Her fans, nicknamed “Little Monsters”, will not have waited for her in vain. After two postponements from summer to summer due to Covid-19, Her Majesty Lady Gaga, the American singer who stole the scepter of dance-pop queen from Madonna in the late 2000s, was finally able to regain possession of the Stade de France. The attempt in the third season was to be the right one, the Dionysian enclosure being sold out on Sunday July 24.
Woman of all excesses, Lady Gaga had not been impressed by the gigantism of the place when she discovered it in 2012. Her two concerts at the Accor Arena (formerly Paris-Bercy) in 2018 unfortunately had to be canceled due to hospitalization related to fibromyalgia. The “little monsters” had therefore not seen the phenomenon in France – which, for her, means the capital – since its passage in this same Bercy in 2014.
Eight years was a very long time and the excitement was at its height when the silhouette of the star, then her face appeared in black and white in a film which already portrayed her in the role she assigned herself for her tour “The Chromatica Ball”: that of a heroine of dark fantasy. With a warrior aesthetic close to that of the Iron Thronethe novel series by George RR Martin which has been adapted into Game of Thronesbut revisited by a contemporary art performer.
Operative cutting
Released in May 2020, the album Chromatics saw Lady Gaga return to “dance”, with this mix of synthetic pop and electro-rock that had marked the success of her first albums, The Fame et Born This Way. Without bringing anything new in spite of the army of collaborators convened, if not this concept of an imaginary planet, escape from a world less and less habitable. This is probably not the opinion of the person concerned since she chose to defend almost the entirety of this disc, by resuming her operatic cutting. The orchestral preludes thus make it possible to pass from one scene to another, with four acts preceded by a prelude and concluded by a finale.
At 36, Stefani Germanotta does not yet give in to nostalgia for her repertoire, and it is to her credit. And what could seem repetitive when listening to the disc is no longer so on stage thanks to a show that we will qualify as total: it associates no less than sixteen dancers – to surround, carry or undress the queen of the evening –, five musicians – including guitarists who seem straight out of Hellfest –, video, and of course constant outfit changes. As for the decor, Lady Gaga wanted it as a tribute to brutalist architecture. As a result, this very heavy structure is reserved for a summer stadium tour and only deploys in five European cities.
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