Lady Gaga's live art installation

Lady Gaga is bent on her knees, surrounded by her body of dancers, on stage in the center of the Forum. She remains still for several seconds, gets up and shouts: “My name is Stefania Joanne Angelina Germanotta and this is my house”. The audience responds with a roar. His double appears on stage for the first time: a masked woman with a white crown. “What are you doing in my house?” Gaga shouts again. It’s there, at the end of the first act of the concert, which reveals the story told by the “Mayhem Ball Tour”: a struggle between light and darkness, present and past, success and intimacy, staged by two versions of Gaga that chase each other in thirty songs, two and a half hours and four acts of a gigantic show that is a live art installation.

You are overwhelmed by a unique and out-of-scale production in a period in which the gigantism of concerts is the norm. But also that it takes place in a sports hall and not in a stadium – which makes the story even more overwhelming and intense.

A show where everything is off the charts

The appointment was for 8: upon arriving, you immediately notice on the stage a huge building with floors and balconies, where the band and, at times, Gaga herself will stand. The stage design is by Es Devlin, an artist who has curated the tours of U2, Beyoncé and The Weeknd (but also installations like the rotating library seen at the last Milan Design Week): in short, the best there is. And indeed the stage space is used in every way possible around that building. While waiting for the concert – which starts 40 minutes late – messages from fans flow, including a marriage proposal; then a video with a gigantic Gaga writing for several minutes, until the real one enters the scene from an archway, atop a huge old-fashioned dress. It is only the first prop of a show where everything is out of scale: at a certain point there is even an enormous skull, a sort of sand tomb where one of the two Gagas sings together with a skeleton.

A musical that crosses musical genres

The show is built like a musical, with a compact narrative structure: the songs blend into each other and the interludes serve as a connection for stage and scene changes. The inevitable comparison is with the other mega-show of recent years, the Eras Tour: but there Taylor Swift told about herself, while here Lady Gaga wears different masks, she tries to talk about identity and diversity through the theme of the double, of the alter ego. It’s still Lady Gaga, but it’s always different. Even musically: from the hyperpop of “Abracadabra” and “Poker Face” at the beginning, he moves on to rock – he picks up an electric guitar several times – to more classic pop, to ballads. AND accompanying her is a band with a drummer who bangs like a blacksmith.

It’s impossible to tell everything that happens on stage: you get overwhelmed by events, you get distracted for a moment and something new appears. But Lady Gaga has a stage presence and charisma that allow her to hold a story togethera, in which even the diversions are programmed: “Joanne” on the piano for the grandmothers, a long spoken intro of “The Edge of Glory” to thank Donatella Versace for her support even in the less fortunate moments of her career.

Lady Gaga on the piano and the finale

The climax of the show is when Lady Gaga makes peace with her double and sings two minimal versions of “A Million Reasons” and “Shallow”. Together, Gaga and her alter ego sail on a boat towards the center of the stage: a minimal theatrical stunt that preludes an even more intimate moment, the piano songs – which Gaga always does, but which always leave you speechless with the intensity of the performance. This show is a blockbuster, but one day we would like to see it in concert like this, just piano, voice and a few instruments.

The colossal dimension returns for the final act: a long interlude with a sort of sandstorm on the screen, the corps de ballet returning and the building reopening for “Bad Romance”, which is followed again by an encore.

Pop culture

If this concert has a flaw, it is its own merit: a very precise dramaturgical writing, a millimetric interlocking of real objects, choreographies and giant screens. At several moments Gaga looks more at the cameras than at the audience, and the show is followed on screen rather than live. The choice to bring a show like this to the arenas makes it both more inaccessible – fewer tickets, gone in an instant, with many people outside the Forum hoping for a miracle – and more accessible: the diva is there, human and close, on stage, together with an audience of very loyal fans with whom she has a visceral relationship. Lady Gaga is an anomalous pop star: ambitious and fragile at the same time, diva and anti-diva who talks about diversity rather than the star system, credible even when she stages apparently unreal characters.
It’s difficult to put the “Mayhem Ball Tour” in just one category: it’s a concert, it’s a traveling musical, it’s a live film, it’s design and art installation. It’s pop culture, in one of its best manifestations.