Sam Hui Concert at Venetian Macao

Last night Patrick, Stephen and I were invited to attend Sam Hui's January 31st Concert at the Venetian Macao Arena:

土曜日晩、パト君、ステベン君と僕は一緒マカオのベネシュンカジノへ行った、サム・フイのコンサット為に！下の写真を見て下さい！

Not being a Cantonese speaker or someone who grew up in HK,  I really only know Sam Hui (許冠傑) because of his two sons,  Ryan Hui and Scottie Hui, both of whom are great friends of alivenotdead.com.   

I did know a few key things about Sam Hui: 

1) He's the "Godfather of Cantopop"

2) He really likes Elvis

3) He really likes leopard print

4) He has a lotof super hardcore  fans I expected the show to be pretty big and entertaining, especially since Scottie, Ryan and Justin all would be participating.  Its always interesting to see how different artists do big solo concerts... aside from Hamasaki Ayumi's Tokyo and HK shows, I hadn't been to any this past year since we saw Jacky Cheung at PopTV arena.... so I was looking forward to this show and a chance to see what a Sam Hui concert was all about.

Scottie got us some great seats to his Macau show.  We took the ferry over and took the bus to the Venetian.  Thanks to Ida's assistance we were able to stop back stage to say hi before the show:

Ryan!

Elvis was getting his make-up done at the time...

We couldn't find Scottie, but this Chinese diety was there...

Then it was off to our seats for the start of the show...

Once Sam came out and played one song he went straight to the front of the crowd and started handing out red envelopes to mark CNY.... with a little help from Chinese Santa there... :-D

Something on the order of 10,000 screaming fans...  must be scary from on stage. ;-)

over in the corner there were some super-fans who would rush down to the corner and start screaming at the drop of the hat... very interesting.

even though i wasn't fimilar with a lot of the old school hits,  it was interesting just to see the way the show was staged.  The dancers had outfits that matched Sam's jacket,  which had designs based on the graffiti of the so-called 'Emperor of Kowloon' Tsang Tou Choi. Pretty cool!

Especially in HK,  during these big shows the main star is expected to change their outfits during the course of the show... at Hamasaki Ayumi's show they usually have the dancers go out and do some solo numbers to instrumental versions of her songs... in the case of Sam Hui, you get Scottie:

Covering an old classic... 

Then next thing you know,  Elvis shows up:

Well, not exactly Elvis...

I have to say,  Sam Hui is really the master of crowd interaction... if you're a super-fan and are in the front sections of the concert hall, you actually get a lot of interaction...  believe it or not including:

a kiss for all the lucky ladies in the front...   At this point I was thinking it was more Tom Jones than Elvis...  but for the record,  I didn't see any of these ladies throwing their underwear...

But if you're going to go Elvis, might as well have two Elvises:

Why stop at 2, when you can have 3?

Yes, that's Ricky Hui as Jumpsuit era Elvis.

I was thinking that it would actually be more accurate to have Sam dress up like " 68 Comeback Special" Elvis... that way you'd have  early, middle and late Elvis all together on stage.

 I have to say, Justin really has a great singing voice!

As I mentioned,  Sam Hui really does a lot of 'audience interaction'.... in this case once he changed into a Chinese outfit, they brought up a girl from the audience:

and she got a serenade...  i'm curious how they picked the girl from the audience... she was definitely a lot younger and more attractive than the average demographic here....  ;-)

ooh, special gift scarf,  she's obviously enjoying the attention!

he even busted out the gwan dao...  fancy. ;-)

One special guest that freaked me out a bit was this guy:

Not because he had red disco-ball pants... but because he was an eerily good Leslie Cheung impersonator... when he first came out he was standing in front of strong backlighting so you couldn't see his face...

M...O... N...

actually its kind of freaky how the memory of Leslie Cheung still has such a hold over Hong Kong music...

Now from the non-spirit world:

Ryan comes out for a duet w/ his father.

Oh wait, make that a trio...

hey, nice hat!

ooh, pyrotechnics!

That was the close of the show... then they had an encore:

I need to hire my own team of dancers...

At this point in the show I was suddenly reminded of that line from Mel Brooks in "History Of the World Part 1" ...

Some more fireworks and then it was over:

"Elvis is in the process of leaving the building!"

Very impressive!  almost 3 hours!    According to Ryan and Scottie this show is actually shortened down from some of the earlier shows, which stretched on as long as 4 hours!

After the show:

We were lucky enough to get to say hi and meet Sam Hui after the show too.  

Thanks again for the opportunity!  Even for people who aren't up on our 80s canto-rock standards,  it was fun!