Hours before Madonna emerges, as crowds pour into the United Center, excitement hangs in the air like a mist. A sparkly mist. The atmosphere is celebratory, and why shouldn’t it be? Less than a year ago, the pop star was hospitalized and induced into a coma following a bacterial infection; she told the crowd on February 1 in Chicago that she was lucky to be alive. Every couple of years since she emerged as a solo star in the 1980s, Madonna has been declared to have run her career dry and to have amassed one too many controversies to continue. Yet here she is, still singing and dancing, showing unbelievable staying power for a pop star. The aim of the Celebration Tour is simple: to talk and sing and party through Madonna’s life and career.
The mood of the tour is more nuanced: part nostalgic, part ironic, part erotic, entirely hypnotic. The nostalgic? Stirring numbers devoted to Madonna’s former lovers, Michael Jackson and Jean-Michel Basquiat among them. The ironic? Madonna’s subversions of religious imagery and traditionally hyper-masculine activities like boxing, and the singer drinking from a beer bottle while she sang “Burning Up” and regaled the crowd with tales of her adolescence. Does it matter that she was almost certainly drinking water from the beer bottle? No, of course not. The erotic is obvious: if there is one theme that has pervaded Madonna’s songs and performances through forty years, it is the theme of sexual liberation. To say that Madonna has fully appropriated the frequent criticism that her shows are too explicit would be an understatement. Think of a sexual position, and there’s a good chance Madonna and her dancers moved through it in their choreography.
The hypnotic? All of it. There’s gold and there’s glitter. And just when you think you’ve seen all the gold and glitter one arena can hold and all the jewels and sequins that can adorn one dress, there are more. There are diamond necklaces and sparkling silver gloves. Everything and everyone onstage shines, most of all Madonna herself. Despite all this, perhaps the show’s greatest achievement is that it manages to not be gaudy. It is maximalist, certainly, but craftily so, and succeeds despite incredible internal aesthetic dissonance. A cascade of black and white images on massive screens, which served as a tribute to lives lost during the AIDS epidemic, could have felt cheap but was instead overwhelming and quite touching.
Indeed, Madonna’s entire performance could be seen as a heartfelt homage to the resilience of the queer community (or, if you’re slightly more cynical, as a two-hour long middle finger to homophobia). Emceeing was the delightful Bob the Drag Queen in a pink Victorian-era dress that extended sideways about two meters past where one’s hips end. Drag was omnipresent in the audience as much as onstage. And, after a poignant rendition of “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,” Madonna wrapped a pride flag around herself while historical TV broadcasts played in the background. “Madonna is a witch,” proclaimed one news commentator. Well, perhaps in her mystique.
Some diehard devotees sang along to the biggest of Madonna’s big hits, including “La Isla Bonita” and “Like a Prayer.” Mostly, though, fans seem caught in awe. When the United Center’s lights rose after a mid-show crescendo on the powerful “Hung Up,” there’s a grand and metaphoric—if obvious—reveal: the spectacle is as much what Madonna has inspired as the singer herself.
To take nearly a half century of pop culture and distill it into one night is a hard task. But, excepting a disappointingly dry rendition of “Like a Virgin,” the show did well to hit most of the high points and some low and middle ones too. “Let’s go all the way back,” Bob declared as he introduced Madonna. And she appeared, on a rotating stage, in an elegant black dress with some both-artistically-and-sexually-daring cutouts and long flowing sleeves. The staging, as she then opened the show with “Nothing Really Matters,” was wonderfully reminiscent of the singer’s iconic 1984 MTV VMAs performance, wedding cake and all.
If she could give one piece of advice, Madonna said, it would be to “think about making choices in your life that are going to make you proud.” So, strike all the adjectives from before—the mood of the Celebration Tour is proud and deservedly so. In the show’s penultimate number, before the not-so-subtly titled “Bitch, I’m Madonna,” each of the seventeen backup dancers emerged in a different costume from Madonna’s past. There was the wedding dress, the League of Their Own uniform, a set of golden horns. Fire burst from below the stage, a massive disco ball spun overhead. As Bob put it, above all, the Celebration Tour is a party. It is a spectacle. In lace, in diamonds, in leather, in 2024, and in the spotlight, Madonna still commands your attention.
