Lady Gaga

Lady Gaga's roadshow, titled "The Monster Ball", has the drama, spectacle, exaggeration, and intensity of opera with the thematic content of a talk show. The show opens, after the mandatory delay for expectation, with the dancers, as Gaga fans on their way to the concert, struggling with a stalled car in an obvious urban area. (The car engine turns into a piano later.) Street signs point to "hospital", "emergency room", "pharmacy" but also, less concretely, to "drugs" and "death". Gaga appears as a shadow on the curtain, on a fire escape to the side of the stage. There she is, an urban working class heroine. The audience, resentment-free despite the inexplicable wait, goes wild.

The music is bouncy and catchy; some of the songs are terrific. But Gaga has recognized the danger in concerts: If it's just the music, the DVD is better. So she has emphasized form over substance and developed a real performance. The costumes are extravagant--less being more. The dances are furious, laden with horniness and sensuality. And there is blood. Lots of it, especially on her, for impact. Impact. Sometimes she's a sacrifice. Sometimes she's the priestess. Sometime towards the end a giant statue of Christ catches fire.

Of course there is danger in pushing the envelope; sometimes you reach a place where there is nowhere else to go. But if any performer can make a success out of excess, it will be Gaga. She has been travelling since November 2009 and has renovated the show once. The show is exotic, powerful, explosive, confrontational, exhausting, obscene, repulsive, sensual, contrived and, generally, extremely well done. And well aimed. The audience is a cross-section of the peripheral: The extravagantly homosexual, worshipful young girls, partiers and admiring business women. There is a constant drumbeat--not of the rockers who get no satisfaction--but of the uncertain, the lost, the unformed being told over and over that they are of value, that they are a bit different --not because of some heartless accident--but because they were "born this way" and "this way" is good and will be enjoyable and productive.

It is a genius that this woman, coldly carving a niche in the entertainment world, goes on a fatiguing 18 month tour whose theme is her audience.