In a cover story in the new edition of Elle, Adele speaks at length on her decision to postpone her Las Vegas residency on January 20 of this year, the day before it was to begin, reiterating in greater detail that it was purely an artistic decision — one that was painful, but that she does not regret.
“It was the worst moment in my career, by far. By far,” she says. “I was so excited about those shows. It was devastating.” But “there was just no soul in it,” she continues about the first iteration of the show. “The stage setup wasn’t right. It was very disconnected from me and my band, and it lacked intimacy. And maybe I tried too hard to give it those things in such a controlled environment.”
She said she’d come to that realization at a dress rehearsal the night before she announced the cancellation. Frustrated, she walked to the end of the 15,700-square-foot stage, sat down, unplugged her mic and started singing a cappella to the mostly empty, 4,300-plus-seat Colosseum.
“This would be the best part of the show,” she recalls thinking. “For me, and for you. This is what I want. And none of [the show] “has that.” The article does not really explain why it took until the day before the residency’s scheduled launch for her to reach that conclusion, although she briefly addressed the issue in an interview on Britain’s “Graham Norton Show” a few weeks after the postponement. In that interview, she seemed to lend credence toreports that the show was called off over creative differences with original designer Esmeralda Devlin and the venue, Caesars Palace, rather than crew members testing positive for Covid-19, as originally stated.
“I regret that I kept going until that late in the day. It would have been a really half-assed show and I can’t do that,” she said. “People will see straight through me up on the stage and know I didn’t want to be doing it. I’ve never done anything like that in my life and I’m not going to start now.”
However, her last-minute decision not only stranded thousands of fans who’d traveled to the city from all over the world, it effectively derailed promotion of the 15-time Grammy winner’s fourth studio album, “30,” her first in six years. She says that she essentially “went into hiding” after calling off the dates, remaining indoors due to paparazzo. “The first couple of months was really, really hard,” she said. “I was embarrassed. But it actually made my confidence in myself grow, because it was a very brave thing to do. And I don’t think many people would have done what I did. I’m very proud of myself for standing by my artistic needs.”
In February, she returned to the spotlight, performing “I Drink Wine” at the BRIT Awards in London.
“I nearly cried at the end of my performance” on the BRITS, she told Elle in the new article. “It felt strange receiving so much love when I’d let people down.” Early last month she played a pair of well-received concerts in London’s Hyde Park, and on July she announced the rescheduled Vegas dates. The show, which will launch in November, is designed by herself with the British entertainment architecture firm Stufish, with whom she’d worked on the BRITs performance. Front-row tickets are going for mid-five figures on the secondary market.
Saying she drew inspiration from the fireplace in her London residence (she spends most of the year at her home in Los Angeles), she drew a diagram of the new stage for Elle. “She draws a three-sided square, then two smaller ones nested inside,” the passage reads. Adele then describes, “It’s tiered stone, and I’d been playing over in my head how vast the stage is in Vegas. I was like, ‘How do I make a stadium-size stage feel small in that room?’ I noticed all the borders around the fire, and I was like, What if I treat it like a puppet stage?” When the new design team came to her house the next day, she pointed to the mantelpiece: “I want that.”
Her goal, she said, is to “tell the story of the beginning of my career to now. I’m not gonna give too much about it, but the show grows. The showgrows. It’s all about the music, and it’s really, really nostalgic. It’s gonna be really beautiful.”
Read the full article here.
