Nearly two hours into her epic Celebration Tour performance Tuesday night in San Francisco, Madonna briefly slowed up the show’s relentless, highly choreographed pace and shared some brief words with her audience.
“Is my hair a mess? Do I look like trash, right?” asked the legendary singer and pop culture icon. At this point, her famous blond hair was bound in school-girl braids. “You can’t always look good when you’re working hard, right?”
“I do my best. I do my best,” she said to the Chase Center crowd.
A few minutes later, with a guitar in hand, she broke into a stripped-down, acoustic version of “Express Yourself.” It was just her voice and the guitar. There was none of the big and sometimes overly noisy spectacle of dance, fashions and visuals that accompanied most other numbers in the Chase Center performance, a journey through her 40-year career as a cultural provocateur and the creator of some of the late 20th century’s most indelible pop music standards
At Madonna’s behest, the audience held up the lights in their phones to create that starry-night effect so beloved by arena performers. “Remember the light you shine outside of you is also inside of you,” Madonna told her many adoring fans, while they joined her in singing, “Don’t go for second best, baby, Put your love to the test.”
It was perhaps the heartfelt, authentic moment in the 2½-hour concert, which for the most part was exhilarating but could also be occasionally frustrating and messy, as if the show, or the star herself, were sometimes off her game.
It could be that Madonna was acknowledging that even she can’t always be perfect when she said, “I do my best. I do my best.”
Maybe that line was also a way for the 65-year-old to summarize a life and career marked by resilience and a determination to entertain, engage, push boundaries, make art. The Celebration Tour is Madonna’s first road show devoted to a career retrospective rather than on promoting a new album. That means the seven-part set list is populated with versions of “Into the Groove,” “Holiday,” “Vogue,” “Like a Virgin,” “La Isla Bonita,” and “Nothing Really Matters.”
This retrospective aspect of the show clearly pleased many in the crowd at Chase Center. It got them up and dancing and they didn’t seem to mind her usual hour-and-a-half-late start. These fans appeared to be her contemporaries and probably witnessed, first hand, her ascent to global stardom. A fair number also were women and gay men, who perhaps believe they benefited from Madonna’s many artistic campaigns on behalf of gender and sexuality equality.
But as a retrospective for an artist who is nearing the age to collect her full Social Security benefits (as if multimillionaire Madonna would need them), they also had to feel that the show offered plenty of reminders of the passage of time and of her mortality – and of their own.
For one thing, Madonna is no longer the most famous and influential music artist in the world – having been most recently supplanted by Taylor Swift and Beyonce. Meanwhile, her ability to shock has waned, though that doesn’t mean she didn’t still try to provoke and titillate Tuesday night — featuring topless female dancers in some dance numbers, one of whom she French kisses a la Britney Spears at the 2003 VMAs. For “Justify My Love,” she also performed with dancers in flesh-colored tights in what’s supposed to evoke an orgy, though this number didn’t come off as sexy as it could have been.
Madonna fares better when she upends religious iconography in the show’s most spectacular number, “Like a Prayer.” She sings the anthemic work on a dramatic spinning carousel that held shirtless dancers striking poses that at times mimicked Christ’s crucifixion
It’s hard to deny that Madonna’s supposedly inexhaustible body shows that she’s a stage veteran who has pushed herself to physical extremes for decades. Sure, she looked amazing in the multiple corsets she donned and performed in almost non-stop for 2½ hours. There also were moments when she was able to skip down the runway, like her ‘80s club kid self.
But in the opening “Into the Groove,” she almost took a tumble over one of her dancers after completing a spin. At other times, she appeared to be slightly behind the beat. Much of the choreography appeared to be built around giving Madonna a break from doing the more athletic, intricate moves she used to be on board for.
Her dancers carried that weight. Madonna also had dancers dress up to perform as iconic younger versions of herself. This tactic was used in full force in the climactic number, “Bitch, I’m Madonna,” when the stage is populated by “Material Girl” and “Blonde Ambition” Madonnas, and even a Madonna from her film role in “A League of their Own.” “Ozark” star Julia Garner, who reportedly was slated to play Madonna in a long-delayed film biography, also came on stage to portray one of these younger Madonnas versions of the singer in “Vogue.”
When Madonna kicked off the North American leg of her tour in Brooklyn in December, she acknowledged her close call with fate last July, when she contracted a bacterial infection that put her in the ICU and forced her to postpone her tour.
In some ways, the Celebration Tour’s name seems to underline the fact that she’s still here — unlike some of her peers. She devotes several songs and visuals to people who have died. There’s her mother, of course, whom she lost when she was 5. There’s also Prince, as well as the vast community of artists decimated by the AIDS epidemic. Some of these artists nurtured her when she was an ambitious young dancer and musician starting out in New York City in the early 1980s. They and so many others are represented by black-and-white images that flash on screen and grow into the hundreds and even the thousands.
Towards the end of the show, Madonna also offered a curious tribute to Michael Jackson, who died in 2009. It may have been her way of circling the show back to her musical roots in the early 1980s when both she and Jackson ruled the pop culture universe, and when she reminds us they were friends in a montage of images of them together.
But it’s one of the more frustrating moments in the show. The number features a screen showing shadow images of dancers emulating Jackson and Madonna, while Jackson’s “Billie Jean” and “Smooth Criminal” plays along with Madonna’s “Like a Virgin.” However, it’s a recorded version of “Like a Virgin,” which was a bit of a letdown. Of course. This devoted crowd would likely have preferred to see Madonna drop the gimmickry to perform one of her biggest hits in person.
Set list
Act 1“Nothing Really Matters””Everybody””Into the Groove””Burning Up””Open Your Heart””Holiday”
Act II
“The Ritual””Like a Prayer”
Act III
“Erotica””Justify My Love””Hung Up””Bad Girl”
Act IV
“Vogue””Human Nature””Crazy for You”
Act V
“Die Another Day””Don’t Tell Me””Mother and Father””Express Yourself””La Isla Bonita””Don’t Cry for Me Argentina”
Act VI
“Bedtime Story””Ray of Light””Take a Bow”
Act VII
“Bitch I’m Madonna””Celebration”
