Freddie Freeman was hitting homers down in San Diego, so it was up to visiting superstar Lady Gaga to keep the on-base percentage exceptionally high Saturday night at Dodger Stadium, site of one of the last stops on her “Chromatica Ball” outing. Surprises were few, this many weeks into a mega-tour whose production values were already known among the legions of Little Monsters who’d long since put curious paws to Googling Gaga’s setlists and setpieces.
Anyway, knowing what’s coming doesn’t quash the overpowering effects of a savvy performer who’s determined to look as cold as inhumanly possible while also, conversely, sounding like the warmest superstar you’ve ever encountered. Does that count, in ballplaying terms, as a slider?
As the singer reminded the audience, this occasion was a long time in coming, as Gaga is effectively bringing up the rear among performers who had tours scheduled for mid-2020 and are finally making good on them. She’s no Taylor Swift, consigning her “Lover Fests” to the dustbin of necessarily abandoned ideas; Gaga has remained undaunted in making it clear that 2020’s “Chromatica” is the album she is very much touring behind, with 10 songs from the two-year-old album accounting for just under half the overall set. There was a sense of post-pandemic victory to Gaga’s increasingly lengthy asides, late in the two-hour-plus concert — “The whole world did not fade. We’re all here, in some kind of way,” she said. But, as an undertow, you might detect a sense of vindication for the “Chromatica” record itself, in how she’s determined not to let it go down as a lamb that got lost in the storm.
So, extra points for chutzpah for how Gaga starts off every show on the tour: by getting three of the biggest hits of the night — arguably the biggest — out of the way at the start, essentially as a prelude to what she considers the “Chromatica”-centric body of the show. Not only does she get these taken care of early, but she sings them in various levels of immobilization, starting with “Bad Romance,” performed while she’s inside a giant, steely contraption that may represent some kind of steel exoskeleton, sarcophagus or just good old iron maiden. Is this a metaphor for feeling imprisoned by past success? Or just really cool, X-treme costume design?
once those three introductory hits were out of the way and Gaga regained full control of her life and limbs for the next hour and 45 minutes, title cards periodically appeared on screen, establishing “Act I” through “Act V” and subsequent finales and denouements. Unlike her long-running “Enigma” show in Las Vegas, this tour has none of those scripted, philosophical monologues, so it’s not easy to suss whether there’s a real narrative arc at play in her mind or whether the ”act” business just provides cover for costume changes. There was undeniably an element of the momentum going into stall mode every time Gaga disappeared from sight for four or five minutes. But, as costuming spectacle goes, you’d be hard-pressed to argue it wasn’t worth the lull when the singer would suddenly reappeared in a bodysuit made out of what looked like innards-revealing, torso-hugging plexiglas, or better still, all masked up as a lovely, if intimidating, purple mantis.
She and her dozen or so dancers worked hard for the money for the first two-thirds of the show, working up enough monsoonal moisture to breathe sweaty life into “Chromatica” album tracks that might’ve slipped a fan’s mind, like the very pandemic-premonitory-feeling “911.” The set warmed up, eventually, after being established in the show’s beginnings with a monochromatic feel Gaga herself has said was inspired by architectual brutalism. (Gaga could sound a little Germanic herself in the early going as she repeatedly commanded the audience to “get your fucking hands in the air,” with a commandeering scowl and harsh make-up that was its own kind of brutal.)
But then, past the halfway point, the crowd of 52,000 saw that platform at second base pay off with an extended solo segment that gave the audience the unmitigated, uninterrupted Gaga that would form a solid basis for a fine one-woman stadium show, should she ever want to attempt that ballsy a gambit. Sitting at a piano that had been formulated to appear as something growing organically out of gnarly forest limbs and trunks, the queen of poker faces smiled for the first time all evening (not counting a sinister giggle earlier) and turned Dodger Stadium into an enchanted pop forest with a clinching series of solo ballads and, yes, motivational speeches.
For much of this solo stretch, she was filmed by one camera attached to the fairie-land piano, and it was mesmerizing; never underestimate the power of a fixed shot of a charismatic star in an insectoid leotard. (Never mind the 30 cameras that were said to have been shooting the rest of the show, for some presumed future home-video release.) The faithful seemed especially pleased that Gaga has introduced a designated hitter into the show about midway through this tour, having replaced “1000 Doves” in the solo mini-set with an earnest protest song from the otherwise unpresented “Joanne” album, “Angel Down,” preceded by a message about the fight for reproductive rights. But the best song of the segment, maybe the night, was “Edge of Glory” — a song that felt impossibly corny, on record, with its overeager Springsteenian aspirations, but is all Gaga-ian, live and stripped.
For some of us, no show Gaga ever does will outdo her “Jazz and Piano” residency in Vegas, where she was more parts Rosemary Clooney than Grace Jones. But, of course, you’re not getting the full Gaga if you’re getting her in Irving Berlin mode. And in this show, the affected but still affecting intimacy of the solo segment made for a dynamic setup to a final stretch back on the main stage that made her dance-teria mode seem like her best mode after all.
Coming after a quieter, more thoughtful segment, “Stupid Love,” an up-tempo track that seemed kind of underwhelming when it was introduced as “Chromatica’s” first single two and a half years ago, suddenly weirdly felt like a visceral kick in the pants. And “Rain on Me,” too, finally felt as cathartic as Gaga meant it to. (After the crowd had just narrowly dodged an unseasonable L.A. precipitation bullet, it’s a good thing being an actual rainmaker is not among Gaga’s talents.)
The most interesting superstars are the ones that walk fine lines, and Gaga certainly continues to do that. After “Joanne,” and especially after the world discovered — via “A Star Is Born” — that she’s conventionally pretty, she could have further played the authenticity card for all it’s worth. But in the spirit of those “Keep Austin weird” bumper stickers Texans used to brandish, Gaga has determined to keep herself weird — or just weird enough to provide necessarily ballast to her more earnest inclinations. It’s clear, by the end of a show, that she just wants to give the disenfranchised world a hug. But with costuming that include jagged shoulder cones, it’s not clear how that’s going to happen without blood involved.
