A Haunting Dance Keeps Audience In Trance

Is it 2008 or 2025?

It feels like yesterday when Lady Gaga first broke out on the scene with her melodramatica, synth operatic suono in The Fame and The Fame Monster, and what makes her Mayhem album accessory concert The Mayhem Ball all the more amazing is how timeless it is.

“I’ll see you in 20 more years,” said the Oscar winner and 14x Grammy winning artist, underscoring that notion toward the end of Monday night’s concert at The Kia Forum in Inglewood, CA.

“I’ll just keep coming back — is that OK?” she exclaimed to cheers and wavy claws from her monsters.

Myriad performing artists go through their careers losing their way, losing their sound, and thus losing their fans. Redefinition can be a killer, and that’s a hard hole sometimes to crawl out of.

Not for Lady Gaga whose Mayhem Ball is a celebration of everything that’s her: weird love, blood-gushing broken heart, newfound tattoo amour, and sublime nightmarish dreams. What’s old is new, and her seventh album, Mayhem, is everything pop opera we love about Gaga. For, if Stefani Germanotta’s latest ditty repertoire Mayhem didn’t work, then neither would Mayhem Ball concert even in all its fashion. Her latest canon is a perfect melodic marriage to the bass line of her classics (“Alejandro”, “Poker Face”, “Bad Romance”, etc.).

When it comes to pop star resurrections, Mayhem Ball brings to mind Madonna’s Confession of a Dance Floor. Both albums/concerts repped a rebound, and an homage to the disco spirit of the pop iconoclasts who double as LGBTQ+ champs. Both renaissance albums arrived roughly two decades into each artist’s career following the launch of their first albums. If you go by what the media tells you, Madonna Louise Ciccone and Germanotta loathe any comparison to the other. However, after basking in Madonna’s Felliniesque Celebration Tour last year at the Forum, and being stuck in a wonderful time loop that is Mayhem Ball, the question as to who gives a better show –Madonna or Lady Gaga– comes to mind. Alas, it’s a rhetorical one akin to the schoolyard debate: Who would win in a fight — Superman or Batman?

You could say Gaga’s dance troupe is prone to more physical tantrums, more cartwheels (“Abracadabra”) and more monster-mash dancing (take your pick: either the purple jacket guys, who are, yes, sitting while they’re dancing, to “Zombieboy”, or the spooky entourage who surround Gaga in the “Disease” grave sequence.

While Madge strutted a look back at the eras of her life in Celebration, Gaga’s Mayhem Ball is Moulin Rouge! on acid with dollops of Alice in Wonderland and Phantom of the Opera in a production design that reveres early 1900s horror.

How does it stack up to Gaga’s first Monster’s Ball tour from 2009-2011? By all accounts, in ambition, scope, and costume changes, Mayhem Ball is a much bigger monster.

The main set piece is a Colosseum like opera house in which the band, the dancers and Gaga entrance about. The runway which juts out from the stage into the crowd is a phallic design, which depending on the number, fills up like blood, a multi-colored parquet floor or other design. Throughout the 2 1/2 hour night there are costume changes galore including but not limited to a skeleton-like majorette costume (a nod to Michael Jackson’s get-up from “Dangerous” which Gaga wears during her gondola performance of “Shallow”). At one point she’s dressed in a black hooded cloak ala Phantom of the Opera for “Vanish Into You” which is reportedly a nod to designer McQueen’s 2005 collection “It’s Only a Game”. Leading into the “Poker Face” romp, Gaga and dancers are adorned as chessboard pieces; the singer facing off with her doppelganger who she orders “Off with her head!”. The concert get-ups were styled by Gaga’s sister Natali Germanotta of Topo Studio, and Hunter Clem.

As the audience awaits eagerly for Gaga, on screen, there’s a shot of multi-platinum artist in Elizabethen-like garb as she writes a letter with a feathered pen. As the show tunes up, that image enventually transitions to a placard reading “Act One: Of Velvet and Vice”. Each act is grouped with both songs of old new. The concert begins with two Gagas on screen, one brunette in her crimson Alice in Wonderland red queen gown across from blonde Gaga who wears a white gown. The duo chant together her “Manifesto of Mayhem”.

This is the Manifesto of Mayhem.
The Mistress stands before me, eyes wide and full of wrath
Her cane held in her right hand, on her left foot, a cast
“Beware”, she says, the chaos in your heart will never cease
until you find another way to harness what you seek
Her haunting tone, her restless speech, the music of her mouth, her screeching nails and inner life are like a storm, they’re loud
At oncе, in all her glory then, we both bеgin to dance
My head rolls back, my chest explodes, my hand begins to cramp
To not know any peace is the great nightmare for us all
To wake and feel unsettled in a house that has no walls
So I must sing and build the walls to cradle my own space.
And my own sound will grow the fortress of a home erased
And her and I, will find a way to live as dueling twins
But I will know, if in the end, Mistress of Mayhem, wins

Lights go down, and Gaga is rolled out on stage atop a scarlet needle pin cushion-like gown (designed by Samuel Lewis, Athena Lawton, and William Ramseur) in a nod to Thierry Mugler’s 1985 Lady Macbeth design. She’s crooning the Wednesday meme hit “Bloody Mary”. Her dress opens to reveal her monsters, dancing. It’s hard to think of another concert with an opening number that rivals this one. The Weeknd’s Styx “Mr. Roboto” tribute with his Return of the Jedi emperor guard back up dancers were quite intriguing at SoFi last month for his After Hours Til Dawn tour, but Gaga easily outstrips that. She eventually descends from the top of the caged gown to join in boogie for “Abracadabra” and “Judas”.

After a few songs, Gaga exclaims, “Welcome to the opera house.”