Mariah Carey returned to the Times Square stage on New Year’s Eve on “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve With Ryan Seacrest” one year after her disastrous NYE performance in which technical difficulties caused her to give up midway through. And this time, almost nothing bad happened. You can view the performance above.
It’s not exactly surprising. Mariah’s performance a year ago was the big moment of New Year’s Eve 2016 and led to weeks of people trying to figure out what exactly it was that went wrong.
So it was expected that with Carey returning this year, everyone’s ducks would be in a row. And they definitely were, for the most part, when she took the stage about 20 minutes before midnight in New York.
The one hitch wasn’t really a hitch — it was more of a fun self-referential joke she made halfway through. During the show, she performed her tracks “Visions of Love” and “Hero,” and during the break between songs she tried to get someone to give her a glass of hot tea.
“I’m just going to take a sip of tea if they’ll let me. They told me there would be tea,” Mariah said, but after a moment it was clear there was no tea coming. “Ugh, it’s a disaster. OK, well, we’ll just have to rough it. I’m going to be just like everybody else with no hot tea.”
Last month, the singer had canceled several concerts in her Christmas tour due to a “lovely upper respiratory infection” following a bout of the flu.
Aside from the tea situation, everything went great. Those looking for a repeat of what happened last year were left wanting as moments later Times Square rung in the East Coast new year.