Luis Miguel, day 3: cover the sun with a finger

Let’s be honest, let’s not lie, no euphemisms. Luis Miguel he had to suspend or at least postpone for a few days this visit to Chile, the most requested for many years. His state of health – a notorious cold which reduced his vocal output to a minimum expression sometimes unrecognizable -, does not allow a show as the public deserves, with the seal of quality that has long accustomed Latin America.

What he, his team and the producer in charge have done from Monday the 21st until Wednesday evening, during this tour with a stay of ten dates at the Movistar Arena, is an abuse of the affection that his fans profess unrestricted for the dude boy who fell in love in the last decades of the 20th century.

If we add the mediocre shows of 2015, and the tense past of 2019 under the fever of Netflix series, which compromised strictly forbidden privacy to recover notoriety and exposure with an unusual breath of empathy, the Mexican star adds almost a decade without high-end concerts in these regions.

Luis Miguel’s third meeting in Santiago only accentuated the problems of the previous days, with the cough as an uncomfortable guest. The first 20 minutes of the show embodied a real ordeal, a fierce battle, as if each song were a round, where Luis Miguel’s strategy was to avoid the most complex notes and capers as much as possible. In an attempt to accommodate himself by lowering his pitch, playing with the melodies to avoid the usual path, and shortening the phrasing so that the rarefied air allowed him to go the distance, he broke up several songs.

Sometimes his situation seemed insurmountable. . Until you forget me -an example taken at random from among several- was disfigured, unrecognizable. It was only after the first half hour that he managed to slightly resume part of the original trajectory of some classics like i don’t know about you And We are engaged by Armando Manzanero, and A man is looking for a woman, composed by Juan Carlos Calderón and Luis Gómez-Escolar; a few titles where three of the best writers of ballads in Spanish of all time meet, in the service of the Sun of Mexico.

However, the high notes, the usual acrobatics, the distance to the microphone disappeared. The voice seems out of tune with the AM band of an old radio.

These unfavorable prospects are offset by the notable improvement in her figure. If a cold battered throat causes a strange feeling of decrepitude, this more stylized Luis Miguel 2023 model has regained the agility of twenty years ago. The Mexican had grown accustomed to the ways of an old crooner, with little movement. Now he moves decisively on stage; she dances, kicks and poses like before, with completely renewed energy. The image it projects gives the impression of stepping back in time.

Another point that somewhat compensated for the vocal deterioration is that he finally managed to master the compulsive demands of the sound managers. This mania, which reached the point of losing his temper during a concert in Panama in March 2019 when he violently threw a microphone at a manager, seems to have been eradicated during this tour.

The event turned from start to finish into a monumental karaoke, where people paid to see Luis Miguel and to hear his Royal Orchestra with a female-dominated string section, but not to hear his voice.

Luis Miguel may have regained his figure and mastered the swings, with a rejuvenating effect. But somehow, with those weird gigs in Santiago, he’s still a boy used to being abused. Playing three evenings in a row with a demanding repertoire divided into six segments to cover 40 years of career, requires being in top form. The public does not deserve the crumbs of his voice framed in a spectacular montage, and the artist himself does not need to submit to this rigor.

As the series has shown very clearly, even if it seems banal, Luis Miguel is a human being like any other. As such, you could catch a cold and not be on duty until you recover. We all do.