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Her greatest-hits tour has the feeling of a memorial—a spectacular one.
Madonna stood in a silvery bodysuit on an arena stage, having just landed back on Earth after flying around in a suspended box while singing “Ray of Light.” Her audience’s eyes were still recovering from her high-wire gyrations, her postapocalyptic backup ravers, and her many, many lasers. But there was a new reason to gasp: A black-robed figure was creeping up behind Madonna.
Death was coming for the queen of pop.
Thoughts of mortality were already in the air. She was originally supposed to kick off the Celebration Tour—a greatest-hits revue—this summer, but a bacterial infection put her in the intensive-care unit in June. She recovered, but, as she told the audience at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center on Wednesday—the postponed opening night for the tour’s U.S. leg—she really had feared she wouldn’t survive. In our youth-worshipping culture, Madonna’s mere existence as a 65-year-old woman who’s still in the spotlight already feels like a provocation, a performance. One might expect her to use this tour to assert her unkillability; instead she’s making impermanence part of the act.
The event’s emcee, Bob the Drag Queen, announced that this was not merely a show but a celebration. As the night wore on, the distinction felt important: This was a concert as commemoration, focused as much on Madonna’s impact as her output. She and her dancers reprised iconic (an overused, but in this case absolutely appropriate, term) outfits, including her conical bra and her A League of Their Own jersey. Video montages ticked through her old controversies, quips, and exes (hello, Tupac!). Madonna, we were reminded, has been a role model for pursuing one’s desires; as Bob put it, she “taught us how to fuck.”
The greatest testament to Madonna’s importance was not all the callbacks, but the quality of the show itself. She continues to have an impeccable knack for audiovisual dazzlement; she’s still a pacesetter, even in the year of Beyoncé’s and Taylor Swift’s stadium excess. The staging was clever: an asymmetrical lattice of catwalks with overhead screens that furled and unfurled, creating a sense of continual movement across the arena. Her set pieces weren’t static either. They included a crucifix-laden carousel and a series of boxing rings with light beams for ropes. Musically, the energy was dynamic and ever-pulsing; though she’d come on hours after the doors opened, and played till 1 a.m., sleep seemed unthinkable.
Madonna herself was full of feistiness when addressing the audience: She said she loved New York because “people can speak my language, the language of cunt.” As for her singing and dancing? Well, it must be said that she performed a bit more crisply on past tours. But her efforts, never less than competent, served as a reminder that her poster-worthy image was created by the immense determination of a human woman (four of her six kids made cameos in the show; one played piano, another vogued). Besides, the true stars of any Madonna show have always been her dancers. This time their sinewy forms and colorful outfits took on special importance. Surrounding her like so much ruching on a fine gown, her dancers covered for her; they protected her. Madonna is, lest we forget, a great user of other people.
On Wednesday, those people included the dead. At one point, video screens showed the faces of departed iconoclasts such as Nina Simone and Sinéad O’Connor (the latter of whom Madonna had mocked in the early ’90s). Earlier, as she sang “Live to Tell” in her flying box, screens showed huge portraits of Keith Haring, Robert Mapplethorpe, and other victims of AIDS. Turning tragedy into spectacle, the sequence was classic Madonna in that it toed the line between guts and exploitation. But it landed. She really was a great friend to the gay community at the height of the epidemic, and onstage she spoke poignantly about her “survivor’s guilt.” (A video segment comparing herself to Michael Jackson was less effective—both because of the allegations against him, and because it felt like a rare bit of filler in this late and long show.)
The entire event was so bursting with movement and mythos that I truly felt jolted when the Grim Reaper showed up toward the end. He stalked her in understated, balletic style while she sang her 1992 single “Rain.” It’s a beautiful song about love, but in the context of the show it became a song about her life—standing “on the mountaintop,” while unstoppable natural forces pour down. This would make for an elegant final statement in anyone’s career. But she’s going to keep performing the song, night after night, spreading her most crucial teaching: Keep believing there’s another peak.
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