GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE September 7, 2001

The material show girl

Madonna admits she may not be the best singer, but she does put on the best performance

by Kaizaad Kotwal

"She is the original size queen!" proclaimed David Frego, who gathered with friends to watch Madonna's "Drowned World Tour."

It is true. If nothing else, Madonna has never known what it is to live life pint-size. In her world, from punk girl and geisha girl to cowgirl and beyond, the Material Girl has always lived life in its largest dimensions.

Her most recent tour is no exception. Spanning 48 concert dates in over 20 cities across Europe and the United States and a live HBO special, her show is a theatrical extravaganza.

Sold out within hours, the Material Girl's tour has lived up to her nom de guerre, raking in the big bucks, with ticket prices ranging from $65 to $250 via legitimate ticket outlets, and reportedly between $5,000 and $50,000 from scalpers.

Her August 28 show at the United Center in Chicago drew fans from as far away as Maryland. (The tour has no Ohio performances.)

Madonna has admitted that she is not the greatest singer in the world, saving critics from the embarrassment of pointing that out. But what she is the best at, bar none, is putting on a performance.

Her concert, like some classical theatrical epic, was divided into four distinct acts, each with its own theme, its own aesthetic and its own style, substance and significance.

In homage to her punk days and her bad girl persona, also as a tribute to her recent marriage to Scotsman Guy Ritchie, she emerged at the start of the show in what can be best described as Mad Max meets Rob Roy.

Adorned in a ragged kilt of gray plaid encrusted with rhinestones, her legs snuggled into bondage-style pants, her feet in black boots and her torso sheathed in a tartan top with a sheer back, she emerged from under the stage on a rising platform, wreathed in clouds of swirling mist. The opening number, "Drowned World," allowed her to showcase her now-mature and well-honed voice.

The first set included "Impressive Instant," "Candy Perfume Girl," and "Beautiful Stranger." She ended her opening act with her popular dance tune "Ray of Light." This set of five numbers harked back to her days as the bad girl of pop.

The transition to the second act, her paean to all things geisha, was a long recording of "Paradise Not For Me" in which four dancers, suspended by their ankles from the rafters, emerged from fabric cocoons and did some amazing acrobatics—sort of Cirque de Soliel. This overly long break was to give Madonna enough time to transform into Geisha Girl.

She emerged from the bowels of the stage in a stunning black kimono with red highlights designed by Arianne Phillips and Jean Paul Gaultier. Each sleeve was a gargantuan 26 feet long, spanning almost the entire width of the stage, eventually detaching and being carried across the stage like some revolutionary flags and banners.

This set included "Nobody's Perfect," "Mer Girl," and "Sky Fits Heaven." One of her best renditions of the evening was given in "Frozen." In this set she also paid tribute to Japanese anime, used on the rear projection

and the video screens strewn across the stage. In a segment that could be called "Crouching Diva, Hidden Virgin," Madonna performed a ballet-like dance sequence, heavily influenced by martial arts, suspended and floating via a Peter Pan-style harness system.

Her third, and probably most motionless sequence, except for her riding a mechanical bull, was dedicated to her most recent musical persona-that of urban cowgirl. Dan and Dean Caten designed the look for these six songs, including "Human Nature," "Secret," "You'll See," and "Don't Tell Me." Dressed in jeans with stretch suede chaps encrusted in rhinestones and a sequined American flag tank top under a leather shirt, she blended the trashy with the chic, something she pulls off with style and grace.

At the end of this segment she said that she was previewing a new song with the audience. Speaking in an over-the-top southern drawl, she sang about not grieving the killing of her daddy who had made her what she was today. Madonna clarified that the song, although true, was not about her father. It was the show's most puzzling moment and yet it was quintessentially Madonna. Was she embracing the audience in her humor and humanity or was she slyly telling them to fuck off with a smirk and a wink?

For the final act, Madonna slipped into her Spanish/Ghetto Girl incarnations. Dressed in a gorgeous John Paul Gaultier outfit, her hair pulled back into a bun, she embodied the ancient and the modern all in one. Her costume change was enabled by an instrumental interlude of "Don't Cry For Me," from her star turn in Evita. It was too bad that she didn't sing that number, but she more than made up for it with an all-Spanish rendition of her controversial song "What It Feels Like For a Girl" ("Lo Que Siente la Mujer"), one of the highlights of the evening.

Her male dancers adorned in bras and her female dancers in the sleek and sexy aesthetic of drag kings, Madonna brought a freshness for the nostalgia of years past when she shocked and subverted the status quo. In the show's sexiest and most romantic moment, she tangoed magically with two of her female dancers dressed as men. It was nice to see that marriage and motherhood has not completely sobered up this radically chic maven of modernity.

She followed that up with one of her old dance favorites, "La Isla Bonita," accompanied by a male flamenco dancer who stunningly stomped his way into the audience's hearts.

The old, dancing and gleeful Madonna was back for the last number, "Holiday," and the encore, "Music."

Overall, the concert was more a theatrical experience than it was musical one. The tour, which carts around over 100 tons of equipment with a traveling crew of over 200 people, makes Les Miserables and Phantom of the Opera look like mini-tours by comparison. Eight years after her last tour, fans were ready to see her again and for the most part she delivered with great gusto and gumption.

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However, for the kind of money she was charging she could have done a few more numbers, especially from her older oeuvre, and satisfied those craving for Madonna nostalgia.

Also, while the dancers were uniformly good, the show could have used more choreography to keep the energy up and moving. Finally, the show was so tightly scripted that it didn't allow her to banter more with her fans. It would have been nice to have seen more moments where she allowed herself to ad lib, to go off the beaten path and to truly connect with the audience. It was so tightly scripted that at times it just seemed like it was another day at the office for her, business as usual-punch in, punch out and pick up the paycheck on the way to tuck Lourdes and Rocco into bed.

Nevertheless, Madonna has always thrived by reinventing herself. Here her reinvention seems to be saying, "There's a little bit of the old, here's quite a bit of the new. If you don't like what you're sold, well then fuck you!"

Thibault Schilt, originally from Nancy, France, now living in Columbus, found that the experience was very intense and left him speechless. "I am always wondering what she's going to do next," said Schilt.

"I have seen all her concerts and it's been eight years since her last one so I was waiting to see if she was going to be able to meet all my expectations."

For him "she really did. I was mostly impressed with the Japanese tableaux which was flawless." For this fan, "she is the best entertainer in history," something most of her true-blue fans would agree with one million percent.

Sean Gaddis, originally from Columbus and recently back from a year away in Japan, was among the few who wasn't quite as blown away. He said, “One of the things is that her voice has definitely gotten better, it has matured over the years. However, I wasn't that impressed with the concert." Gaddis added, "She is now the mother of two and she's still trying to be an angst-filled youth." He was also turned off by the "faux Texas accent, which was pretty awful." Gaddis agrees with David Frego that she had "put more effort into the costume designs than into her guitar lessons."

Paul Gillilan liked the whole fake Southern bit. "I'm not a huge Madonna fan," he said, "but I came to watch the concert because I like her music." For Gillilan, Madonna "puts on a great concert" and "she's so in charge of her own world doing exactly what she wants to do. She played exactly what she wanted to even though her fans might have wanted to see her do different stuff."

Doubtless, Madonna will continue to dance to the beat of her own drummer for years to

come.

"She's so in charge of her own world doing exactly what she wants to do.”

KAIZAAD KOTWAL