The road to Celine Dion’s Las Vegas comeback will begin with the opening ceremony at the Summer Olympics in Paris on Friday.
It will be the Canadian pop legend’s first performance since a March 9, 2020 concert at the Prudential Center in Newark, NJ.
Dion, 56, was seen smiling on Monday as she waved to fans and signed autographs at the Royal Monceau Hotel near the Champs-Élysées — where Lady Gaga, another reported opening ceremony headliner, is also staying.
According to TMZ, Dion will be paid $2 million to belt a single song.
Hard Road to Recovery
This development will probably surprise anyone who watched the recent documentary, “I Am: Celion Dion.” The Amazon Prime film showed the box office-breaking former Caesars Palace headliner felled for 10 straight minutes by an intensely painful, full-body seizure just because she overexerted herself recording a new song for the documentary’s soundtrack.
In a tearful Instagram video in December 2022, Dion revealed that she had been diagnosed with Stiff Person’s Syndrome, a condition affecting fewer than one in every million people that’s marked by rigid muscles that spasm painfully and uncontrollably when triggered by noise and emotional distress.
“Unfortunately, the spasms affect every aspect of my daily life, sometimes causing difficulties when I walk and not allowing me to use my vocal cords to sing the way I’m used to,” Dion said in the video.
Since then, however, the “My Heart Will Go On” singer has made a series of public appearances that seem to suggest that somehow, she is successfully fighting back against the incurable disease.
The most hopeful appearance occurred at the Grammys in February, but not on stage, where Dion presented Taylor Swift with her latest Album of the Year award. That hope was transmitted via an Instagram video shared by R&B singer Sonyaé Elise, in which Dion vamped and harmonized with her backstage at the awards ceremony.
Her Hope Will Go On
In May, Dion almost let news of her Olympics performance slip to Hoda Kotb after being interviewed by her for an hourlong NBC-TV special.
After the cameras cut, Kotb said she asked Dion when she would perform next. According to Kotb, Dion asked her manager, John Nelson, “Can I tell her?” But he insisted that she couldn’t.
In an interview with Vogue France in April, the native French speaker expressed returning to Paris as a specific goal.
“I’ve chosen to work with all my body and soul, from head to toe, with a medical team,” she said. “I want to be the best I can be. My goal is to see the Eiffel Tower again.”
On Friday, she will get to fulfill two goals at once then, since the ceremony will be held on the banks of the Seine River, with the famous tower in the background.
Reps for the concert promoter AEG Live have continually expressed hope that Dion will finally get to appear at Resorts World, where she canceled a residency that was supposed to begin in November 2021.
However, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, there is no formal plan for a Las Vegas return … not yet, anyway.
This won’t be Dion’s first Olympics. She also performed “The Power of the Dream” at the opening ceremony for the 1996 games in Atlanta.
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