I don’t think the mixed reviews of Shania Twain’s new tour have been fair. Is this one?

There seems to be a perception — and not necessarily an isolated one, either — that Shania Twain’s new “Queen of Me Tour” is a bit of a hot mess.

She can’t sing anymore, and if at any point it sounds to you like she can, it’s because she’s lip-syncing. She has the look and feel of someone who’s had too much to drink, and her attempts at dancing are embarrassing. She’s just going through the motions on the way to cashing big paydays from her sold-out shows.

Whether the reviews I read before I headed to her concert at PNC Music Pavilion in Charlotte actually contained those exact criticisms or not, I wouldn’t be able to say. I just know those were the general notions I had filed inside my brain when I walked through the gates on Wednesday night, along with the throngs of women dressed in a variety of pink cowboy hats that blink when you light them up.

In other words: I was prepared for a train wreck.

Well, so much for reviews, eh?

For just shy of two hours, Shania put on a masterclass in country-music show-womanship, delivering energetic, joy-filled renditions of hits from 20-plus years ago in a variety of clever stagings, while wearing outfits that no doubt sparked conversations in the hundreds of cars stuck in the PNC lot after the show.

Speaking of those costumes ...

To start the night off, Shania appeared seemingly out of thin air behind the fans seated in the closest sections to the stage to sing new song “Waking Up Dreaming.” Dressed in all black, dark sunglasses and a short blonde wig, she performed while stagehands wheeled her on a dolly from one side of the pavilion to the other — and while shrieking fans clamored to get as close as they could to her.

When she finally made her debut on the actual stage, emerging from a plume of real smoke that had been synced to an animation of a cartoon rocket being launched into space, she had taken her costume game up a couple dozen notches.

It’s almost is if she’d stepped out of the new “Barbie” movie: Her new blonde wig had wavy locks that spilled more than halfway down her back; a loose, billowing, hot-pink blouse fell off her shoulders; bikini bottoms that were barely there; and then the rest of her was all legs, covered only by matching yellow platform shoes with straps that crisscrossed up to her knees. Oh, and then she had this long swath of yellow, also-blouse-y fabric that seemed to be designed for the sole purpose of being blown around by the four wind machines positioned at intervals across the stage.

Shania added dark shades to the ensemble and reclined in the seat of a big ol’ chopper-style motorcycle for 2002’s “I’m Gonna Getcha Good.”

But otherwise she went unchanged from there till the encore, when the 57-year-old singer returned to the stage clad in a black floor-length overcoat ... which she removed (after running through “That Don’t Impress Me Much”) to reveal she was wearing the same outfit — black corset, mini-skirt — that she wore almost 25 years ago in the music video for “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!”

“She was sitting in a museum,” Shania told the roaring crowd, “and I decided, like, shame on me, right?”

Regarding her general stage presence ...

Like I mentioned, I’d read some pretty bad stuff about this tour. Stuff that made my face go [insert your preferred cringe GIF here] when I read it. I’m relieved to say that, from my vantage point at least, almost all of it was overblown.

Shania keeps things fairly simple choreography-wise, but she’s lighter on her feet and more limber than most women 10 years younger. The high kicks still come easy, and during “Honey, I’m Home” she busted out a kind of skip-run-dance thing (something like a reverse running man, but not quite; sorry, I don’t know my dance moves) that would look just as smooth coming from Doja Cat.

She particularly seemed to come alive — in terms of moving her body in an aesthetically pleasing fashion and looking like she was genuinely having fun on stage — whenever her two male backup dancers got anywhere near her, which was fairly routinely.

On top of all that, Shania seemed to savor the multiple opportunities she created to bring fans on stage. Early on, she invited a 7-year-old girl and her mom up, asked the girl her favorite song (it was “That Don’t Impress Me Much”), and then serenaded her with an a cappella verse from it. Later, bunches of fans, mostly in pairs, got to watch Shania perform her “universal love song” — “From This Moment” — while standing around pop-up high-top tables that had been brought onto the stage. Then a few minutes after that, she treated two female friends to a quick on-stage singalong, first of “Whose Bed Have Your Boots Been Under?” with one, then “That Don’t Impress Me Much” again, with the other. Both of those were initiated by Shania, a cappella, too.

Which brings us, finally, to the topic of Shania’s voice. And it’s a complicated, touchy subject.

The singer has spoken publicly, repeatedly, about being stricken with Lyme disease in the early 2000s; her feeling that the symptoms caused damage to her voice that has never been repaired; her vocal cord disorder diagnosis in 2011; and a series of subsequent throat surgeries she underwent.

In an interview just this past February, she told the Associated Press: “I’m not afraid of the criticism. I’m not gonna be perfect. My voice is not what it used to be. I sing differently.”

It’s also been alleged, I’ll remind you, that she lip-syncs a few, maybe some, maybe many of her songs live. If this is true, I would have pretty mixed feelings about it. But I’ll also tell you this: I spent the first half of the show watching her as closely as I possibly could to try to see if I could tell whether she was lip-syncing ... and then I stopped, almost completely, after realizing a) I couldn’t tell, decisively, and b) my doing so was sucking the fun out of an experience that was turning out to be more fun than I’d anticipated.

There were times — like when she was on the acoustic doing ballads like “You’re Still the One” and “Forever and for Always,” or particularly when she was a cappella with those fans — were you really got to hear Shania’s voice. When there was no question.

She was not lip-syncing.

In those moments, her voice wasn’t near anything resembling perfect.

It was nowhere close to what it used to be as we, or she, would like.

I guess the question fans have to ask themselves is this: As long as everybody is having fun and happy to be there — and especially as long as it seems like Shania is having fun, and she seems truly happy to be there — does it matter?

Shania Twain’s setlist

1. “Waking Up Dreaming”

2. “Up!”

3. “Don’t Be Stupid (You Know I Love You)“

4. “I’m Gonna Getcha Good!”

5. “Come on Over”

6. “You’re Still the One”

7. “Giddy Up!”

8. “Any Man of Mine”

9. “Whose Bed Have Your Boots Been Under?”

10. “Honey, I’m Home”

11. “Rock This Country!”

12. “Nah!” / “She’s Not Just a Pretty Face” / “Waiter! Bring Me Water!” / “When” / “Thank You Baby! (for Makin’ Someday Come So Soon)“

13. “Pretty Liar”

14. “(If You’re Not in It for Love) I’m Outta Here!”

15. “From This Moment On”

16. “Number One”

17. “Forever and for Always”

18. “Queen of Me”

Encore:

19. “That Don’t Impress Me Much”

20. “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!”