Sixteen musicians stood on stage at Dickies Arena Thursday, a bombastic array of bodies — trumpet, trombone, guitar, piano, three different types of percussion, backing vocalists, no small amount of impassioned dancing — with the magnetic Marc Anthony standing in front of it all.
The song (whose title translates to “And There Was Someone”), a fulsome whirl of salsa featuring the fitting line “A night of endless madness,” felt like being strapped to the nose of a bullet train, hurtling forward down an endless track.
The 56-year-old Puerto Rican superstar marshaled all of it with the practiced air of a lifelong entertainer, even tossing his dark sunglasses to a fan in the front row with a flourish. For roughly 90 minutes Thursday night, a room was transported — swooning at lachrymose ballads and shaking their bodies to the sinuous rhythms of salsa, tropical and Latin pop songs, some of which dated back more than 25 years.
Anthony is in the midst of his “Historia” tour, pulling from across his extensive Spanish-language catalog and illustrating why artists such as Lin-Manuel Miranda call him “our Sinatra.”
Anthony’s Halloween night stop in Fort Worth was, from all available evidence, his debut appearance in the city. His last appearance in North Texas was at Dallas’ American Airlines Center three years ago. (In keeping with the spirit of the holiday, one amusing moment late in the evening came when an audience member, dressed in an enormous inflatable dinosaur costume, briefly distracted the headliner: “What the fuck is that?” he wondered aloud.)
While he’s recently released his 15th studio album, MUEVENSE, none of those tracks were showcased in Fort Worth. Instead, Anthony reached for beloved classics “Valió la Pena,” “Hasta Ayer,” “Flor Pálida” and “Mala,” each of which sent ripples of appreciative shouts through the sizable crowd, which kept its phones aloft and its feet moving all night. (The uppermost section of Dickies Arena was curtained off Thursday, reducing overall capacity.)
Anthony relentlessly worked the stage, which was flanked on both sides by vertical video screens that rarely cut away from his visage, from the moment he materialized from underneath it. His fleeting remarks, in Spanish, to the audience put the focus squarely on the dozen or so songs.
Lin-Manuel Miranda has called Marc Anthony "our Sinatra," for his ability to sing ballads like no other Latin artist.
Jamie Ford Peña
Clad in a black suit jacket, black shirt, blue jeans and polished black shoes, he roamed from one side to the other, alternately dancing, conducting and making affectionate gestures to all corners of the room, dotted as it was with Puerto Rican flags and the outstretched hands of devoted fans.
Puro corazón
It was a kinetic, fiery, revivifying spectacle, brimming with feeling and skill and heart.So effortless was Anthony’s performance that it feels like nitpicking to complain about the venue’s sound mix, which was rarely less than a roar and often threatened to swallow Anthony’s vocals whole (no small feat, that), or that the opening acts alternated between fine (DJ Mikey J, who spun salsa and tropical pop sides for about 15 minutes) and utterly forgettable (comic Joey Vega’s interminable 25-minute set included multiple exhortations for the audience to “go home and make love tonight”).
Anthony really doesn’t need to burnish his legacy at this point — 29-time Lo Nuestro Award-winner; eight Latin Grammys and four Grammys; the Guinness World Record holder for best-selling tropical/salsa artist, with more than 12 million albums sold worldwide — and the interstitial ads playing in the arena unintentionally drove home this point, highlighting his design work with watchmaker Bulova, an energy drink he’s probably invested in or his stake in a Miami-based boat racing team.
His primary interests lie in activism (Anthony recently endorsed presidential candidate Kamala Harris, on the heels of Donald Trump’s vile Madison Square Garden rally) and philanthropy these days, but even so, he’s never fully parted with music as a means of expression.
Watching Marc Anthony gleefully feed off the electric energy of the band behind him, and the ecstatic audience before him on Thursday, it wasn’t hard to understand why — who would ever want to lose that feeling?
