concert

In March, Bad Bunny performed his first-ever concert in Asia when he played in from of 2,300 fans in Tokyo as part of Spotify’s Billions Club Live series.

Starting April 8, a filmed version of that performance will be available on Spotify for the “Nuevayol” artist’s millions and millions of fans not in attendance.

The show, officially titled “Billions Club Live With Bad Bunny: A Concert Film,” was billed as a special stop in the Grammy-winning performer’s “Debí Tirar Más Fotos World Tour” — which kicked off with a November concert in the Dominican Republic and has since sold out stadiums across Latin America and Australia. He notably didn’t include dates in the United States as part of the tour.

Footage of the Japan concert swept social media, as it showed Bad Bunny doing a never-before-seen salsa rendition of his 2018 collaboration with Drake. He also notably sang his 2021 single “Yonaguni,” which features lyrics in Japanese.

The concert film will premiere two months after the “Callaíta” singer nabbed a historic album of the year win at the Grammy Awards and became the first fully Spanish-language act to headline the Super Bowl halftime show — which was lauded for its potent star power and political messaging.

Bad Bunny’s generational run looks to have no immediate end in sight, as he will kick off the European leg of his world tour with a May performance in Portugal before making stops in Spain, England, Sweden, France, Poland and Italy.

But the “Dakiti” artist’s newsworthy year hasn’t been limited to the music world.

In February, it was announced that Bad Bunny will star — alongside Academy Award-winning actor Javier Bardem and multiple-time nominees Edward Norton and Viggo Mortensen — in Puerto Rican rapper Residente’s directorial debut, “Porto Rico.” The film, which has yet to announce a release date, will explore the complicated colonial history of Puerto Rico through Western/historical drama storytelling devices.

Paul McCartney sauntered onto the stage of the Fonda Theatre, took in the 1,200 faces before him — “I can see the whites of your eyes,” he said — then offered up a brief history lesson about where we’d gathered Friday night.

The Fonda, he told us, opened 100 years ago; back then, he added, it was called the Music Box.

“Cool little place, innit?”

At 83, McCartney is well into his cool-little-place era.

Last year the rock legend played a string of concerts at New York’s tiny Bowery Ballroom while in town for “Saturday Night Live’s” 50th anniversary; a few months after that, he hit the Santa Barbara Bowl as a kind of warm-up for the latest leg of his Got Back world tour.

Paul McCartney and his band during sound check for Friday’s show.

(MJ Kim)

Friday’s underplay — the first of two instant sell-outs at the Fonda — came as McCartney is drumming up interest in a new studio album he’ll release in May. Outside the venue, a double-decker bus was parked with signage advertising the LP, which is called “The Boys of Dungeon Lane” after a road in his Liverpool hometown.

But that hardly seemed like the purpose of the show itself, which lasted about an hour and 40 minutes and didn’t even include a performance of the album’s lead single. The truth is that Sir Paul genuinely appears to get a kick out of these intimate gigs — out of standing right in front of a crowd and doing the magic trick that is a song like “Get Back” or “Jet” or “Got to Get You Into My Life.”

And why wouldn’t he?

If a Paul McCartney concert in an arena or a stadium is a finely honed spectacle of boomer nostalgia and industrial-strength charm, one of his shows in a club or a theater is a chance to play music, which after six and a half decades still clearly turns his wheels.

You wouldn’t say the shows remind McCartney that he’s a regular guy. (Those six and a half decades have made him anything but.) What they might do, though, is remind him why he became so widely adored — valuable self-knowledge for an artist whose great subject has always been the transformative power of love.

Here, as in Santa Barbara, he and his seven-piece band (which featured three horn players) did a pared-down version of the most recent Got Back set, opening with a killer one-two punch — “Help!” into “Coming Up” — that alone said plenty about McCartney’s range and endurance.

“Let Me Roll It” had a funky swagger, while “Getting Better” chugged with cheerful insistence; “I’ve Just Seen a Face” showed off the group’s crisp harmonies and “Lady Madonna” its tight rhythmic interplay. After “Let ’Em In,” McCartney asked his band member Brian Ray to show off the song’s all-important bass line: a single note plucked over and over and over again.

Friday’s show was the first of two at the Fonda.

(MJ Kim)

He did a few other comic bits, including a memory of Tony Bennett singing without a microphone as a way to demonstrate the excellent acoustics of a concert hall — the punch line was that he later saw Bennett do the same thing at the Beverly Hilton — and some gentle ribbing of the folks sitting up in the “posh seats” of the Fonda’s balcony. Among them, McCartney pointed out, was Morgan Neville, director of the recent “Man on the Run” documentary about McCartney’s life in the aftermath of the Beatles’ breakup.

He also noted that his wife, Nancy Shevell, was in the house and dedicated “My Valentine” to her; truth be told, that one was a bit dreary, as was “Now and Then,” the so-called last Beatles song released in 2023 using machine learning to complete a scratchy demo left behind by John Lennon.

“Thank you, John, for writing that lovely song,” McCartney said afterward, which made it a little harder not to like.

In any event, there were more classics to come, not least a buoyant “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” and a “Let It Be”/“Hey Jude” twofer that inspired such a lusty singalong that McCartney probably could’ve gotten away with lip-syncing if he’d wanted to.

But of course he didn’t want to — that was kind of the whole point.

It’s all coming back to Celine Dion.

The French Canadian singer may be making her return to concert performances this fall, according to Variety. In 2022, Dion canceled her North American tour due to muscle spasms and later revealed that her diagnosis with stiff-person syndrome, an autoimmune neurological disorder, would prevent her from performing.

Montreal newspaper La Presse reported that fans were speculating Dion would return to the stage, after Parisians spotted posters referencing titles of Dion’s songs like “Power of Love” and “Pour Que tu M’aimes Encore” throughout the city. La Presse also reported that Dion will likely perform two concerts a week throughout September and October at the Paris La Défense Arena, a venue that seats 40,000 spectators.

Dion has not headlined her own show since her Courage World Tour in 2020, which was postponed and then canceled due to her health issues. She sang an emotional cover of Édith Piaf’s “Hymne à l’amour” during the closing ceremony of the 2024 Olympics. Last November, she performed her songs “I’m Alive” and “The Power of Love” during the 1001 Seasons of Elie Saab fashion show in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

The singer publicized her battle with SPS in her 2024 documentary, “I Am: Celine Dion.” In the film, Dion discussed how she’d been experiencing health issues for 17 years before her diagnosis. SPS affected Dion’s ability to sing by causing a strain on her vocal cords, making her voice sound more nasal.

“Sometimes I would point my microphone towards the audience and I would make them sing it. There’s moments where I cheated and I tapped on the microphone, like it was the microphone’s fault,” Dion explained in her documentary.

Even with her diagnosis, the singer made it clear in her documentary that she intended to continue pursuing her love of music.

“If I can’t run, I’ll walk. If I can’t walk, I’ll crawl, but I won’t stop.”

Dion’s representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment. La Défense Arena declined to comment.

Police vowed Friday to detain any suspects behind possible terror threats targeting K-pop juggernaut BTS‘ comeback concert set to draw hundreds of thousands to downtown Seoul next week.

The group is scheduled to perform before some 22,000 fans in Gwanghwamun Square on March 21, with police estimating as many as 260,000 people to gather around the area that day.

The Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency said it would deploy police commandos to inspect the site, noting it could not rule out the possibility of terror in connection with the current conflict in the Middle East.

“If police resources are wasted or the event is disrupted due to public threats, such as bomb threats, (we) will pursue and apprehend (the suspects) to the end under the principle of investigation under detention,” it said.

Police plan to set up metal detectors at the venue’s entrances as well as barricades to prevent possible accidents or acts of terror, such as a vehicle-ramming attack.

They also asked concertgoers to minimize personal items as security checks will be strengthened.

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