Doja Cat Ramps Up the Rap and R&B — and All but Disguises Her Pop Hits — in Impressively Vibey ‘Scarlet’ Tour: Concert Review
04.11.2023 - 23:36
/ variety.com
Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic As Doja Cat‘s “Scarlet Tour” touched down at L.A.’s Crypto.com Arena Thursday night for what was only its second date, fans were still learning about just what shape her first arena headlining shows would take. Title cards appearing on the big screens announced that it would be broken down into five parts — Acts I, II, III, IV and V — but it took a while to figure out whether these chapter stops would involve big costume and production design changes, as might be typical on a big diva tour.
That wasn’t so much the case, though, as the shifts Doja Cat was going for over the course of the hour-and-a-half set were more subtle than that. The singer stuck with just two costuming choices in the performance… and a single dominant color.
Unlike Taylor Swift, Doja Cat spends her entire show sticking with her red era. Or, yes, “Scarlet,” to take a pretty obvious cue from the title of both the tour and her new album, released in September.
Her favoritism toward both the hue and the record were clear from the start: The set was thoroughly dominated by the performance of 15 of the 17 songs on “Scarlet,” augmented by just five from her biggest commercial outing, “Planet Her,” and two from “Hot Pink” and one from “Amala.” That extreme emphasis on just-released material is a pretty gutsy move, even before considering that Doja Cat is going to spend nearly the entire evening wearing a single literally gutsy costume — a skin-tight bodysuit that’s a stylized representation of a body’s crimson internal musculature — while bathed primarily in red (or an orange-red). On paper, these emphases on a brand-new album and one domineering hue may not sound like something that’s going to
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