Lady Gaga's Chromatica Ball Brings the Show to Dodger Stadium But Really Soars With the Solo Segment: Concert Review

Freddie Freeman was hitting home runs in San Diego, so it was superstar Lady Gaga to pay a visit the unusually high on-base percentage Saturday night at Dodger Stadium, site of one of the final stops in his "Chromatica Ball" outing. There were few surprises, these many weeks into a mega-tour whose production values ​​were already known among the legions of Little Monsters who had long since laid curious paws on Gaga's setlists and sets.

Anyway, knowing what's coming doesn't negate the overwhelming effects from a savvy performer who is determined to look as inhumanly cold as possible while looking, conversely, like the warmest superstar you've ever met. Does it count, in terms of the game of the ball, as a slider?

As the singer reminded the audience, this occasion has been a long time coming, as Gaga brings effectively at the back among the artists who had tours planned for mid-2020 and are finally pulling it off. She is not Taylor Swift, relegating her “Lover Fests” to the trash of necessarily abandoned ideas; Gaga remained fearless in pointing out that 2020's "Chromatica" is the album she tours a lot behind, with 10 songs from the two-year-old album making up just under half of the entire set. There was a post-pandemic sense of victory in Gaga's increasingly long asides, at the end of the two-plus hour concert – “The whole world didn't fade away. We are all here, one way or another,” she said. But, as a backlash, you might detect a sense of vindication for the 'Chromatica' record itself, in the way she's determined not to drop it like a lamb that's lost in the storm. /p>

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - SEPTEMBER 10: Lady Gaga performs onstage during the Chromatica Ball Tour at Dodger Stadium on September 10, 2022 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Jeff Kravitz/Getty Images for Live Nation) Getty Images for Live Nation

So extra points for sass on how Gaga starts each show on the tour: in getting three of the biggest hits of the night — arguably the biggest — out of the way early on, essentially as a prelude to what she considers the "Chromatica"-centric body of the series. Not only does she take care of them early, but she sings them at varying levels of immobilization, starting with "Bad Romance," performed while she's inside a giant steel contraption that may represent a sort of steel exoskeleton, a sarcophagus or just good old iron maiden. Is this a metaphor for feeling imprisoned by past success? Or just a really cool X-treme costume design?

Once those three intro shots were out and Gaga regained full control of its life and limbs for the next hour and 45 minutes, title cards periodically appeared on screen, establishing "Act I" through "Act V" and subsequent endings and denouements. Unlike his long-running "Enigma" show in Las Vegas, this tour has none of those scripted philosophical monologues, so it's not easy to determine if there's a real story arc at play in his mind or if the "act" activity just provides cover for costume changes. There was undeniably an element of momentum going into stall mode every time Gaga disappeared from view for four or five minutes. But, as a costume show, you'd be hard-pressed to argue it wasn't worth it when the singer suddenly reappeared in a bodysuit made of what looked like plexiglass revealing innards, skin-tightening torso, or better yet, . ..