Madonna’s Celebration Tour Proves the Material Girl is Still the Reigning Queen of Pop Music: Concert Review
15.10.2023 - 03:05
/ variety.com
Mark Sutherland Four songs into Madonna’s long-awaited Celebration Tour and a technical hitch gives her a chance to chat for a little longer than was probably planned. She tells the crowd of her early days being “hungry, broke and scared” in New York, with a lack of support from her father, who wanted her to come back home. “But I was not about to go back,” she declares.
“Because I am not a quitter!” You can say that again. Madonna has been many things to many people over her 40-year pop career – something this two-hour-plus, 40-odd song, multiple-costume-change telling of “the story of my life through music and dance” makes very clear. But throughout it all, she has always been an absolute trouper.
Most other performers would have balked at taking on a gruelling world tour less than four months after a stay in the ICU with a serious bacterial infection. Many more might have at least considered tempering the ambitious nature of an all-singing, all-dancing show that would be a physical challenge for any of today’s young pop megastars, let alone a 65-year-old pop veteran with strapping on her knee. But not Madonna.
After postponing the scheduled first leg, the tour finds itself starting – a mere 20 minutes late – at London’s O2 Arena, the very venue where, in 2015, she famously fell down the stairs after a cape malfunction at the BRIT Awards. Those of us who were close enough to hear the thud as she hit the floor like a pole-axed prize fighter that night were amazed when she simply got back to her feet and got on with the show. And tonight, she metaphorically climbs off the canvas of that hospital stay to reclaim her pop heavyweight crown, a metaphor helpfully supported by the elaborate boxing set-up utilized during the
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