Five stars for Lady Gaga’s Chromatica Ball — a spectacle with wow factor to spare

Even the prelude to Lady Gaga’s Chromatica Ball was a full-scale musical theatre/sci-fi/fashion extravaganza. Gaga materialised on a screen in alien-warrior guise, then for real on an elevated stage turntable and was gradually unpeeled from a couture casing as she sang a megahit-triptych (“Bad Romance”, “Just Dance”, “Poker Face”). Her chorus line of dancers rippled through a haze of dry ice; pyrotechnics sent eyelash-singeing heat across the 63,000-capacity Tottenham Hotspur stadium in north London. And this was all just for starters.

Gaga’s return to live performance was never going to be a subdued affair, and at the first of two London dates in a world tour named after her sixth album, Chromatica (2020), she proved that she can sustain serious wow factor over a two-hour show. The Manhattan-born singer-songwriter-actor (aka 36-year-old Stefani Germanotta) has flourished since her hyper-stylised debut album, The Fame (2008). The Chromatica Ball brilliantly reflects her creative range; it also channels the clubby energy of her latest material through a rib cage-rattling sound system.

The show’s multi-act narrative involved allegories for fame, toxic relationships, oppression and liberation — but essentially it was a pop-culture fever dream made flesh. It was both archly avant-garde and astoundingly fun, with a belting setlist (the vampy “Monster”, a riotous “Telephone”) and tremendous attention to detail. Gaga’s designer costumes and mid-song metamorphoses were spectacular, her vocal power — soaringly soulful and screamingly punkish in turn — and slick choreography triumphant, especially given that fibromyalgia pain had curtailed her previous tour in 2017-18. Even the lighting design (blood red, acid green and molten gold flooding the brutalist set) and the band’s instruments (a circular keyboard, Flying V guitars) seemed fantastical.

A golden-suited Gaga dedicated “Babylon” (Chromatica’s most vogue-inspired expression) to the late fashion visionary Alexander McQueen, before she and her dancers paraded through the crowds for the ecstatic house headrush of “Free Woman”. This was possibly the show’s most thrilling highlight, with audience members’ illuminated wristbands pulsing in time to the revelry. The delight of her devotees electrified the atmosphere.

Arriving at a central B-stage, Gaga took a seat at a piano to perform “Born This Way” as both torch song and disco stormer. This track always summons the spirit of Madonna’s 1989 classic “Express Yourself”, but Gaga has achieved her own (blonde) ambition: merging glamour and grotesquerie. On this intimate platform, she was candidly sentimental: relating the depression she had experienced before creating Chromatica; giving thanks to friends and fashion collaborators. She was also out-there: changing into a bug-like bodysuit and playing piano in yoga pose, before smiling at her fans and saying, “Thanks for loving a weirdo like me.”

The main stage was literally ablaze for a movie-ballad encore of “Hold My Hand” (from the Top Gun: Maverick soundtrack), with Gaga raising a taloned glove. At the Chromatica Ball, this superstar served a surreal feast for the senses; the crowd devoured every morsel and still screamed for more.

★★★★★

Tour continues to September 17, ladygaga.com