Omar Apollo, Shooting Star
I watched as three paramedics urgently waded their way through the tightly packed crowd of Toronto’s well-dressed, sweet-smelling indie elite. A girl with blonde pigtail braids and blowsily feminine rose perfume floated through us—as she passed me by, I heard a boy with stars under his eyes exclaim, “I want Omar Apollo to rail me.” His leather-clad, indoor-sunglass-wearing friend vigorously nodded her head in approval, and the rose quietly dissolved into muggy perfumed air.
On Wednesday night, I saw History—the hot, yet ironically named concert venue (constructed in 2021)—turn into the backdrop for a show that promised intimacy, but left us with the nagging itch of potential unfulfilled, a stunted conversation between discordant lovers. The large, flat canvas of the GA section that should have been home to the portrait of an audience moving in unison was instead a random smattering of limp bodies too diffident to move and a select few limb-flailers too drunk to care. The people that seemed to be expressing themselves the most freely were up in the balcony, far removed from the confusion below.
Above it all stands Omar Apollo, glittering in an iconic black sparkle-spangled suit and brimming with childlike enthusiasm. The majority of the concert is made up of his trappier tracks—beginning with “Tamagotchi,” a lustful, thirsty number meant to quickly warm up the audience.
Only the audience remains decidedly lukewarm, granting him a few hot flashes before going back to swaying in place. Seeing this, he gets increasingly restless and makes multiple attempts to coax the audience out of their shell like some sort of unconventional therapy session: “Toronto, I wanna see you shake some ass to this next song, okay?”—because it’s not that they don’t want to let go, it’s just that they don’t know how. And Apollo, the young, sunny, starry-eyed performer is burdened by the weight of carrying the show on his glimmering back.
Half an hour in, Apollo attempts to reach out with ranchera-esque ballad “En El Olvido;” his mournful, sirenic voice reverberates around us as he laments a star-crossed love while reconciling both the Mexican ranchera tradition and queer desire.
He’s flanked by two guitarists—dimmer stars, each clad in shimmering silver shirts—who deftly thumb acoustic and electric guitars. Even in the studio version, this ballad is stripped bare—the guitars jump pluckily around Apollo as he belts out the anguished pain of a lover left lonely:
Tú no sabes tanto que yo haría
Tocarte las manitas debajo del cielo
His voice trembles with power and I tremble with him. Behind him, a blinding video of a waving Mexican flag is projected and the green and red reflect off the right side of his face. But then, I look around and the rest of the audience holds the same glazed-over look as with his previous songs. The only people I see even remotely emoting to the song are myself and the girl who has been pushing up against my back for the entire concert to flail a small Mexican flag around in the air. Her eyes glimmer with unshed tears as she gazes at Apollo like he’s the sun, and her elbow digs into my left shoulder blade as she waves the tiny plastic flag, vainly searching him for some sort of recognition.
Apollo’s performance oozes with sexual charm, pride, and queer melancholy—all of which are magnified every time he takes a sip of the Old Fashioned faithfully waiting for him underneath his microphone. His intoxicated emotion is a double-edged sword; he’s blazingly brilliant, like a star right before it collapses and I can feel us crashing towards an imminent supernova as he drinks more liquid fire. He stumbles slightly sloppily around the stage, and forgets some of his lyrics.
His audience is split in two—I notice some people laughing, their movements echo his and become looser, more free. Their feet leave the ground as they hop shyly to the beat of “Go Away,” and Apollo grins radiantly, encouraging them all the more. The other camp shifts uncomfortably, extremely aware of the sixty dollars they paid for the show; their eyes follow this perfidious performer with barely-concealed hurt, as if he had invited them personally and was now purposefully polluting the performance with mistakes, his golden cry reeking of bitters and whiskey.
However, if they weren’t expecting a red-blooded, footloose show, I’m not sure if they listen to him at all. Apollo was perfectly personified by this performance—the young star is intensely passionate, drunk on life (and alcohol), constantly hurtling towards an unknown, blazing end. Putting the live flame that is Omar Apollo inside History’s ice-chamber to entertain its frigid occupants resulted in a steamy elemental battle where Apollo came out on top, having successfully melted the frosty exteriors of at least half the audience—an impressive feat for a Toronto crowd, and a testament to his irresistible glamour. If you ever have the chance to catch this shooting star live, grab it; Apollo’s inferno can only flame for so long before he leaves us in a blaze of glory.
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