People who rip Madonna for not acting her age should take a good hard look at Mick Jagger.
Do people make fun of him for acting like a stud on stage? OK, bad example. Point is, if it’s OK for the aging male rock stars, why shouldn’t Madonna try as hard as she can to remain relevant, hip, sexy, shocking, whatever she wants? It’s inspiring to see a 57-year-old woman up there twerking on top of pole-dancing nuns in their underwear … and where were we?
Yes, Madonna is the hardest working woman in show business, praise that shouldn’t be thrown around lightly.
For the first of two shows at Rexall Place Sunday night – and what rude American scheduled this on Thanksgiving weekend – the queen of pop led a dazzling Cirque du Broadway sexy song and dance spectacle that put most others to shame. Fans who shelled out huge dough for this thing expected no less than the best. This is what pop concerts look like these days, and Madonna pulled out all the stops (an old pipe organ reference) to make sure this Rebel Heart tour was the biggest, flashiest, most grandiose Cirque du Broadway sexy song and dance spectacle available.
Not surprisingly, the music was for the most part less interesting than the production that went with it. Representing all phases in a career dedicated to remaining relevant, hip, sexy shocking, etc., each song was no mere “song” to be “performed.” No, each piece of the Madonna story was presented as choreographed high drama. A squad of hard-working dancers playing parts ranging from Holy Roman Warriors to gas jockeys to street dancers out of a modern version of West Side Story. Later came bulls and bullfighters in a lively Spanish number, setting the stage with a steamy dance number with matadors in La Isla Bonita. Latin was just one of the flavours in a musical travelogue that also made stops to Africa and the Middle East.
The underwear-clad nuns weren’t the only Catholic-shocking imagery deployed, a schtick she’s used to good effect for decades.
Opening with a song Iconic saw the 57-year-old singer lowered to the stage in a cage, which she promptly broke out of to sing about what it’s like to be a pop star, an “icon.” Soldiers brandishing crosses were replaced by geisha girls in a song called Bitch, I’m Madonna – in case anyone was confused who they were seeing. Much later came a new song called Unapologetic Bitch, if you’re sensing a theme.
A warm and relaxed host despite the obvious demands of the show, she addressed the crowd after her old-school-style pop song True Blue. “I get to do what I love – I’m a lucky girl!” she said, adding, “You’re lucky, too!”
Through each of what appeared to be four separate “acts,” successive layers of clothing were shed as she worked her way up to more danceable material. Early on came Deeper and Deeper before a more sensitive moment in Heartbreak City – performed atop a floating spiral staircase. And then, with the words “Nobody f—ks with the queen!” she launched into a quirky, wacky version of Like a Virgin. Soon came S.E.X., more dance music and more stripped down (metaphorically) version of her hits. Who’s That Girl was also rendered acoustically. Dress You Up was recast as a samba.
As for her voice, it’s been joked that Madonna makes a good case in favour of lip-syncing, but while there seemed to be a ton of processing and doubling on the lead vocals, there were lots of moments where she appeared to actually be singing. Imagine. But who comes to a Madonna concert to hear Madonna sing? Of course not. We come for the twerking nuns.
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More than 14,000 fans got into the groove, vogued, and expressed themselves during Our Lady of Pop’s inaugural visit to Edmonton.
Sunday’s dancetastic celebration of love, nakedness and religion was the first of two at Rexall Place — and the only two Alberta dates on her Rebel Heart tour, which has already grossed $20 million US from just 10 concerts.
(P.S. Tickets are still available to Monday’s show.)
Highlights: Uh, her mere presence? Madonna released her very first album in 1983 — and we’ve had to wait 32 years for the controversial dance-pop diva to find the E-spot.
She’s not nearly as shocking as she was in the ’80s or ’90s, but the 57-year-old mother of four still proved to be a rebel at Sunday’s show.
She pole-danced with strippers “dressed” as nuns as she sang Holy Water — a throbbing number from her 13th and latest album, Rebel Heart — which ended with a bunch of her dancers re-enacting the Last Supper.
She strummed a ukulele, while sitting on a pile of tires, as she sang True Blue. She pushed one of her male dancers from the top of a spiral staircase during HeartBreakCity, a maudlin love-gone-wrong number, also from Rebel Heart.
Low note: Her opening felt a bit lacklustre, especially for an icon of her stature. At 9:45 p.m. the lights went out in Rexall. Then her Rebel Heart curtain fell to the stage, with nary a musical, pyro or lighting cue to accompany it.
In fact, there were a few seconds of awkward silence as fans waited for her dancers, dressed as ancient Chinese soldiers, and a video of Iconic, featuring Mike Tyson and Chance the Rapper, to start the proceedings.
In the crowd: Mostly fortysomething (and older) women and men who grew up during the Walkman era of the ’80s.
(Surprisingly, very few brought their offspring — there was a noticeable lack of fans younger than 20 years old, perhaps due to Madonna’s steep ticket prices.)
Hundreds of women wore Madge-inspired outfits, from Like A Virgin wedding dresses to tutus to bullfighter’s suits.
Strike a pose: As strong and supple as her voice was — ranging from girlish (Like A Virgin) to deep and dangerous (Burning Up, HeartBreakCity) — Madonna’s dance moves were just as stunning.
She twirled around a stripper’s pole. She palled around with the rest of her male and female dancers during Deeper and Deeper. She strutted across the catwalk during Holiday, the last song of her 135-minute set.
Quip of the night: “As the evening goes on, you’ll be required to undress,” she said before her seventh song, True Blue.
True to her word, she intermittently singled out fans in the crowd and demanded they take off their tops. “Edmonton is going to be naked!” she gushed, as she collected one man’s “Italians Do It Better” T-shirt.
Later on, she pulled one woman on stage and made her wear a novelty hat with a turkey protruding from the top of it. “I’ve had a penis on my head, too,” Madonna joked.
Material girl: Her costumes ranged from ornate Chinese robes to ‘50s greaser to revealing dresses with fishnet stockings.
Unapologetic bitch: It’s the title of one of her songs from Rebel Heart, and it suits her to perfection. She didn’t bother tailoring her set list to appease long-suffering Edmonton fans — they got the same songs as every other city on her current tour. Which meant 13 (of the 19) tracks from the deluxe version of Rebel Heart, which is far from her best effort.
While she performed a handful of her older hits, including Like A Virgin, Holiday, La Isla Bonita, Material Girl and Music, other classics only made cameos. She sang a snippet of Vogue, for example, during Holy Water, and a teasing morsel of Love Don’t Live Here Anymore during HeartBreakCity.
Perhaps even more sacrilegious, Madonna completely ignored Like A Prayer, Live To Tell, Hung Up and her entire 1998 album, Ray of Light. Do we have to wait another 32 years before she performs those in Edmonton? Or maybe she’ll do a few of them during her second show on Monday night?
While in the process of the ongoing transfer of our old website onto the current one, we have just finished another section: BENEFIT CONCERTS (in the menu under LIVE)
Madonna has attended many benefit concerts throughout her career but has only performed on these three mega events: Live Aid, Live 8 and Live Earth. We have gathered the following in order to bring you as much info as we could:
In the event that Male or Female presale tickets for this event are sold out, a limited number of general admission tickets will be sold at the door on the day of the event. Please contact 702-333-9000 for additional ticket information.
….’A steady stream of people started filing into the venue, and it took me a couple of blinks to realize that the first woman and the head of the pack was Madonna. She is a petite little powerhouse of a figure, and was dressed in a sharp navy trench coat-style cape with her hair neatly woven into a braid that fell down her right shoulder, like a pop star’s rendition of Little Red Riding Hood. Her bright lipstick and dark eyeliner appeared flawless, and as she scanned the strange scene—33 civilians dancing haphazardly, undoubtedly looking tired from all the waiting and the late hour, and her own hits blasting over the sound system—she looked so calm and coiffed that you would have never guessed that she had just finished performing a two-hour show in front of a sold-out crowd at the Xcel Energy Center.
It turns out that injecting Madonna’s entire professional dance troupe into a party is a surefire way to liven it up, and as more and more of the pop icon’s touring crew filtered in, a fully choreographed dance party soon broke out in the middle of the room. It was incredibly surreal standing on the sidelines attempting to groove to the music while what looked like a professional music video shoot sprawled out before us, but all of a sudden the energy in the place had been cranked to 11 and it was all we could do to try to soak up the crew’s ecstatic vibe.
Madonna was ushered into a roped-off section of the room and then disappeared, undoubtedly to have a few private moments with Prince while her team blew off a little steam on the dance floor. By 2:15 a.m. she had returned to the scene and was followed in short order by Prince, who stood near the back of the dance floor draped in a floor-length hooded sweater and smirked at the energetic dancers who were frolicking around the room.
As soon as Prince appeared the small crowd started pressing toward the stage, and even after Madonna’s tour buses had all been unloaded into Paisley Park there were still only roughly 60 people there to take in the impending show. Most of the people in attendance were standing within a couple yards of the band, and Prince seemed a little uncomfortable playing to such an intimate audience.
“You better keep dancing,” he instructed us, sitting at an organ and leading a new configuration of his band through a swampy, funky new song. 3RDEYEGIRL guitarist Donna Grantis was joined by a drummer Kirk Johnson and bassist Dwayne MonoNeon Thomas, Jr., who had more jazz and funk sensibilities than Grantis’s more hard-driving 3RDEYEGIRL bandmates Ida Neilsen and Hannah Ford Welton (who was dancing in the audience with her husband, Josh). The change in musicianship allowed Prince to deconstruct his songs into more complex, moody arrangements, tracing back to his roots in late ’70s jazz and funk.
As if to show off the band’s newly discovered chemistry, Prince followed up a rip-roaring rendition of “Guitar” with a lengthy, solo-filled jam to the Bill Withers song “Use Me Up.” After giving Grantis and his new bassist a turn at soloing, Prince slowed the song down and morphed it into a spacey, dreamy interlude, then tore through an impressive and complex piano solo that sounded like it was inspired in equal measure by Thelonious Monk and Jimi Hendrix.
When Prince launched into the next song, “Ain’t About to Stop,” off his latest album HITNRUN Phase One, I decided to try to discretely scan the room to see where Madonna was taking in the show. I had expected her to hang back a bit, or maybe sitting in her roped-off area, but once I stepped a little closer to the stage I realized that she was not only in the front row, but had perched on the edge of the stage at Prince’s feet, looking up at him adoringly as he sang.
There is a face that people make when they are watching Prince play guitar; it’s a gleeful expression that combines the joy of going down a roller coaster with the realization that you are witnessing a moment that might never be recreated by another being that lives on this beautiful Earth. It turns out Madonna also makes that face when she is watching Prince play. As the band stretched out into another jam and Prince ripped into a soul-levitating guitar solo, her mouth relaxed into an awestruck gape, revealing a shiny gold grill underneath her perfect red lipstick.
Prince, too, seemed a little awestruck by Madge, appearing nervous as he flitted around the stage to different instruments and taking great care to get the lighting, sound, and chord changes just right. It completely shifted the energy at the Park, which usually pulls like a magnet toward Prince’s spot in the room, and it was a rare chance to see two megastars share an intimate moment and a series of knowing smiles.
After the sixth song of the set, Prince leaned down and whispered something back and forth with Madonna, and then hopped back up to his keyboards and simply said, “Cool.” With that, Madonna made her way out of the building and Prince was left alone with his band and small group of adoring fans, and he delivered simmering renditions of “1000 X’s and O’s” and “X’s Face” before hopping off stage and handing things back to the DJ….’
Madonna is set to give her Philippine fans the best music experience of their lives when the Rebel Heart Tour arrives in Manila on Feb. 24 & 25, 2016 at the SM Mall of Asia Arena. The Manila concerts are presented by Globe, the country’s number 1 mobile brand and purveyor of the Filipino digital lifestyle.
Globe kicks off the Manila concerts early with the Globe Madonna Rebel Heart Tour Raffle Promo, the biggest of its kind in the country. With the promo, customers can get the chance to see the Queen of Pop to watch her concerts in Manila or in Los Angeles, USA, giving Madonna fans multiple opportunities to see her perform live.
The Globe Madonna Rebel Heart Tour Raffle Promo is open to Globe, TM and Tattoo customers for a chance to win tickets to Madonna’s Rebel Heart concert in Manila or an all-expense paid trip to catch Madonna’s Rebel Heart concert in Los Angeles, California, USA on October 27, 2015.
“Music is an integral part of the Filipino digital lifestyle and Globe is here to make the music experience even better. As the exclusive presentor of the Madonna Rebel Heart Tour in Manila, we are committed to providing a complete immersive experience for all Madonna fans out there, one of which is this exciting raffle promo that aims to give lucky Globe and Tattoo customers the elusive privilege to see their idol for free, whether in the country or in Los Angeles,” shares Globe Telecom Senior Vice President for Consumer Mobile Marketing Issa Cabreira.
One million pesos worth of prizes are up for grabs, where two (2) winners will be flown to Los Angeles to watch Madonna’s Rebel Heart Tour in the U.S. inclusive of roundtrip airfare, hotel accommodation, pocket money, and a backstage tour experience. Meanwhile, sixteen (16) lucky Globe customers will get the chance to see Madonna in Manila on February 24 or 25, 2016.
To register to the raffle, Globe Prepaid, TM, Postpaid, and Tattoo Nomadic customers can text MADONNA REG <Name>/<Address>/<Email>/<Age>/<Gender> to 2662. Globe Platinum and Tattoo Home customers are automatically registered to the raffle.
Promo period is from October 1 to 31, 2015. Draw date for the LA concert package is on October 16, 2015. For the Manila concert tickets, draw date is on November 6, 2015. For more details, visit www.globe.com.ph/BeOnewithMadonna.
These shows are going to be spectacular, spokesman for organisers says after tickets for Material Girl’s February 18 date run out despite prices of up to HK$11,888
All tickets for Madonna’s second concert in Hong Kong on February 18 again sold out within 30 minutes of going on sale at 10am on Friday, in a repeat of the earlier rush for tickets for her first performance on February 17.
Concert organisers Live Nation Lushington (Hong Kong) said more than 20,000 tickets were put on sale for the shows at AsiaWorld-Arena. The concerts are believed to have sold out faster than any others in Hong Kong. Live Nation had initially scheduled only one performance by the 57-year-old singer, who will be making her Hong Kong debut 32 years after first taking to the stage.
Madonna performs in Montreal during her Rebel Heart tour.
The cover of Madonna’s “Rebel Heart” album.
Fans were obviously not deterred by high prices. Tickets ranged in price from HK$688 for the cheapest seats to a whopping HK$11,888 for front-row seating. The most expensive package was the “Runway VIP Party Package”, which for HK$16,888 secures seating for two people alongside the Material Girl’s runway.
After the second show sold out, a spokesman for Live Nation said: “We are extremely thrilled with the results. We would like to thank everyone for supporting the Queen of Pop. These shows are going to be spectacular.”
On Wednesday a second Madonna concert was added in Bangkok for February 10 after all tickets to the initial February 9 show in the Thai capital sold out in less than an hour. The Bangkok shows will be staged at the city’s 15,000-seat Impact Arena.
Madonna’s Rebel Heart Tour began in Montreal, Quebec, on September 9 and will take in 64 cities before it wraps up in Brisbane on March 27, 2016. The tour follows the spring release of Madonna’s Rebel Heart album, the singer’s 13th studio album.
The first box office totals are in for Madonna’s Rebel Heart Tour that launched on Sept. 9. With the first 10 performances reported to Billboard by promoter Live Nation Global Touring, the tour’s total gross stands at $20 million, based on 132,769 sold tickets from the first eight arenas on the schedule.
Highlights include the tour opener in Montreal with sellout crowds on two nights and a gross of $3.4 million to kick off the tour’s six-month run. Washington, D.C.’s Verizon Center hosted the first U.S. performance with a packed house of 13,271 on Sept. 12. Two shows at New York City’s Madison Square Garden produced the top gross so far with a $5.2 million take from 28,371 sold seats on Sept. 16 and 17. A second Canadian performance on Sept. 21 occurred at a new venue, the 18,000-seat Centre Vidéotron in Quebec City that opened just 13 days earlier.
The Rebel Heart Tour’s opening leg in the U.S. and Canada will hit 20 arenas before wrapping in San Diego on Oct. 29 after a seven-week span. The following week, the tour heads to Europe for shows booked in 11 countries through December 20. Then during the first quarter of 2016, the tour will resume after the holidays with treks in three continents: a second North American run in January, Asia in February and a final Oceania jaunt in March.
Madonna’s last stint on the road, the MDNA Tour, topped $305 million in box office revenue in 2012, earning her the No. 1 ranking on Billboard’s Top 25 tours chart that year. Her highest-grossing tour on record is 2008-2009’s Sticky & Sweet that reached $408 million in sales, landing at No. 5 among the top-grossing tours of all time.
It’s easy to admire Madonna and not necessarily easy to like her.
Respect her as an inspirational visionary, a hard-driven original, a tough-as-nails survivor, a single mother (of four) and a singular artist. Dislike her because she’s a demanding, narcissistic, self-aware, self-absorbed, perfectionist diva. There’s good reason that she titled a song “Unapologetic Bitch” on her latest album.
It was a lot easier to like Madonna on Thursday night at Xcel Energy Center than it was in 2012 there. Her MDNA Tour was disturbingly dark and violent. This year’s Rebel Heart Tour found a kinder, gentler and happier Madonna.
The takeaway from her 130-minute show was that she was more playful than provocative, with more heart than hedonism and more smiles than scowls. At first, though, it didn’t quite seem that way. The 57-year-old godmother of pop seemed short on energy, hoarse of voice and wanting more from her 13,000 fans.
“Did the cat get your tongue, St. Paul?” she asked a half-hour into the show. “Or have you had too many beers? Or not enough beers?”
Ah, Madonna still knows how to push buttons. In other words, it was Madonna being Madonna.
Apparently the crowd didn’t get riled up when she co-mingled religion and sex on “Holy Water” (which spilled into a bit of her 1990 classic “Vogue”), in which dancers dressed as nuns pole-danced with Madonna, and “Devil Pray,” which urges to ditch drugs and find spirituality by, um, having an orgy on a Last Supper-like table.
Of course, Madonna didn’t need religious settings to make her points. Set in a 1950s garage, the double entendre “Body Shop” was both auto and erotic. But, as she has proved throughout her 30-some-year career, Madonna can change faster than a chameleon. She seamlessly sat atop a pile of tires in the body shop and offered a doo-wop treatment of 1986’s “True Blue,” accompanied by ukuleles.
Like Bruce Springsteen and U2, Madonna doesn’t want to be an oldies act in concert, so she offered nine tunes from her “Rebel Heart” album. Of course, she dressed them up, first with Asian costumes (think Samurai warriors), then Spanish outfits (matadors aplenty) and finally something with French flair (welcome to the cabaret, 1920s style).
Those outfits — or variations thereof — also worked for mixing in oldies re-imagined. “Dress You Up” became a Mexican street scene, mashed up in the middle seamlessly by the Latin-tinged electronica of “Lucky Star.”
“It’s hot under here,” she said, removing her bolero hat after the dance-happy medley. “I’ve never worn so many clothes. Whose idea was it? Not yours.”
There were 450 outfits for the 20 dancers, two backup singers, four musicians and the one and only Madonna. When she exited to change costumes, her dancers took over the stage with some of the most thrilling and imaginative filler in arena concert history — including prancing atop cross-shaped bendable poles.
Although Madonna gained energy throughout the evening, she explained that she woke up with a fever Thursday morning. And that prompted her to break into an a cappella version of the classic “Fever.” Yes, Madonna can be in the moment and she can sing live (though she was lip syncing during dance numbers). She dedicated the Edith Piaf signature “La Vie En Rose” to Prince. And she crooned her 1987 hit “Who’s That Girl?”
She’d spent most of the night trying to explain that. Actually, she’s still evolving — and that’s why we keep paying attention.
Pop superstar Madonna performed at Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul on Thursday, October 8, 2015. (Pioneer Press: John Autey)
It was easy to get caught up in the excitement the last time Madonna was in town, for a two-night stand in November 2012, thanks to the herculean effort she puts into her live shows as well as the fact that it had been 25 years since the Material Girl last played Minnesota.
In retrospect, that tour has lost some of its shine, due to its dark tone, the pointless interlude where Madge brandished a gun and her brattish decision to start the show after 10:30 p.m. All of which made Madonna’s Thursday night return to St. Paul’s Xcel Energy Center a relief.
Now 57 and at the end of her 10-year contract with Live Nation, Madonna stands at a crossroads in her career. She’s likely to be 60 the next time she tours, that is if she can find another deal as sweet as her current one.
Her new album “Rebel Heart” earned warm reviews but the worst sales of her career. Still, if such weighty thoughts are bogging her down, Madonna didn’t show it Thursday night, when she took the stage at 9:45 p.m. in front of about 13,000 fans. The 2015 version of Madonna is unafraid to enjoy herself on stage.
For all the millions her outings have raked in over the years, Madonna has approached live performing with a certain teeth-gritting grimness. She works harder than most in the entertainment business and has never been afraid to remind her audience of that fact. But now, she’s not only seemingly happy, she’s almost playful.
To be sure, Madonna still thrives on controversy, even if it’s difficult for her to truly shock in this era when “Fifty Shades of Grey” made S&M mainstream, network TV shows feature explicit (straight and gay) sex scenes and there’s a Cool Pope who is totally down with “Like a Prayer” (possibly).
She opened the show with a sequence of songs that culminated in scantily clad nuns pole dancing on crosses and an orgy-inspired re-enactment of the Last Supper.
But she did it all with an obvious sense of humor, barking out her goofy new song “Bitch I’m Madonna” and strapping on an electric guitar for a reworked “Burning Up.”Later, she conjured the spirit of the musical “Grease” for a sexed-up take on “Body Shop,” pulled out a ukulele for a tender “True Blue” (and returned to the instrument later for a cover of Edith Piaf’s signature tune “La Vie en Rose,” dedicated to her “good friend” Prince), adopted a Spanish bullfighter look for “La Isla Bonita” and wrapped things up with an ebullient “Holiday.”
As was the case in previous tours, Madonna did lean heavily on her new album, “Rebel Heart,” and not all of it worked, particularly the harsh remix of “Living for Love,” which otherwise stands as her finest single in a decade.
During “HeartBreakCity,” she included a bit of “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore” from her second album. The latter took on a new poignancy when delivered by an AARP-eligible, twice-divorced mother of four.
MELBOURNE showman Scott Maidment has a friend and colleague in Madonna.
The queen of pop saw his last two shows in London and loved them so much she invited Maidment to work on her Rebel Heart world tour.
He obliged, naturally, and flew to New York to create one of the numbers, Illuminati, for her concert.
“It’s pretty amazing walking into a room when you meet someone like Madonna and she goes, ‘I really like your show, I want to work with you’,” he says.
Maidment is the creative brain behind Strut & Fret, the company responsible for a parade of acclaimed shows, including those seen by Madonna, Cantina and Limbo.
Ironically, Limbo was made in Melbourne almost three years ago to tour the world, but has never been performed here until now.
It is one of the headline acts at this year’s Melbourne Festival and will take up residence in a Belgium spiegeltent to be raised on the south bank of the Yarra.
Strut and Fret specialises in circus-cabaret entertainment — the jaw-dropping kind with audiences right up close to the action for added wow.
It’s three days before the Pope leads hundreds of thousands of people in a mass at Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway, and four miles away at the Wells Fargo Center, one of America’s most famous ex-Catholics is already getting into the spirit of the occasion. Madonna uses a giant cross as a stripping pole and writhes around on a re-creation of the Last Supper table as she moans, “Yeezus loves my pussy best.” “Popey-wopey is on his way over,” she says later in the show. “I think he’s stalking me.”
The gleefully blasphemous moment is one of 21 elaborately choreographed numbers on Madonna’s Rebel Heart Tour, which has been packing North American arenas since it kicked off September 9th. It’s her most extravagant stage show ever — a two-hour set that features samurai warriors, matadors, gypsies, rockabilly kids dancing around a body shop and a dangerous-looking dance routine on top of giant swaying poles, not to mention a grand finale set in a gleaming 1920s-style Paris cafe.
“The logistical avalanche of putting it together was unlike anything I’ve ever done,” says Arianne Phillips, the head costume designer, who notes the tour uses 500 pairs of shoes and 450 costumes. “Every day of rehearsals felt like an impossibility.” To prepare for the show, the 20 backup dancers spent three months putting in 14-hour days, six days a week. The 57-year-old Madonna was right beside them. “No matter what we asked her to do, like riding a nun like a surfboard, she’d try without flinching,” says Megan Lawson, the tour’s head choreographer.
The day after the Philadelphia show, Madonna phoned up Rolling Stone to talk about the tour.
At what point in the creation of Rebel Heart did you start brainstorming ideas for this tour? Finishing my record was filled with panic and pressure because of all the leaks, so I wasn’t really thinking about my live show until I released the record and started making videos and doing my promo show. So honestly, I didn’t really try to sit down and get my head around it until last March. That’s unusual for me because I usually start thinking way, way, way in advance.
When you did start plotting out the tour, what were your goals? My goals are always the same. I want to take people on a journey. I like to explore themes. I believe that if you’re going to a big venue like a sports arena or a stadium you need to present a kind of entertainment that interfaces with all of the senses.
I don’t think it’s enough to just stand onstage and sing. I think that there are moments for that, but I’m a very visual person. I was trained as a dancer, so those kinds of things are really important to me, in my shows, anyway.
I feel like when the audience walks into a show, they walk into a magical world, and they’re transported for two hours to another time and place, and they plug into the matrix of my creative brain, which, generally, explores and expresses all of the things that I’m interested in, and/or inspired by. So that’s always my goal. And of course, it changes and shifts from record to record, from tour cycle to tour cycle. The moods I’m in, the themes I want to express, all of that.
What are the primary themes of this tour? The first message is empowerment, and we’re using the song “Iconic” as the opening. It talks about being a warrior and fighting for what you believe in, and recognizing that we all have the ability to be iconic in our own ways — to be warriors, to shine. Also, I’m honored that I had Mike Tyson is in my song and video, because I really look up to him and admire him as a person who has gone through the roller coaster of life, who has walked through the fire, gone through the darkness. And for me, he’s metamorphosed into a human being who is someone to look up to and be inspired by.
So, that would be the first theme. And “Devil Pray” is a song about being sucked into the illusion that alcohol and weed can give you insight into sort of the upper world, so to speak, or can make you closer to God. And in fact, they do. But I think in the end it’s an illusion.
As I said, I don’t just jump from subject to subject, so we have to go on a journey. We have to start out as warriors, and then we explore themes of sex and religion, because they are things in our society that are always separated. And, to me, sex is a sacred gift that was given to us. It’s meant to be played with. I like to, obviously, provoke people with concepts of sex and religion’s point of view about it. That’s because I believe that people need to be challenged even if they disagree with me, which is fine. But I’m not gonna take you song-by-song. We’ll be talking for two hours.
How about you just tell me your process for picking which older songs to put into the set list. That couldn’t be easy. That is really, really hard. Basically, I go through the catalog, which is a pretty long list of songs. And once I got an idea for the themes I want to explore, I break the show down into four sections, and then I try and find ways to interweave my old songs with the new, and generally that has to do with themes. So we try a lot of stuff out, and it doesn’t work.
Then we try things that I never would have thought of and it does work. It’s a very, very long process. That’s, for me, the biggest challenge, to marry the old with the new. Because obviously those songs I wrote a long time ago, and I have to reinvent them to a certain extent so that they speak to me now versus the woman that I was 30 years ago.
I’ve always admired that about your concerts. It would be so easy to simply do your 15 biggest hits and stick to the original arrangements, but you’ve never once taken that easy route. No. And I just couldn’t do it, anyway. I just couldn’t do it.
Can you explain why? Because I’ve changed, and sonics have changed. The sound of a synth or an 808 [drum machine] … everything has just changed so much. If you put the exact song next to something new, it just sounds so small and mono. You know what I mean? They just can’t live together.
“True Blue” was a really great moment, stripping it down like that. Yeah. I love performing that song and “La Vie En Rose.” They’re so much fun because there’s something naive and sweet about singing a song on a ukulele.
Are you new to that instrument? Oh, God, yes [laughs]. I suck at it, basically. The chord progressions are completely different than they are on a guitar, so it’s not something I can play without thinking. But I have to constantly challenge myself. It’s a challenge for my every night, because a G on a ukulele doesn’t look like a G on a guitar. It’s a little tricky. Gotta pay attention.
Tell me how you get in shape for a tour. You’re doing that show over 80 times in the coming months. That’s a lot to prepare for solely on a physical basis. Yeah. This is true, although I have to say I haven’t had as much time to train and prepare myself physically for this show as I have in the past with other shows. That’s just because I have four kids, and they take up a lot of time. So I have to choose between working out and spending time with them, and then also putting my show together. I have to find the balance of training enough so that I’m not winded and out of breath when I’m onstage, but also not wearing myself out, and also seeing my kids. The list goes on and on.
Do you get something creatively out of doing a live show that you don’t get out of making movies or recording an album? Well, there’s nothing like a live show, obviously. Living on the edge, being out, never knowing what’s going to happen, it’s a dangerous place to be. You make mistakes, you’ve got to with those mistakes. You know, each audience is different. I love when the audience is alive and plays with me, like it was in Brooklyn. People get my sense of humor and I can riff off of them, both musically and just conversationally.
When you do the same show every night, you have to build up your energy and get ready to be this life force and take the stadium or sports arena by storm. It’s a lot of work. And then coming down afterward is a lot of work, so there’s nothing like it.
For me, when you’re onstage, there’s no cheating. There’s just no cheating. When you’re in the studio you can do another take, you can fix things, you can re-tune your vocals. When you’re making a film you can go into the edit suite, you can fix things in post-production. I mean, it’s not live. A concert is just a whole different world.
“For me, when you’re onstage, there’s no cheating.”
Do you see yourself still doing tours in 10 or 15 years? I don’t even think that far in advance, but if I did travel around and perform and connect to audiences, I’m sure it would look and feel different than, say, the extravagant sort of musicals that I put on right now.
Do you think you could enjoy a more stripped-down show that’s just you and a small band, minus all the production? I quite like the idea of just sitting on a stool with a bottle of wine, a guitar and working my stand-up comedy into the whole scenario. I like talking to audiences, telling stories. I think I could make an interesting show, to tell you the truth. I quite like the idea of doing something simple.
This is your sixth tour of the 2000s. Part of the challenge must be finding ways to top yourself since you’ve done so many different things. I don’t think of it as topping myself. It’s like making a film, and then another film. You don’t have to top yourself. It’s just a different story I have to yell. I work with a lot of filmmakers and costume designers and choreographers and dancers, so it’s always going to be different.
This crew of dancers was pretty amazing. It seemed like they were capable of anything. Yeah, they’re wonderful, super talented and unique. I always tell my dancers that they’re actors, they’re not dancers, and so much is going to be expected of them. I always say the word “intention.” I don’t just like waving my arm around for the sake of waving an arm around. Why are you doing this? What are you trying to say? So I think that’s what makes my shows different.
It’s a funny coincidence that the Pope and you are hitting cities just days apart this week. [Laughs] It’s hilarious, yes. I’m hoping that we run into each other.
You talked about him a lot at the show. Are you a fan? I have a long relationship with the Pope, with the Vatican, with the Catholic Church, with my excommunication. Anyway, you know, I was raised a Catholic, and no matter what spiritual path I might go down, I always feel some kind of inexplicable connection with Catholicism. It kind of shows up in all of my work, as you may have noticed.
Are you happy with the direction this Pope is taking the church? I’ll state the obvious and say that he seems like he’s a much more open-minded individual, who seems to be moving outside of the dogma of the Catholic Church that has been set in stone since the days of Constantine. So I think it’s good.
It’s good to look out into the big, wide world and see that we have changed, and at the end of the day the message of Jesus is to love your neighbor as yourself, and so that means not judging. And to do that, you have to be more open-minded and accepting of people who have lifestyles that you perceive as unconventional. So I think it’s good, yeah. And I also believe that he’s the kind of Pope you could sit down and have a cup of tea with, and/or that you could make a joke about something and he would laugh about it.
It’s funny to think back to the Blond Ambition Tour when the Pope tried to stop your show in Rome from even happening. Yes, he did do that. But times have changed so much then, in so many ways, and not just with the Pope.
Do you think he’d enjoy the show? I do, actually, because at the end of the day, the message of my show is about love, and that’s his message.
We have finally completed our Rebel Heart Album Promo in our Album Promo section. It took quite some work, but we are very proud of the result. We have included some rare bits in the press and memorabilia section as well. What about the rejected artwork for the beloved Dutch official Living For Love 1 track DVD promo (given away at official release party in Amsterdam), how about the printers proof sheets for the final product? This and much more:
tons of facts regarding the release and the promo tour
TONS of scanned magazine/newspaper articles and photographs of Rebel Heart related memorabilia (from our own collection)
All of the official music videos
See the behind the scenes specials of the music videos
watch the entire promo tour online!
View our own picture gallery of the taping at Le Grand Journal
Read our own live coverage of the taping at Le Grand Journal as well as our meet & greet with Madonna
Buy Rebel Heart on iTunes
It is all there! What are you waiting for? Click HERE and ENJOY!
Get ready for worlds’ largest record fair in Utrecht Holland on November 21 & 22!
As always we can provide you with a discount code to purchase your tickets online. Please use the code RP3 when you purchase your tickets at Recordplanet. You will pay 10.50 (plus transacation fees) instead of 11.50 or 13 EUR at the cashier desk on the day.
Photographer George DuBose will be there too (just reported on his upcoming book yesterday) in the signing corner right next to the stage.
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