After prancing through a pair of her ‘80s hits, “Everybody” and a springy “Into the Groove,” Madonna seemed to find herself in one. It had been nearly 12 years since she played Seattle, so there was a little catching up to do Saturday when the Queen of Pop settled in for the first of two Climate Pledge Arena shows.
“It’s good to be back,” Madonna professed after teasing a few bars of “Causing a Commotion.” “I feel your energy and I [expletive] love it. There’s a lot of history in this place and we’re gonna make some more of it tonight.”
Early on, the pop icon was loose and chatty, joking that whatever was in the beer bottle she was sipping on wasn’t actually going to her head (“It’s just water … don’t worry”) while priming her rapt audience for what was to come.
Madonna’s Celebration Tour was an appropriate way as any to get reacquainted with the feather-ruffling star. It’s the first tour in her 40-year career that isn’t propelled by a new album. Instead, it’s built as a career survey with theatrical stage production and impeccable choreography that follows her early days in New York City — including a throwback to her time at the fabled CBGB club with a guitar-buzzing “Burning Up,” which was a little overwhelmed by the backing bass track — through her pot-stirring rise to household name.
We are living in the era of eras tours, it seems, and it’s not exactly novel for most artists with a catalog four decades deep to fete their own legacy on the road. But for a pop star who’s always lived in the present, such an intentional embrace of her past felt significant. The framework for the biographical show was made even more poignant by a health scare that delayed the start of the tour.
Seattle was initially set to be the first U.S. stop last summer before Madonna, 65, was hospitalized with a serious bacterial infection and put in a medically induced coma for two days — a brush with death she seemingly alluded to later.
The two hour and 15 minute show, blemished only by some occasionally muddy sound, touched on mortality a number of times. There were nods to Prince and Jimi Hendrix, a heartfelt — if somewhat risky — Michael Jackson tribute during a wardrobe change and a potent “Live to Tell” dedicated to those lost during the AIDS epidemic. She later saluted New York artist Keith Haring, who died almost 34 years ago to the date, and “so many other artists” lost too soon “to a disease no one cared to find a cure for.”
“I say all this because, honestly, I feel so lucky and I think to myself often ‘Why me? Why did I get to stay alive?’ ” Madonna said. “I have no idea, but I’m so grateful. I’m so happy to be on this earth doing what I do.”
Those sobering moments wouldn’t derail what the tour’s emcee Bob the Drag Queen, a former “RuPaul’s Drag Race” winner, proclaimed at the onset was “not just a concert. … It’s a celebration!” An enduring artist who’s always had an ear toward the clubs, Madonna has tapped into various eras of dance music incursions into the American mainstream, each showcased with a semitruck load of nightclub glamour on Saturday.
There was the disco-spiked “Holiday” — performed with her battalion of dancers under a giant glimmering disco ball — the warp-speed electronica of 1998’s “Ray of Light” and 2015’s EDM-twisted “Bitch I’m Madonna,” a collaboration with Nicki Minaj.
Still, none was as potent as an extended romp through “Vogue,” one of Madge’s most famous heyday hits that centered and celebrated gay ballroom culture during the AIDS crisis and a period of intensified homophobia.
Nearly 40 years ago, Madonna helped make it OK to talk about sex. More specifically, she made it OK for women to talk about sex. It’s an inextricable part of her legacy and a needle Madonna continues to push as an artist in her 60s still comfortably embracing the sexuality that has always been a key component of both her artistry and celebrity. Lest anyone thought one of pop’s greatest provocateurs would tone it down in their latter years, a show that included more than one simulated sex act and the topless male and female dancers who joined her on an energized “Hung Up” proved Madonna is still Madonna.
The dance-pop racer capped a three-song run that began with “Erotica,” with Madonna’s hushed, sweat-drippy vocals accentuated by an amorphous web of limbs created by her dance team decked out in skin-colored spandex, before a bare-bones rendition of “Justify My Love.”
For anyone attending Sunday’s show, Madge hit the stage inside a steamy Climate Pledge Arena shortly after 10 p.m. on Saturday. Madonna has taken some heat for her start times along the Celebration Tour, with two fans who attended one of her New York shows actually suing the pop star over her purported tardiness. (As of Sunday morning, tickets were still available starting at $75.50.)
Perhaps more noteworthy than any possible breach of bedtime, it was noticeably warmer than usual inside Seattle’s largest ice rink Saturday night. It’s not uncommon for touring acts to control an arena’s thermostat and apparently Madonna likes it hot. Word out of Minnesota, where she played before Seattle, was that the pop star requested they crank the heat to 80 degrees, according to the Pioneer Press.
While there were hits aplenty on Saturday, Madonna’s legacy-toasting trek isn’t exactly a by-the-numbers greatest hits tour. “Papa Don’t Preach” and “Material Girl” were notable absentee smashes, if not all that surprising since Madge has signaled in past interviews that she’s largely moved on from those particular mid-‘80s classics.
Before the choice rarity of “Bedtime Story,” which played like the soundtrack to some sort of erotic sensory deprivation chamber, a highlight reel of Madonna’s controversial moments and tabloid-esque sound bites played over the big screen. (A photo of a Mariners-capped Alex Rodriguez flashed among a series of her past love interests, never mind that the former Seattle slugger was a Yankee at the time of their rumored fling.)
“To age is a sin,” Madonna’s prerecorded voice declared at the end of the montage, echoing a speech she gave when accepting a Billboard woman of the year award in 2016. “I think the most controversial thing I’ve ever done is to stick around.”
No argument here.
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