Scheduled to kick off in mid-July and run through to October, the North American leg of Madonna's Celebration Tour was postponed due to her health problems, so the international tour began with the dates scheduled in Europe, starting on October 14 at London's O2 Arena.
Rather than launching a new album, the show is a retrospective of a 40-year career – Madonna Louise Ciccone's debut album was released in July 1983.
Sunday, November 12 at the Accor Arena was the first of four evenings on the Paris leg of a European tour that will end in early December. The venue's website lists a few tickets still on sale, for November 13, 19 and 20, ranging in price from €194 to €386.50.
Nearly an hour and 40 minutes late, due to technical problems – the audience watched as cables and mini-projectors were pulled up on to high supports – the concert finally opened with the arrival of a showman in a Grand Siècle costume who built the mood, while images of Madonna at different periods of her career were projected on to screens. Finally, the woman herself appeared out of the smoke in a large black dress on the circular part of the stage, which extended partly into the pit, for Nothing Really Matters, a song from 1998.
Aside from three or four moments with her daughter Mercy James on piano (for Bad Girl), her son David Banda on acoustic guitar, and a cellist, Madonna sang to pre-recorded tracks. But while there weren't many musicians on stage, there were plenty for the choreography – some 20 dancers in punk looks for Everybody and Into The Groove.
This return to her early years, which she also revisitted in a speech, was followed by a rock treatment of Burning Up, then Open Your Heart and Holiday – an amusing sequence in which Madonna is turned away from the entrance to a nightclub while her comrades enter unhindered. A disco ball adds to the liveliness of this playlist of 1980s pop tracks. In stark contrast, Live To Tell follows, from the 1986 album True Blue. Madonna crosses the heights of the auditorium in a gondola, as black and white photographs of people close to the singer are projected on to screens, followed by hundreds of anonymous faces, all of whom died of AIDS.
What follows this is more dubious. Officiants in monk's robes, a bell and a chorus in mock Latin announced Like A Prayer, with dancers doing acrobatics around luminous crucifixes. An unconvincing evocation of Prince is mixed in – the latter co-wrote Love Song with Madonna, which is not played.
There's some downtime during interludes and costume changes, some of which are hard to understand – such as a depiction of desert dwellers fighting while a projection of Madonna as an Oriental queen looks on. The clichés of gay imagery are needlessly overplayed – feathers, latex, leather, policemen and cowboys, scantily clad athletes... A Madonna double strokes her crotch, and Madonna reciprocates. The whole thing lacks finesse.
You have 15% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.