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DOUG ELFMAN MORE COLUMNS Madonna shows off her newly acquired guitar prowess during a performance at the MGM Grand Garden Arena on Saturday. Photo by K.M. Cannon. REVIEW What: Madonna When: Saturday night Where: MGM Grand Garden Arena Attendance: 15,000 Grade: A-

Monday, September 03, 2001
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

REVIEW: FOUR-ACT JOURNEY: Madonna concert love-hate affair

Multimedia epic too self-involved but fascinating

Watching Madonna in concert is exhilarating and maddening. You hate her, like her, hate her, like her. You sit down and look at the price on your ticket stub, $250. (Hate her.) She's 50 minutes late. (Hate her.)

Then the show finally starts, and it's a delightful, multimedia feast. There's creative choreography. Scads of video monitors show slick images of light. And Madonna, in a punk kilt, sings electronic music while bumping her booty against male dancers' groins. (Like her.)

She flips off the crowd. (Hate her).

Her dancers feel her up, and they're wearing goggles with flashlights where their eye holes should be. One dancer sticks a big phallic tube in between Madonna's legs, and smoke pours out of it. (Like her.)

She curses her 15,000 fans, screaming "(Expletive) off, (plural version of 12-letter expletive)!" (Hate her.)

This went on for 100 entertaining, ridiculous minutes at the MGM Grand Garden Arena. The whole Saturday night event seemed like a pop star's version of performance art, but it wasn't cohesive or challenging enough to reach that arty height.

It felt more like a glitzy, Broadway roadshow that happened to have pop music involved in it and seemingly designed to appeal to women who watch Olympic gymnastics and unmarried men who keep clean apartments.

The concert's overall concept seemed cohesive for the first three songs. A steady stream of dancers acted out futuristic fights, highlighted by a contortionist getting mugged by a gas-masked freakazoid. (Like her.)

But then a big video monitor behind the stage showed a scene from the movie "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me" because Madonna wrote a psychedelic-electronic song "Beautiful Stranger" for the movie. She interrupted her concept to ask the movie's catchphrase, "Do I make you horny?" and to sing something that didn't fit anything that came before or after it.

It was time to get into the groove with these two competing Madonnas. There was the 43-year-old pop culture icon, who sang electronic music that didn't rescue her musical relevancy. And there was the theater-loving, former ballerina who wanted to use dancers and sets to make a big Statement about the Self defeating the stifling forces of Society.

Both Madonnas, like Narcissus and his reflection, tramped through four acts decorated by colorful sets and costume changes. The loose plot, based lightly on four Cold War books by J.G. Ballard, was a hero's journey through a nasty, dark future in a musical search for Truth and Love.

Each look that Madonna sported mirrored looks from her music videos, and certain lyrics carried the plot along. So we got:

Act 1) Madonna the punk-slut singing "I don't even know your name." Act 2) Madonna the introspective, vampiric geisha singing "I ran to the forest ... I was looking for me." Act 3) Madonna the uppity cowgirl singing "Don't you ever tell me to stop." And Act 4) Madonna the Spanish street diva singing "It can be so nice." Where this journey left us, who knows?

But the sex was palpable. At the end of the first act, Madonna rubbed her crotch against a stripper's pole. (Like her.)

During the second act, she and her dancers wore red-and-black geisha and samurai outfits and play-fought while hanging from wires. It was an homage to the martial arts drama, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."

She squandered her most inventive song of the night, "Paradise Not For Me." Mostly naked guys hung upsidedown on wires over the stage, as the band played the haunting trip-hop song, but Madonna was offstage changing clothes. The voice we heard must have been prerecorded. Too bad. It was her finest song.

Next up was the worst musical section, the cowgirl act. It started with Madonna singing the boring ballad, "I Deserve It." She was playing an acoustic guitar. But in the back shadows of the stage, a guitarist was playing the same three chords she was. Which guitar were we hearing?

Fortunately, as the music's appeal waned, Madonna looked hot and buff in her cowboy chaps as she slowly rode a mechanical bull that was supposedly blessed by a priest and tailor-made to fit Madonna's hide. Religion rarely looks so salacious.

In the last act, Madonna loosened up the visuals and sang a slick, Spanish version of the flowy "What It Feels Like For a Girl," followed by an acoustic version of her old sing-songy "La Isla Bonita."

And then, goodness gracious, she resurrected a really old hit, "Holiday." Lots of people would gripe later that Madonna didn't sing hits that made her famous. No "Like A Virgin." No "Lucky Star." No "Justify My Love."

She finished with an encore of "Music," a great little electronic dance song with a fat synthetic beat. But the most exciting moment of "Music" came from a video monitor that flashed facial images of Madonna's iconic styles over the years: the slut, the Marilyn Monroe type, the vogue-r.

Seeing her chameleon characters in that video montage reinforced the idea that Madonna appears beyond all that now, beyond all the people who made her an idol: her fans, the press and most of all, her younger, Michigan-bred self, the Madonna that rose to fame before babies, bad movie scripts and before she did power yoga for two hours a day in London.

She used to sing, "You can dance." Now she sings, "Music makes the bourgeoisie and the rebel, never gonna stop." Her lyrical move from normal person to yearning artist is too self-involved. This is not a fatal condition. She's still a shimmering star. But the bigger she gets, the more she just shines on herself.