TORONTO - Long before Jilly-come-lately starlets like Lindsay Lohan were keeping tabloids alive on the back of their foibles, failed relationships and trips to the hospital for exhaustion or "asthma", there was Mariah.

Few have fallen as fast or from such a height as Mariah Carey, who went from the top-selling female artist of the '90s to fodder for Leno and Letterman in roughly a year. It's not without a certain amount of karmic coincidence that her album Glitter, drawn from the universally panned film of the same name, was released on Sept. 11, 2001. Ouch.

That bad timing was only the beginning of the bad times for Carey, and the first few years of the new millennium were famously unkind to the 36-year-old girl with the glass-shattering pipes. But Mariah's now on the comeback trail, and given the roars and screams coming from the packed ACC concert bowl last night for the Toronto stop of the Adventures of Mimi tour, fans old and new are still here to welcome her.

First the good news: Carey's still got THAT VOICE. After hearing hundreds of American Idol rejects emulate her show-offy high-register warbling, one would think the source material would now be poison to the ears. Not so. Carey can still show those wannabe punks how it's done. Bow down to your queen.

Now, the bad news. It wouldn't be a Mariah Carey concert if it wasn't an exercise in excess, but too often Carey was overwhelmed by her band, her back-up singers and the two-tiered stage with its lighted staircases, wind and fog machines and the giant Mimi sign lowered from the rafters. Her voice may be huge, but her presence was at times disappointingly small.

After an opening video which expressed the profoundly original sentiment that life can be like a roller-coaster, Carey emerged from a hole in the stage, dressed in a black bikini, flowing cape and stilettos, to the strains of It's Like That. Yes, it certainly is.

That segued into Heartbreaker and then Dreamlover, giving Carey the first (but by no means last) opportunity to bust out her trademark ear-tickling squeal. But while the voice is still there, Carey could use a lesson or two in how to pace a live show. Yeah, we expect the costume changes, but is there no way to do it that doesn't involve killing the momentum? The DJ interludes were fine and certainly crowd-pleasing, but the video skit and other filler should be chucked.

And stopping Vision Of Love a couple of lines in to tell the tech guys about a problem with the stage smacked of old school diva-tude. "There's a hole in the stage right here, just about the size of a stiletto heel!" said Carey, a smile on her face but not in her voice. How she noticed it with all the distracted fiddling she was doing with her earpiece is a wonder.

But the woman who has sold more albums than the Beatles doesn't get where she is by disappointing her fans. Her very next song, Fly Like A Bird, was a testament to what her voice can do, and I'll Be There, a duet with Trey Lorenz (who then took the stage solo while Mariah went off to don her third costume in 45 minutes) was deliciously sweet.

Sliding back and forth between the old (Hero, Honey) and the new (Don't Forget About Us, We Belong Together), Carey cherry-picked from her bulging catalogue of monster hits for the concert's 90-plus minutes.

At one point she took to a mini-stage smack-dab in the centre of the bowl to do Fantasy and Always Be My Baby, much to the crowd's delight. And during Make It Happen, a full 32-person gospel choir backed her up. Hallelujah!

But overall, the show had too many rough edges, too much of the band in the sound mix and too many non-Mariah distractions. It's nice to see you back, Your Royal Mimi-ness. But next time you visit, could you please travel a little lighter?

Opening act Sean Paul, enthusiastically professing equal love for the T-dot and the ladies (and, presumably, the T-dot's ladies), got the crowd on its feet early with his sweaty, freaky dancehall reggae beats. Backed by a small army of musicians, DJs and athletic, bootylicious dancers, Paul thumped through the likes of I'm Still In Love With You, Temperature and Get Busy. And no costume changes required.