georganne Bartylak
Head of Logistics: Cher’s sister’s husband Ed Bartylak
Cher’s Personal Assistant: Jennifer Ruiz
Video Reels: Dan-O-Rama
Filmed at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada (28 August 1999)
Aired: HBO (allegedly aired the day after it was recorded)
This is the special that documents the 1999-2000 Do You Believe Tour. Cher fans loved this show but local critics often panned the show for all sorts of the usual anti-Cher reasons: too many costume changes, too much circus-stuff, too many Cher songs. Critics even took issue with the special because it was pre-recorded and not truly “live” even though “live” had already become synonymous with “in concert.” It seemed a petty gripe at the time. It seems ridiculous now.
Imitators obviously paid no heed and Cher’s fin-de siè·cle shows set the standard for big spectacle arena shows by female pop stars to come. This was one of the first, if not the first, of the big circus shows.
Cher had just released another “comeback” album in 1998, almost 10 years after her 1980s comeback Geffen albums. Sonny had died in January 1998 as well. The movie Tea With Mussolini had come and gone.
The first concert specials (Cher in Concert: Live in Monte Carlo and A Celebration at Caesar’s Palace) still show vestiges of the Cher’s 1970s singing gestures and persona. The long hair was gone, replaced by wigs and hair pieces and thus the hair flip was gone. But there were still moments of hand hanging and tonguing her teeth. By Extravaganza – Live at the Mirage in 1990, there was even less evidence of that. By this time, most of the dramatic 80s rock-chick Cher gestures were gone as well.
And after Sonny was gone, a kind of self-consciousness seemed to depart as well, as if his judging eyes might have affected Cher? Hard to say if this is true or what Cher is ever thinking but these post-Sonny shows have lost a kind of chip-on-the-shoulder quality found in previous solo shows. Cher seems more accepting of her changing status into an icon of show business. Post Sonny she is becoming a reluctant matriarch.
This is also a longer show, so my friends would not be so upset by the set-list-to-costume-change ratio.
“Believe” has been a massive hit song and supplied Cher with a come back in her 50s (to match the musical comebacks of her 20s and 40s and the movie comeback of her 30s), This is the second arena show special capturing a tour experience and the fourth concert special. And this is the tour that starts a new, circus phase of Cher tours.
We can categorize them like this:
- 1960s shows with Sonny, a bit grungy, often part of larger tour caravans, casual like the kids, mostly their original material
- 1970s show with Sonny, more glamour and humor, from small nightclubs to big headliners, mostly their original material
- Late 1970s to early 1980s solo shows, more covers, lots of disco attitude, bigger glamour
(Take Me Home tour, Monte Carlo Special, Celebration at Caesars) - Late 1980s to early 1990s rock shows, more covers, a subdued rock look, rock attitude
(Heart of Stone and Love Hurts tours) - Late 1990s to present circus show, big sets, lots of color, Cirque du Soleil-style dancing, back to original material
(Believe, Farewell, Dressed to Kill, Here We Go Again tours)- A subset of this would be the latter-day Vegas shows at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace and The Park Theater.
The show was filmed at the MGM hotel arena in Las Vegas. To advertise the special, a building-sized transparent (so guests could still see out of their room windows) poster was hung on the strip-facing side of the MGM hotel and we see it during a fly over as the special begins.
I saw this show twice (which seemed very decadent at the time). I was working at a place called Yonkers Contracting at the time and went with a co-worker friend to the Madison Square Garden show and then again by myself to the show at Jones Beach where I accidentally got a single seat in the third row and was shocked when I arrived during Cyndi Lauper’s set (to support her album Sisters of Avalon). I’ve never had a better seat at a Cher show. This show was also where I became much more appreciative of the live shows of Cyndi Lauper.
And this was an important show for fans because from the late 1970s through the 1980s, Cher was primarily doing cover songs with maybe a new song or two sprinkled in there. This was the first tour where she was revisiting any of her older hits from the 1970s. In future shows Cher would dip back even further into the 1960s.
Both the DVD and VHS copies of the special came with a delightfully colorful hologram cover.
Intro Video Montage: The opening of one of the deep cuts from the Believe album, “Love is in the Groove, ” plays over a big screen of exciting, high energy visuals created by Dan-O-Rama, followed by a remix segment of the song “Strong Enough.“ Mostly the video uses publicity and video artifacts from the Believe, 1980s and some of the 1990s eras. Contemporary Cher basically. We see snippets of Geffen and Warner Bros UK album videos, the Herb Ritts session, her Uninhibited commercials.
I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For (cover of U2, 1987)
Cher rises up from the top of double stairs descending to the left and right (C-shaped like the 1975 Cher show C and the staircase from Celebration at Caesars). She wears a somewhat convoluted Medieval outfit with a black cross under gold mesh at her chest. The right arm has a kind of arm cape. It’s a complicated costume to decipher. She wears a big, curly red wig and a kind of exaggerated Ugg boots. Her eye-makeup is extra sparkly.
The Heart of Stone tour was amazing. The covers were amazing but still kind of within Cher’s expected wheelhouse. This another level, a cover of U2! She began with this opening during the somewhat small Love Hurts tour.
It never got tiring, until it did, 20 years later through the Farewell Tour (2002-2005) and then the first Cher at Caesar’s show (2011). By 2014 (when she started opening with “Woman’s World”) I would never need to hear Cher sing this song ever again.
The lights are more choreographed, the staging is up a notch, the fleur-de-lis gold chain rails lining the stairs, the medieval touches of the set, almost like a dungeon.
This show will have body-obscuring outfits to cover Cher’s likely menopausal physique. This is as cherubic as Cher will ever be as a live performer. The change really affected my friend Christopher when he watched the special that year at the house I was then living in Pennsylvania. He longed for a never-changing perfect Cher but she suddenly had a puffy face, larger arms and very layered outfits. I thought the change moved the focus from her body to the clothes themselves and the set, which was refreshing (to me, but then I’m not as obsessed with eternal youth).
There’s a tiny extension of the very big stage out into the crowd. Cher marches down the stairs and makes the peace sign and skips around doing air punches and pointing at the crowd.
Young people are strategically placed in the first row…and a Cher impersonator (I think that might have been Wayne Smith). Aside from the impersonator, they don’t exactly look like the die-hards at real shows. I call these “stunt fans.”
All or Nothing (Cher from Believe , 1998)
The dancers arrive. Cher stays in the same outfit. The band is behind her, between the staircases (like Celebration at Caesars). There’s less cutting in this special. She sings the song and there is a smidge of synchronized dancing. The dancers have long, colorful, dreadlock wigs. The outfits are animalistic, like what human characters in The Lion King would look like. Cher does a new thing where she brings her hand up to her face, palm out. She kicks her knee up a lot.
Cher says, “thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. No, no, please, no, no. I’ll just get a swelled head. Then I’ll have to buy all new wigs. Except for this one which is my natural hair color now. I have many natural hair colors I will be wearing throughout the night. I am dressing my age now.” She calls her look “Bozo the Clown meets Braveheart. “Very conservative. and I feel comfortable in it, okay. This is me in a nutshell. I’m the kabuki Bozo the Clown.”
Cher continues, “Before we go any further, we have to raise the lights.” She points out the “tramps there, lots of tramps there…some gypsies up there…some half breeds back there.” This was a moment for fans. Cher coming back to her musical references of the 1970s. Cher doesn’t tend to be nostalgic generally. Outside of the later-day tours, she did not seem willing to look back into time. She finds a section she calls “all gypsies, tramps and thieves.”
She says she has 35 years worth of material to go through in this show. “I don’t understand it because I’m not even 35 years old yet. It’s a mystery.” She says she wanted the show to be “HBO meets Cher meets Cirque du Soleil. Cher du Soleil. This is the beginning of the Cher du Soleil Extravaganza right now.”
We get two things here, another delayed “official beginning” (two songs in!) and Cher reinforcing the tone of the show, a circus of fun. The colors are brighter, the costumes are flowing, the props and staging are larger than life. This is just Cher dipping her toe in the water. It’s a halfway point between the austere black apparatus of the Heart of Stone show and full-on color palette of the Farewell Tour.
Her shows will maximize the circus extravaganza as they evolve, both in stage design, lighting and special effects. Male artists, like Paul McCartney (at the time if I remember) and The Chemical Brothers (more recently) and anyone now playing at the Las Vegas Sphere have done similar “big show” gestures but have never received the criticism for doing it that female artists have, especially Cher. For female artists it is characterized as a distraction and a crutch (because they lack talent, see). For male artists, it’s seen as a technical marvel (they’re both talented and appreciate the technology of stagecraft!).
it’s also worth noting that Cher has in the past associated the whole “look-at-me” circus of show business with Sonny and Sonny had just died. This could have been a nod to his big-show, vaudevillian sensibility.
The Power (cover of Amy Grant, 1994)
Still in the same outfit, Cher sings this deep cut from her Believe album. A male dancer plays the part of the King. A tall man on stilts plays the wise man interacting with the dancers, who are more like acrobats in this and later shows . This is the only tour that includes this song. I love the stilts guy!
During this era, Cher liked to give us good views of her guitarist.
She points to herself when she sings “bad girl.” Stilts man returns without the stilts. He looks a little odd dancing with the “younger” dancers. They gather around Cher, hold hands. They do the Cher-of-many-arms.
Dancer Interlude: The Braveheart people dance around, smokey-lamp-bikes come out with dancers looking like weird druids, This show has a look. The backup singers do Arabic-style melismatic singing. The dancers look like cave people.
Soon we hear the intro to the next song. A dancer does a big ribbon dance. Cher is changing costumes.
We All Sleep Alone (from Cher’s 1987 album Cher)
Cher recently wore a new version of this outfit to the Bob Mackie biopic premier. It’s Cher’s purple and silver pirate outfit with a long black coat, a bobbed wig with a long ponytail. Cher comes down stairs again. The dancers pull of her coat. She has a cool silver hip sash. This is this show’s version of the hole fit but not as great, more jagged. She has tall boots. She goes back up the stairs at the end of the song.
I Found Someone (from Cher’s 1987 album Cher)
Cher stays in the same outfit, singing from high on the stairs. She comes down alone and strut walks the stage, throwing air punches and skipping and pointing to the crowd. She does some skipping and does a mic drop-catch. More shots of her new guitarist.
We are transitioning from the contemporary segment of the show (the 1980s and 1990s) and entering the 1970s segment.
TV Video Montage: This montage starts with the the Good Times dog Scoongie and the scene with the dog and Cher watching TV. The rest of the montage covers clips from the variety shows and the specials of the 1970s, Sonny & Cher album covers, the Cher doll. Because Sonny is now dead, Cher is suddenly accused of using clips of Sonny cynically in her show, but she had been doing these montages (with Sonny) since the 1979 Take Me Home tour and the subsequent Monte Carlo Special.
Way of Love (from Cher’s 1971 album Cher)
You can hear Cher singing the first few lines before you see her rise up from the top of the stairs. This was exciting because most fans hadn’t seen Cher sing these early 1970s hits live ever, unless you had seen one of Sonny & Cher’s 1970s tours. Older gay fans are seen in a state of bliss in the crowd. Cher wears a nude dress and 70s-Cher-style long straight wig, She walks down stairs again. This song tended to get dropped later on in some of the tours.
This should be the torch moment of the show (along with, maybe, “After All”) but it’s so belty that it doesn’t quite get quiet enough.
Note the blow-up stack of pillows to the left and the giant lava lamp to the right.
Half Breed, Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves, Dark Lady Medley (From the Cher albums Half Breed, 1973, Cher, 1971 and Dark Lady, 1974)
Just like on the Cher TV show, Cher packs these hits into a medley so she won’t be spending too much time on any one of them. The lighting is getting more colorful. Cher stays in the same nude gown as female dancers parade by in Bob Mackie re-creations. Each dancer walk by Cher and they connect in some way. The brouhaha hadn’t started yet over the Half Breed fit. Once Cher’s weight comes off again, she will start wearing a new version of the dress herself in variations over the next few tours until by the Here We Go Again tour Mackie will reconfigure the outfit entirely to be less triggering to young Native Americans. The gypsy costume is peach and pink. The videos show psychedelic animations.
Take Me Home (Cher from Take Me Home, 1979)
Cher walks straight out between the stairs. Dancers in late-1970s leisure suits and fringe vests start doing 70s dance moves while Cher does a costume change. The dancing is a bit too frenetic.
Cher comes out in a replica of her Take Me Home tour tinsel dress, this one in silver. Cher will wear many variations of this dress on subsequent tours and residencies in different colors. This version is a bit figure-obscuring. Because the transition time is so short, Cher comes straight back out from the way she left.
Now the stage includes love beads hanging on each side.
Film Video Montage/”After All” (Cher, from Heart of Stone, 1989)
The montage starts with the confrontation scene with Sandy Dennis in Come Back to the Five and Dive, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean and goes through all the big movie moments and speeches. Behind the screen is a backdrop of glittering stars. Mask gets mild cheers surprisingly. Silkwood also gets average cheers and shows the scene of Cher doing the finger tapping on the porch swing. (See Cher Zine 1 for a explication of Cher tapping in movies.) The Witches of Eastwick and Mermaids get average cheers, too, although Cher’s telling off of Jack Nicholson always gets a big cheer. I feel like Mask, The Witches of Eastwick and Mermaids all get bigger cheers during the Farewell Tour. Moonstruck gets the biggest cheer and then “After All” starts.
The movie clips continue as Paul Mirchovich sings the duet with Cher, who wears black pants, a silver top and a short lace jacket. She wears a shoulder-length wig. This is a somewhat subdued performance of “After All.” The Heart of Stone tour had the Snow Queen outfit and future shows will see Cher float by on a Venice-style boat (Caesars and Park Theater shows).
I think Cher has had these Kevyn Aucoin-style eye sequins on her face for the whole show but you can really see them now.
Walking in Memphis (Cover of Marc Cohn, 1991)
Cher says this song for her has a very sad beginning but a very cool ending, She says Marc Cohen had a huge hit with it but years later she did it and had “a huge bomb…just a major bomb…not exactly like in infomercial category but…”
The happy ending is that a very good video came from it and the song is a fan favorite in her live shows.
As she sings the song, the very cool video plays behind her, the video where she impersonates Elvis. ” I was Elvis,” Cher says, “See the ball, be the ball.” She says, “I wanna warn you gay guys, don’t fall in love with me because I am a really cute guy.” She says they are going to look up on the screen and think, “What a shame…all the cute ones…just try to hold back.”
She stands up to point herself out in the video (as if we wouldn’t be able to locate her) and then continues the song from a stool. She looks like she has fun singing it. She does some hand hanging and finger pointing. There’s some throw and grabbing of the mic and a hand to face. She gives a raspy rocking out to the end of the song and one last little lip lick.
Just Like Jesse James (Cher, from Heart of Stone, 1989)
Cher says this is “as country as I’ve ever done” (except that she’s done quite a few country songs on her TV shows and there was “It’s Too Late To Love Me Now” from her Take Me Home album and “Just What I’ve Been Lookin’ For” from the Dark Lady album, just to name a few).
Cher talks about her fetish for guitar players during her “foolish young days.”
She’s equating guitarists with gunslingers here.
There’s lots of finger pointing, hand-to-face, hand hanging and at one point she mimes a gun.
Band Intro: Cher doesn’t always introduce her band, so this is fun. She divides the band into good boys and bad boys. All lead guitar players are bad boys, she says. She’s done a personal study. Then “on the estrogen side, she introduces the backup singers and calls them “cheeky little monkeys.”
Paul Mirchovich, the leader and conductor gets a kiss. The dancers come out with the tour’s cool baseball shirts (I used one as a nightgown for many years). She says thank you to the crew. She calls her crew “show offs” and says (with a wink) that “if there’s anything I hates, loathe and despise, it’s a show off.”
She says her mom told her when she was 2 or 3 years old, she ran around the house singing naked. “Nothing’s changed too much. I just get paid for it now,” she says.
The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss) (Cover of Betty Everett, 1964)
Cher did a small tour for her 1991 “Love Hurts” album that actually started a few precedents that carry through this tour, the opening song, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” and this song from the Mermaids soundtrack (also added to the international release of Love Hurts). And this song has been a pillar of the tours ever since. She sings the song mostly alone but during the bridge the backup singers run down to dance with her and then they run back.
While introducing the song she says of the dancing part, “we get really stupid” and challenges the audience to get stupid, too. “It’s really fun to be old and stupid.”
She does more pointing, more hand to face and throws some sassy looks. She does some marching across the stage.
D’ove L’amore (Cher, from Believe, 1998)
This is one of my favorite parts of this show and this is the only tour where she sings this song.
We begin with a dance interlude to the long Spanish guitar intro. The backdrop of stars still hangs in the background. The male dancers do a long flamenco dance in Spanish outfits with long coats. It’s very sexy. The lady dancers have outfits that complement Cher’s, but with miniskirts. Cher eventually comes down the stairs in an outfit very different from the “D’ove L’amore” video but for some reason I keep thinking the tour outfit is the same as the video dress. The red and black top has a long train that she turns and throws. The pants are black. Her wig is very stylized.
In this show we get very few full-body shots and more angle shots.
The girls come out to dance, each with ruffled trains. Cher disappears among all the dancing distraction. The men do more flamenco.
Video Montage/Strong Enough (Cher, from Believe, 1998)
The video screen plays the “Strong Enough” video intro. The screen is surrounded by a plastic-looking curtain of holes. Disco balls descend, Cher returns through the lower entrance of the stage with a bright red wig with a peak at the bangs (this is the wig-napped one in Cher Zine 1), a lace and beaded top with black pants and a belt of fringe,
The dancers wear colored wigs and modern black outfits, the girls have multi-colored wigs. Cher works the sides. This song is slated at the end of the Believe and Farewell tours and the Colosseum run but would often get dropped later in the run. By the Dressed To Kill show the song was moved to the second slot where it would remain for the Park Theater show and Here We Go Again tour.
Turn Back Time (Cher, from Heart of Stone, 1989)
This is the first closing song, before the encore. This will be the case for all future tours, except Dressed To Kill, where they added “I Hope You Find It” as the final encore and had Cher flying over the audience in an angelic floaty rig.
The amazing thing is the power of this song situated as her penultimate song. The crowd loves it! And it wasn’t even one of her #1 hits. But it has gone on to become one of her most beloved signature songs regardless.
For this special, Cher stays in the same outfit. The escalated lighting action builds excitement. Like the ritual started in the Heart of Stone tour, a sailor hats is thrown onstage. Cher puts it on and sings for a while and then it falls off at some point. She goes back to it later and puts it back on. Some of the audience members have sticks with silver stars they wave around. Cher does sky punches as she sings the song and some power walking. She does one lunge at the climax of the song.
She gives her double-handed peace kiss, then the prayer hands and she throws the hat into the crowd. During the final guitar solo Cher disappears again.
Believe (Cher, from Believe, 1998)
The special shows the MGM sign panning out to show the Las Vegas Strip along followed by shots of the crowd calling for the encore. The big screen shows the Cher logo of the time with the sword coming down the length of the H.
Cher returns in a silver outfit with mirrored segments and a foil-like wig. The dancers are in silver and white space-age outfits. Cher lip syncs the autotune parts (this was very controversial at the time, post milli-vanilli when lip synching became very criminal). She sings the choruses. The stage is framed by two flipping bungee aerialists and dancers with thneed-like silver arm sleeves they twirl around.
Cher gives more peace kisses at the end.
During the tour Cher would disappear here again and the music and dancing would go on for another minute or two and then the show would end. Which always felt anti-climactic in it’s final Cherlessness.
For the special, Cher comes back out for final bows at the end and tells the audience “You were a great crowd. You’re gonna look so cute on TV. Thank you everybody. We love you….You rock. You rock. Thank you. Good night everybody. God bless you.”
A remix of “Believe” plays during the show credits.
Special Features
On the DVD of the special you can view full clips of all the Dan-O-Rama videos.
The TimeLife DVD also includes an HBO interview for the special where Cher wears her red “Believe” song wig. They ask her if it’s hard to be back on tour. She says she’s almost over being too nervous, that the “last bit is hard and it pumps.” They ask how she keeps up such physical show? Does she work out? She says while touring, she can’t sleep on time and can’t work out when driving from city to city but that she gets a big workout four times a week on stage.
They talk about the song “Believe” and how it was completed at the end of the album because something was wrong with it, She says factions of her group didn’t like different parts of the song until only the bridge was left (the part Cher liked the most). She rewrote the second verse to be very Cher-like. She said the engineer was mean to her telling her that her vocal was not good enough. She mentions bringing up the Roachford song and then getting the song right with the special effect. She told the engineers, “don’t let anybody touch the vocal” because she knew producers would try to touch the vocal.
She said she wanted an other-worldly look for this show, “Cirque de CherLe.” She says she dreamed of working with Cirque du Soleil people. She wanted a whimsical experience, a Show, “a rock-and-roll circus.”
They asked her how she keeps her Bob Mackie collaboration fresh. She said it’s about knowing what it is you want. For this show that meant “Braveheart meets Boudicca,” women with horns. Mackie “kept drawing until he got it.” Cher says she always pushes him.
Was she surprised by the age range of her audience? [I was.] She said that during Cyndi Lauper’s opening set, she would watch the audience and see the children out there. “We get pretty outside and we’re loud.” She noted gray-haired people also and admitted the show was family entertainment. “People love it” although she’s surprised how little kids know the old songs like “Gypsies Tramps and Thieves,” “Dark Lady,” “Half Breed” and “The Way of Love.” Cher says she didn’t like those songs for a while, wanted to get away from them, but now feels “those songs are really cool” and “fun to sing,” that they are fresh again with a “whole new nostalgic meaning for me, too.”
Of the big Spectacle, Cher says, “I need to have a good time, I’m basically childish.” To come out with a dress and just sing would bore her to tears, she said. “I wanna be in a show,” she comments and references Judy Garland and Mikey Rooney in the barn creating a big show.
She notes that the costume changes are “frantic,” how she has to hang on to straps while the crew rips off and puts on clothing.
They ask about a pre-show ritual and Cher talks about the prayer circle. They trade off saying the prayer, Cher says and depending upon if someone is having a hard night, they get put in the middle of the circle. “We’re like gypsies,” Cher says. The show takes a lot of energy. She says she only gets nervous if she’s kept waiting.
Asked what about her multi-media career she finds challenging, she answers, “I find it all challenging.”
Highlights: The show fans and critics didn’t know they wanted until they got it. Bad reviews for this show will turn into good reviews during the Farewell tour, which is an even bigger circus. And other artists would start to emulate these shows, including career retrospective reels (I saw Sammy Hagar do it not to long ago) and aerialists (Pink! was particularly inspired by this). The show is longer and more colorful than her previous 1980s and 1990s shows. This was a happy show and the crowd experience was a big party. She has also returned to her 1970s hits which feels very fan-affirming. The whole show felt very fan-affirming.
