Lady Gaga doesn’t have to prove anything to anyone. In a decade and a half, she’s proven her hand at club pop, the Great American Songbook, and singer/songwriter confessionals, and shown her mastery of image creation and provocation before stripping back down to the basics in “A Star Is Born,” all while laying claim to the weirdos, art nerds, and queer kids of the world. So what’s left for her to conquer? If Friday’s sold-out Chromatica Ball Tour date at Fenway Park didn’t offer any easy answers, it certainly showed one of this century’s greatest pop stars flexing her muscles after four years and several pandemic-fueled false starts.
If anything, Gaga returned with a vengeance. The opening “Bad Romance” found the singer encapsulated within what seemed to be a combination of a fitted cloak, a cocoon, and a sarcophagus. She did almost nothing beyond creeping her arms out at odd angles as a phalanx of dancers scurried below her, and she still commanded focus with impossible ease.
Unafraid of making herself grotesque for effect, she took on the persona of an imperious extraterrestrial queen and snarled her way through “Just Dance.” The house throb that has fueled much of her most recent material generated an insistent undertow that amplified her power, even when she was lying on a concrete slab tilted at 45 degrees, like a mad scientist’s monster, for “Alice.”
She was so tightly wrapped in her ferocious stage persona, in fact, that when she called out her band at the very end of Act II of her four-act show, it was the first time all night that she presented as recognizably human. By the time she reached a satellite stage in the middle of the field for Act IV, the façade had dropped as much as it ever would. She was still Gaga, naturally, going avant-garde — wearing futuristic harlequin garb while playing at a piano molded into twisted, surrealistic sculpture — for her most vulnerable material like “Shallow” and “Always Remember Us This Way.”
The latter song, very possibly the great lost Lady Gaga power ballad, was built on sympathetic (rather than forced) unity, the theme that made her Mother Monster to her fans in the first place. And the spell of that, a free-time cabaret-styled “Born This Way,” and a solo “The Edge of Glory” dedicated to everyone affected by the constricting of reproductive rights, carried over even through the warbling synth-house jam of “Fun Tonight” and electro-dance rush of “Stupid Love” back on the main stage. Gaga closed with her airplane-movie song “Hold My Hand,” over the top in exactly the right rock-ballad ways as she dropped to her knees and shredded herself to bits on the floor. Then she headed to the exit, paused to do a Michael Jackson kick and spin, and vanished.
Marc Hirsh can be reached at officialmarc@gmail.com or on Twitter @spacecitymarc
LADY GAGA
At Fenway Park, Friday