Adele cancels Las Vegas residency for at least a month after sickness affects voice

It was difficult to get started but once underway, it was having incredible success... until her body told her: “Enough.” British singer Adele, 35, announced on social media that she has been forced to suspend, for now temporarily, her residency in Las Vegas, the concerts she has been giving in the city since last November 2022 and that extended until June 2024. A problem with her voice is forcing her to stop for the entire month of March.

“Sadly, I have to take a beat and pause my Vegas residency,” she wrote. “I was sick at the end of the last leg and all the way through my break. I hadn’t quite gotten the chance to get back to full health before shows resumed and now I’m sick again, and unfortunately it’s all taken a toll on my voice.” “And so on Doctors orders I have no choice but to rest thoroughly,” she added.

As a result, Adele said that “the remaining five weekends of this leg [of the residency] are being postponed to a later date.” The postponed dates are March 1, 2, 8, 9, 15, 16, 22, 23, 29 and 30. After March 30, her next scheduled concerts were for the weekend of May 17 and 18. This will mean she will be resting for two and a half months.

“I love you, I’ll miss you like mad and I’m sorry for the inconvenience,” she ended, signing off in a more personal tone. The singer underwent throat surgery due to polyps in 2011.

For a year and a half, the British artist has been playing on Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. at the Colosseum theater at Caesars Palace, one of the most emblematic hotel-casinos in Las Vegas, before 4,200 spectators. Her tickets sold out months in advance, and not exactly at accessible prices: when they came out they started at $400, but soon the most affordable tickets cost $600 and were on track to reach $2,300. Despite this, her 10 remaining concerts (in May and June, after this break in March) are all sold out. Afterward, she is scheduled to perform a dozen concerts in Munich, Germany, during the month of August.

Adele’s Las Vegas residency has not been easy. It was scheduled to get underway at the end of January 2022 (with two weekly concerts until April 16), but complications due to the Covid-19 pandemic meant that it had to be pushed back as “half of the team” was sick, she explained. “I’m so sorry, but my show ain’t ready,” Adele said in a video posted to Instagram, adding she was really “embarrassed” to have to postpone the residency.

A few months after her announcement, Adele fired a good part of that team and hired a new one to start from scratch. Finally, and after a couple of summer concerts in London, the residency began, as she had promised, on November 19, 2022. It was going to end in March 2023, but she added dates between June and November. And on October 20, 2023, when she had already performed 31 weekends and the last concert was scheduled for just a few days later, she announced that she would do another 32 concerts between January 19 and June 15. Of this last round, Adele has performed 12 concerts, but she says she was not performing to 100% of her abilities.

According to the British newspaper The Daily Mail, in a recent concert she felt “tired” and was unhappy with the sound of her voice. “And Ursula from the ocean has come from my chest tonight. I can’t hit my headnotes properly. I didn’t sleep very well and my chest is on fire,” she said. “Straight after this show, I am going on voice rest. Can you imagine how hard now me not talking for three days is? So I’m going to be in bed coughing my guts up on complete voice rest,” she added, joking that both her son and partner were “absolute chatterboxes.”

Residencies in Las Vegas, with concerts scheduled months in advance, are big business for established artists. Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley were among the first to hold residencies. And Céline Dion was the queen of Las Vegas, and changed how residencies were viewed, upending the idea that they were an entertainment graveyard. She made $600 million from her concerts in the casino capital. Lady Gaga had a residency in 2018 and U2 opened the City Sphere with another.

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