Over-the-top singer wows the crowd at the first of her two Toronto shows at the Air Canada Centre July 11, 2010.
LUCAS OLENIUK/TORONTO STAR
You know what? I’d be proud to be counted among Lady Gaga’s “Little Monsters.”
I went through a period of silly music-critic waffling last year where I wouldn’t admit even to my closest friends that I kind of dug “Just Dance” and “Poker Face,” and then it just seemed silly to join the hordes lavishing belated praise upon the young woman known to her parents as Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta when The Fame Monster and the video for “Bad Romance” hit in the fall and everyone could see how devastating this chick’s vision can be with a budget and a transatlantic podium.
But, hot damn, that was one hell of a show Gaga brought to the Air Canada Centre Sunday night and suddenly it doesn’t seem redundant to add one more voice to the Lady Gaga choir.
Spectacle is the crucial factor, obviously, when you’re operating at the increasingly rarefied level at which Lady Gaga has been operating these past few months, and her Monster Ball tour has plenty of that: sets that morph from seedy back alleys bedecked with neon signs advertising implants, gold teeth, drugs and “hot ass” to windblown New York subway stops to creepy enchanted forests; a recurring Wizard of Oz motif and the sparkling Good Witch gowns to go with it; flaming grand pianos; flaming coed dancers exploding out of trap-doors; a deliciously profane Catholic prayer to Jesus’s inclusive nature conducted while writhing orgasmically on the proscenium in a black-leather teddy while slathered in fake blood; and — the coup de grace — an actual Fame Monster that swallowed Lady Gaga whole during “Paparazzi.”
All of this crap would be nothing but your typical A-list Vegas romp onstage without the songs, though, and those are pretty monstrous in their own right. Gaga’s strength has been in bringing the hedonistic thump of millennial club music to pop tunes that even your mom and closeted gay dad can get with.
“Poker Face,” for instance, has enough of a Peaches bite that even the cool kids always secretly liked it, for instance, while “Alejandro” has that same, elusive magic-in-artifice that the entire ABBA catalogue had and pretty much everything else in the hit-after-hit catalogue does Madonna one better: one dirtier (“Disco Stick”), one dancier (“Beautiful, Dirty, Rich”), one gayer (between the sculpted boy toys cavorting onstage and the very cool shout-outs to LGBT charities supporting homeless gay youth, we didn’t really need “Boys Boys Boys” dedicated to “all my Toronto gayboys” to get the picture) and definitely one more melodramatic. Gaga’s torchy renditions of the piano ballad “Speechless” and the new tune “You and I” were broken up with so much teary-eyed, you-fans-are-my-children-forever chatter that one might have gagged on the sentiment had it not all seemed so sincere.
When Lady Gaga thanks her Little Monsters for letting her live the dreams she kind of lampoons in her music but also shrewdly tailor-made her music to fit, she seems to mean it. I’m not gonna fight with her, anyway. She kind of scares me.
