“Tonight,” Lady Gaga said/exulted/proclaimed on Monday, “my religion is Montréal!”
Not, strictly speaking, true; the religion starts with a G and ends… yeah. But Montréal was her congregation, over 17,000 strong, assembled in the Bell Centre for Chapter 2 in Gaga’s Montréal passion play. Bring on the sparkler-bras, burning piano, bleeding angel and the L-U-V.
Gaga had opened her Monster Ball tour a little less than a year ago in the same venue. Ten months, several fractured taboos and superfame later, the show was virtually the same, with one added megahit. Ah yes, I miss the old days of 2010 – the innocence, when Gaga’s talent, shock-tactic staging and identity politics were a step beyond. While there’s no denying the large Gaga/fan moments, the bravura set pieces and the inevitable Bad Romance detonation at the end, there were lulls in audience response. The floor rocked – she both earned and demanded it – but some in the packed house sat and soaked it in. The Monster Ball, after all, is no longer new. Is it still Monster Good? What’s the shelf-life on minority self-esteem and Disco Jesus-ing?
Broken into five distinct acts – City, Subway, Forest, Monster Ball, Encore – by four art film/set changes, the Monster Ball is 60 per cent great clubland and electropop, 20 per cent iffy showbiz, 20 per cent self-actualization session, and all outsize ambition. Opening with Dance in the Dark after a wilting hour-plus wait in a surprisingly warm Bell Centre, a dozen dancers adding their own hydraulics to the gridded multi-level stage, she left no holies barred.
Fashion maven, she maxed out the cruciform imagery and wore: knickers and stiletto boots, the zany wimple get-up during the subway-set LoveGame, red curtains with curtain rod included, black gown with ballroom facemask (while playing an instrument we’ll call The Cone) on her quest for “an inner sense of Fame.”
And there was plenty of Outer Sense of Fame, as no performer has so obsessively worked the theme of celebrity itself. And the girl can talk. There was the touching moment with the cellphone, when she called a fan in the crowd (father of a two-year-old son named Matisse who loves Gaga), when she read the terrific teenage lament-poem tossed onstage in a full photo album, when she turned the blood-smear moment in Monster into her own confessional. “I used to get so bullied in school. And the wounds are still there. I still bleed on the inside.”
But the love-yourself speeches, which the young star clearly needs as much as anyone in the crowd, could be slashed in half; hell, it’s in the songs, no? And during Teeth, she needlessly barked that she’d never lip-synched. What idiot would actually have charged this canary-haired dynamo with that? If anything, you can’t shut the Gaga up, and she has both the chops and the pride to deliver it all live.
Pulling focus upon exiting, as Gaga emerged from her Fame Orb (yes, literally) to bomb Bad Romance into the rafters, with those who had been heading to the exits (it was nearing midnight) rushing back, there was no doubting the fully realized performance, despite the caveats. A 100-minute show with a garish narrative, a sweating, dancing, crawling, belting star and a multi-million-selling club anthem (Born This Way) turned into a bravura solo torch song at the piano: Jesus, is anyone else even trying?
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