By the end of her four-night stint in London in the past week, Madonna’s status as pop’s ultimate survivor was assured.
Four months ago, it was uncertain whether she would be able to begin her Celebration tour, showcasing a career that set the template for modern pop stardom.
She was hospitalised in June with a life-threatening bacterial infection that left her in intensive care, and observers doubted the 65-year-old would recover in time. As did she.
“I’m pretty damn surprised I made it this far,” she said on the first night. “And I mean that on many levels.”
A total of 80,000 fans packed into the O2 Arena this week and, despite technical hitches on several nights, the tour earned four- and five-star reviews. Critics praised its canny assessment of her musical, cultural and societal impact – although
some tabloids balked at its proud display of her sexuality.
Here, the Guardian looks through her typically dazzling start.
Community at her core
Madonna would never have become the star she is without finding a community in 80s New York queer culture, as the Celebration tour made plain. Her dancers were largely Black, Latin, queer and trans, and the exuberance between them felt gorgeous and sincere.
The show’s greatest stylistic influence is ballroom culture, which she first showcased in her 1990 hit Vogue. Her foregrounding of the artform – such as judging a ball competition and having the RuPaul’s Drag Race winner Bob the Drag Queen as an MC – felt like an authentic acknowledgment of a mutually loving bond.
That was underlined by a profoundly moving tribute to her peers and the community lost to Aids: the giant disco ball that twirled during Holiday slumped to the ground, crushing a male dancer. As she started Live to Tell, screens revealed portraits of late friends including Freddie Mercury, Keith Haring, Robert Mapplethorpe and Peter Hujar. She sang to them on a suspended platform, the images multiplying so fast you could no longer make out the men’s individual identities.
She’s still scrappy five decades in
Starting three months later than planned, said the musical director Stuart Price, “created an opportunity to further enhance the show”. The performance was full of spectacular set pieces – a spinning carousel filled with muscular male dancers; flying stages; enough biblical symbolism to fill the Vatican – but it also felt thrillingly haphazard, befitting the young Madonna’s make-or-break attitude. That was dramatised in the prelude to Holiday, staged on the steps of famed New York nightclub Paradise Garage with Madonna begging the bouncer to be let in while gorgeous queens sauntered past. It also came through in her seemingly off-the-cuff addresses: beer in hand, remembering her early days playing at punk club CBGB’s before a brilliant guitar-led rendition of Burning Up; beer also in hand on night three as she talked about her anguish over the Israel-Hamas war.
Age is no match for her
One of the most moving aspects of the Celebration tour is its reflection of how much Madonna has had to overcome: poverty and risk as a young dancer in New York; ferocious censure; pop’s ever-present threat of obsolescence. Then there is also the sheer passage of time: the toxic combination of misogyny and ageism, not to mention the physical limitations that a body – and a dancer’s relentlessly flogged body, at that – can take. Madonna has been confronting the former for more than half her life. “The most controversial thing I’ve done is to stick around,” she said in voiceover – a clip from an awards acceptance speech – as newspaper clips lambasting her age spin across the backdrop. But she’s also vanquished the latter: executing a show this physical just four months after her hospitalisation is an astonishing feat; her undisguised knee support sleeve also read as an unapologetic acknowledgment of the exertion and bodily toll entailed in performing at this level aged 65. Her acoustic cover of Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive was well earned – and her voice sounded formidable.
Conquering new sexual frontiers
Nobody has made sexuality into iconography like Madonna. But there was a point behind – almost – every cone bra and shred of latex as she protested prudishness and hypocrisy, sent up the absurdity of the virgin-whore dichotomy and foregrounded eroticism during an era where sexuality could become a death sentence. Onstage, her age added a new dimension to this lifelong mission as she revelled in her status as an object of desire and an enduringly sexual being.
Family is everything
During the song Mother and Father, Madonna sang to an image of her mother, while her son David Banda played guitar in front of a screen of his late birth mother. Madonna’s daughters also featured: Lourdes Leon helped judge the drag ball on night one, Mercy James played piano beautifully on Bad Girl and – stealing the show – 11-year-old Estere deejayed and vogued. And in respect of her queer and marginalised fans, she hymned chosen family – the support networks that many people create in the face of rejection and persecution at home.
Wackiness is part of the enterprise
The first half of the tour plots a fairly linear path through Madonna’s history. But once she passed the early 90s, narrative went out of the window in favour of the relative chaos that has become her modern calling card. There were samples of Sam Smith and Kim Petras’s provocative hit Unholy (albeit not Vulgar, Madonna’s actual duet with Smith), a delightful spotlight on the Dominican rapper Tokischa and a strange interlude for The Beast Within, in which Madonna’s dancers trudged through a desert landscape reminiscent of a Star Wars prequel.
Controversy remains her second language
There were, of course, a few flagrant provocations: having paid tribute to Prince, with a purple-costumed guitarist ripping a guitar solo at the end of Like a Prayer, she also included a mashup of Like a Virgin with various Michael Jackson hits, while silhouettes of the two frolicked on screen in reference to their on-screen romance. And on night three, she expanded on her previous allusions to the Israel-Hamas war, lamenting the children killed in the conflict and advocating for “no sanctions, no land given or taken”.
Her star power remains
Despite the tour’s focus on Madonna’s fallibility, it was impossible not to behold the fact the actual Madonna was right there, running through a recent history that felt more like mythology.
