There can be 55,000 people in a room and it only takes one to dazzle them.
Lady Gaga brought her Chromatica Ball to the tri-state area on Thursday night, making her way through a spectacular sold-out concert at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, NJ.
Gaga opened her 22-track set with the one-two-three punch of “Bad Romance,” “Just Dance” and “Poker Face” before moving on to songs from the tour’s eponymous album. It’s rare to see an artist perform their greatest hits straight out of the gate in live shows, and as the audience shook the floor with the energy of that iconic first “oh-oh-oh-oh-oh”, it was no dance party for the lady of the hour.
Instead, Gaga sat atop the stage in an avant-garde costume that restricted her movements, showing how she’s been boxed in throughout her career as the radio-dominant, meat-dress-wearing pop star who had the world on her mind in her eyes. all time in the 2010s.
But the 2022 Gaga is just as magnificent – and stronger than ever before. Her choreography was razor sharp during fan favorites such as “911” and “Babylon” after fibromyalgia forced her to cancel her latest tour, and her vocals on a piano version of “Born This Way” and her powerful “Top Gun: Maverick” theme song “Hold My Hand” left fans in awe.
The show has been more macabre than Gaga’s previous tours, but so has “Chromatica,” the cathartic house album she wrote about healing and released in 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic that nearly ruined her plans to hit the road again. turned upside down.
At one point, she lay on a floating platform reminiscent of an operating table, wearing a bloodstained latex bodysuit that recalled her shocking 2009 VMA performance. Later, a video interlude showed Gaga reciting a manifesto about art with the same brooding cadence as her vampire character in ‘American Horror Story: Hotel’.
Even with its dark themes and brutalist set design, the theatrical Chromatica Ball turned into one big party by the end of the night. “Stupid Love” literally brought the heat, with flames shooting up to nosebleeds and making the audience sweat even more than they already were in the dead of summer, followed by “Rain on Me,” one of the most euphoric performances ever. the stadium has had a moment.
While Gaga didn’t announce whether any of her idols were in the crowd for her show in her hometown (she called out Liza Minnelli at Madison Square Garden in her 2011 HBO special), she did take the time to pay tribute to those came to her.
Gaga dedicated her “A Star Is Born” ballad “Always Remember Us This Way” to her regular collaborator Tony Bennett, who retired from performing in 2021 after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and she reminded her Little Monsters that Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen ‘The Edge of Glory.”
And yet the night was all about Gaga, the only superstar besides Madonna who constantly reinvents herself and still crushes it every time.