OTTAWA - Ottawa went gaga when Lady Gaga rolled her shockingly good Monster Ball tour into Scotiabank Place Monday night.
There was excitement and hairspray a-plenty in the air as some 12,000 little monsters, composed largely of glamorous drag queens, glitter boys and Lady Gaga wannabes braved a late-winter blast for what might easily be the pop concert event of the year.
Gaga's shown in the past an instinct for teasing media and fans alike with her chart-topping disco songs, over-the- top fashion fantasies, theatrical innovations complete with gender-bending sexual branding.
But in the end, it's mostly fodder for the tabloids when compared to the imaginative brilliance of Gaga's extraordinary live performance.
The girl, who turns 25 on March 28, sure knows how to work it, with a monstrously entertaining show that blended Broadway-scale gospel service and fashion show in a strip joint with semi-naked vampires modelling costumes by Gaga's own Haus of Gaga for an otherworldly experience that put George Lucas to shame.
Eighteen months into her unrelenting extravagant Monster Ball, Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, a.k.a. Lady Gaga, opened her show in silhouette, posing like an extraterrestrial runway model with a flaming yellow pageboy for her opening song Dancing in the Dark.
From that point on, it was one theatrical set-piece after another, each one more surprising then the last. Gaga played a keyboard in the boot of a large cartoon green Rolls Royce for Just Dance and when her microphone crashed out, she grabbed a second microphone and yelled, "At least I don't lip-sync."
There would be almost as many costume changes as there were songs, with Gaga dressed as a nun riding the subway in lingerie humping madly on Love Game, switching gears to work up a frenzy on Boys, Boys, Boys and Money Honey, before stripping off the trench coat, revealing a tiny patent-leather-look bikini, her default outfit for the two-hour show, to sing her hit single Telephone.
As well as being a dynamic singer and dancer, Gaga showed an equally brilliant skill as an imaginative actress in her own musical drama, rarely missing an opportunity to turn a simple song into a theatrical fantasy, as when she sang You and I/So Happy I Could Die while playing a flaming piano.
Even between songs, she was totally engaged playing Gaga, her alter ego, the bitchy disco queen, who mostly screamed at the fans to get over their self-esteem insecurities, get off their asses and DANCE.
However, the show was more than just about attitude. There were moments when Gaga and her cast of a dozen actor/dancers hit actual emotional nerves as she did the love song Monster covered in blood or the angelic ritual on Alejandro.
The giant monster might have been a misstep on Paparazzi, but the Metropolis space theme sent the fans into delirium on Bad Romance.
Exhaustingly entertaining.
denis.armstrong@sunmedia.ca
