Canadian pop royalty she may be, but that doesn’t spare Celene Dion from frustrated fans on occasion. The singer, having announced the cancellation of two shows earlier this week due to ongoing health issues – her fourth and fifth canceled shows this month – caught some fan anger for the latest dropped performances. This was before the Friday announcement that another two shows for this coming weekend are to be cancelled.
“Keeping cancelling shows day by day is an insult to the people who travelled to see it,” said Twitter user @Djbobm66Robert.
Celine is human, and her doctors are not god, but in the last 10 days they canceled like 5 shows always too close to showtime to let anyone modify their travel plans. You find that acceptable by her management team?
— Robert Martineau (@Djbobm66Robert) January 17, 2018
At the core of his (and other points made by social media users aggregated in a post by CBC.ca) is the fact that performers, particularly those in a tourist hot spot like Las Vegas, often form the core of someone’s reasoning to go to a particular destination. This fact was hammered home by the inclusion of the fact that promoters “are not responsible for hotel, travel or other expenses related to the cancellation” in the post on Dion’s Facebook page announcing the latest canceled show.
As an example, my wife and I spent New Years Eve in Fort Lauderdale – not ONLY to get away from the frosty northeast (though that didn’t hurt), but because she’s arguably the world’s largest Billy Joel fan, and he was playing a show at BB&T in nearby Sunrise, Florida. Were the erstwhile piano man to pull a Celene, it would have been a pretty big bummer, even if we were reimbursed for our tickets to the performance.
Dion, to her credit, did address that fact in a statement issued prior to her third canceled show this month, on Saturday.
“Cancelling a show is the hardest thing I have to do, especially when I know that so many people have travelled far to see me in Las Vegas.”
“This decision is not made lightly. When I’m not well, I always try to push through and I do everything I can to do my show. I really struggled to finish [Friday] night’s show and it took everything out of me.”
Whether or not promoters will be more proactive about getting the singer a lengthier break to recover from the maladies that have gotten her 2018 to such a rocky start, we wish her and her fans better luck in the future.
