Michael Buble is “Feeling Good” and he should be. The Canadian crooner, who has risen to international fame by singing American standards along with his original songs, plays to sold-out audiences filled with every-aged women who can hardly keep it together when he takes the stage.
It was no different at the Citi Wang Theatre Saturday night, and Buble loved every minute of it.
His opening number, “I’m Your Man,” had the ladies shrieking in their seats. At one point, a woman squealed, “Take your pants off!”
Seriously. At the Wang Theatre.
Buble, 32, whose personality is less Frank Sinatra and more Tom Jones, takes it all in stride, and not too seriously. He’s a naughty performer, too, and lets the sexual innuendos fly, igniting something within the audience that had it fired up and playing right back.
“Oh, you little cream pies,” he called the Boston audience. “You little chowders. You know, of all the places I play, if I could own one place it would be this theater. Because then I could say my Wang seats almost 4,000 people. My Wang is huge and beautiful and there’s room for your friends.”
Buble, who wore a simple black suit and crooned and slipped and slid all over the slanted stage for about 90 minutes, knows how to work the crowd. At one point, he leaped off the stage and ran through the rows, prompting women to grab, hug, kiss and maul him before he made it - barely - back on stage.
And when he’s not singing, his tongue is planted firmly in his cheek.
“I have such an admiration for my fans,” he said. “Seriously, you should see the house I just bought.”
In fact, Buble’s sense of humor and comic timing are as adept as his voice. His best numbers included the energetic “Call Me Irresponsible” and a cover of Peggy Lee’s “Fever.” But when he switched gears and went for romance, it wasn’t as believable, and his renditions of “Always on My Mind” and “Try a Little Tenderness” fell short.
This might be Buble’s fault, because his bawdy personality - real or staged - belies the believability of his ballads. And he’s embracing it.
“Oh, they all say I’m so romantic,” he said, winking. “But I’m a badass, a bad boy. Meet me in an alley and see how romantic I am.” Then he launched into some “manly” songs, including an acoustic version of Elvis’ “That’s All Right Mama” before making fun of the shtick with a big-band translation of “YMCA.”
Still, he stepped closer to real passion in his closer, a cover of “A Song for You.” Without the mike, Buble took center stage and simply sang to his adoring audience. And for once this night, the ladies settled down and simply swooned.
