Lady Gaga looked proud enough to weep.
Peering out at the vast audience before her at Coachella on Friday night, the pop superstar paused about 45 minutes into her headlining performance to deliver a little speech — a royal address from Mother Monster to her loyal minions — from the second-story balcony of a crumbling gothic structure she’d built on the festival’s main stage.
“I wanted to make a romantic gesture to you this year in these times of mayhem,” she told the crowd. “I decided to build you an opera house in the desert — for all the love and all the joy and all the strength you’ve given me my whole life.” She paused, her long blond hair and frilly white gown rustling in the dry, dusty breeze.
“Sometimes I feel like I went into a dream when I was like 20 years old,” she continued. “I’ve been in a dream ever since then, and I didn’t know if I wanted to wake up, because what if you weren’t there?”
Think: Don’t cry for me, Coachella.
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This wasn’t Gaga’s first time topping music’s most prestigious festival. In 2017, she stepped in at the last minute to replace Beyoncé when the latter pulled out after announcing that she was pregnant. But those circumstances meant that Gaga “didn’t have the time to totally do what I really wanted to do,” as she told The Times last year.
She made up for it Friday: Over two hours, 20 songs and as many costume changes as Coachella’s tightly managed livestream would allow, Gaga mounted a lavish spectacle built around this year’s “Mayhem” album, which has been widely received as the singer’s return to high-concept pop following a few years of acting and jazzing (and falling in love).
Would you say the production, which she broke into four acts and a finale, carried a coherent or easily discernible story? You would not — though a voiceover at the outset suggested it had something to do with two selves battling for control of a soul.
Yet the individual set pieces were so vivid and funny and weird that the tale became one about Gaga’s embrace of her role as music’s greatest kook.
For “Poker Face” she staged a chess battle with her dancers as living game pieces. “Perfect Celebrity” and “Disease” had her writhing in a shallow grave surrounded by the undead. For “Paparazzi” she donned pieces of chrome armor and strutted across the stage on a pair of crutches. “Zombieboy” was an elaborate dance number starring Gaga twirling lewdly with a skeleton.
The set list mixed new songs with old favorites: “Bloody Mary” into “Abracadabra” into “Judas” into the German-language “Sheiße,” which involved a bunch of oversize quill pens and a Last Supper-style tableau. After the ’80s pop-funk of “Shadow of a Man,” for which she dressed as a sexy military officer, she appeared to spot her fiancé, Michael Polansky and thanked the crowd “for bringing me my man.”
Gaga was backed by a live band and a small corps of string players; the French DJ and producer Gesaffelstein, who worked on “Mayhem,” joined her on keyboards for a throbbing rendition of the album’s “Killah.” Gaga accompanied herself on piano in “Die With a Smile” and “Shallow,” neither of which seemed to have much to do with the whole haunted-opera idea, but who was keeping track? (Gaga set up the latter by recalling that last time she was at Coachella, she filmed parts of “A Star Is Born” at the festival.)
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Like virtually every headlining Coachella set in the years since Beyoncé came back in 2018, Gaga’s performance was carefully choreographed for YouTube’s livestream. There were cameras on drones and cameras on wires and cameras held by guys hustling backwards as they shot the singer stalking down a long runway connecting the main stage to a smaller platform out on the polo field. There was even a crotch cam in that graveyard sequence beaming grainy images of Gaga’s rhythmic thrusting to the enormous video screens flanking the stage.
But what came through even at the show’s most intricate was the charge Gaga still gets from performing in front of people — a queenly assertion of her star power, sure, but also a touching acknowledgment that she requires folks to do all this for. She sang live throughout the show, and her vocals were strong and gutsy; between songs she made no attempt to disguise the panting you could hear through her headset microphone. She finished her main set (before a welcome if inevitable encore of “Bad Romance”) with a yearning new tune, “Vanish Into You,” for which she jumped down from the stage to press the flesh of fans up against a barricade.
“I may not get to high-five each and every one of you, but I can sure as f— sing to you,” she said, and as she made her way past thousands of admirers, somebody handed her a black fake flower. She pretended it was a microphone and then used it — instinctively, charmingly, technically without need — for the rest of the song.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
