If you’re Madonna, and you want to do a greatest hits tour, how the hell do you cram 40 years of music into two hours? Since 1983, Madonna has had 38 top 10 hits on the Hot 100—still a record among women—12 of which went to number 1. On the dance chart, she’s had an even 50 number 1 hits, by some distance the most number 1 hits by a single artist on a single Billboard chart. So what songs do you choose to highlight and what do you leave out?
She mostly chose wisely. The Celebration Tour—Madonna’s first true greatest hits tour—was one banger after another, covering just about every era of her music. There were some frequently performed standards (“Like a Prayer,” “Vogue,” and “Holiday”) but there were also some hits she hadn’t performed in 20 or 30 years (“Crazy for You,” “Everybody,” and “Rain”) and a few true rarities that she’d never before performed on tour (“Nothing Really Matters,” “Bedtime Story,” and “Bad Girl”).
I saw the show Thursday with my dear friends and fellow veterans of Madonna concerts for 30 years, Jeanine, Steve, and Rick. Celebration was dense, packed with 20-some songs and countless images and references to her four decades in the spotlight. It took us a full year to get there, as tickets went on sale in early 2023 before the singer ended up in the ICU and had to delay the opener, but it was worth the wait. Madonna’s live vocals were beautiful and she looked great. The show was autobiographical but not linear, hitting on some major themes in the singer’s life but as always, she trusted the audience to make the connections between songs. It was a dense show and left a lot to process.
I have to imagine her near-death experience was on Madonna’s mind in choosing the Ray of Light single “Nothing Really Matters” as an opener. Dressed in a halo-like crown underneath a massive circle of lights, she sang “Nothing really matters/ Love is all we need/ Everything I give you/ All comes back to me” and drove home the point she’s made since her illness that she’s lucky to be alive and the love of her children kept her going.
After that opener, Madonna went back to her early ‘80s roots, remembering New York’s clubs like Danceteria and the Paradise Garage where she got her start, hanging out and asking DJs to play her tapes. At that time, dance pop must have seemed like the Wild West—disco was dormant and you had synth pop and new wave, but there was so much about dance music that still needed to be defined. Madonna was one of the people who defined that sound, and the other night she showed off a strong string of early hits, including her very first two singles, the moody “Everybody” and the punkier “Burning Up,” picking up a guitar and tearing through it. This was Madonna at her rawest, all desire and hunger, and that paired nicely with the deathless “Open Your Heart,” as she straddled a cabaret chair like she did in the original peep show video.
Madonna started in the clubs and though she’s branched out into other styles, she never really left the dancefloor. “Only when I’m dancing can I feel this free,” she sang on “Into the Groove,” basically the thesis statement for her career. For her first big hit, “Holiday,” they staged it as a club that Madonna couldn’t get into after the bouncer let all her dancers in. Suddenly, the mood took a turn as the dancers started disappearing and there was only one left lying on the floor, covered up with a jacket.
After that opener of early hits played tribute to her beginning days in the club scene, Madonna took the time to sing “Live to Tell” and pay tribute to all the people from that scene who we lost to AIDS. Having lost a number of friends and mentors to the disease, she’s been an AIDS activist since the early days of the plague, back when people were afraid even to touch people with HIV. As she flew over the stadium on a platform, huge video screens showed pictures of people with the disease she knew and loved, like Martin Burgoyne, Christopher Flynn, Keith Haring, and Gabriel Trupin. Then the screens started zooming out to show more and more faces of people with AIDS, until it became a sea of faces—not famous people with the disease, just people—and then those faces faded gently away before a dedication “to all the bright lights” lost to the disease. A good part of a generation, just gone.
In “Live to Tell,” Madonna sings “Hope I live to tell/ The secret I have learned/ Til then it will burn inside of me” and “Will it grow cold/ The secret that I hide?/ Will I grow old?” To be able to turn those lyrics around and tell the story of people with a then-fatal disease, who often stayed in the closet in shame and were pariahs after they came out, was extraordinarily moving and deeply human. I’m a little too young to have lived in the fear those gay men did in the club scene in the ‘80s, but I remember it happening—all that ignorance and fear and callousness. Today with so much more acceptance of our community, and with the health risks of AIDS mitigated by new drugs, the disease and its stigma can seem distant to us. But we should never forget our forebears and the price they paid in that fight. Madonna didn’t forget. “Live to Tell” is my favorite song and this was a showstopper, leaving me a mess.
So I was in great shape for the next number, my other favorite song, “Like a Prayer.” Madonna sang this with black robes and rosaries imposed on her, with men in black loincloths trapped in a carousel of crucifixes, a revolving procession of bodies. This was cathartic but darker than usual, perhaps suggesting the complicity of the church in the stigma imposed on people with AIDS.
While the disease was still raging, Madonna delved into the sex, repression, and anger of that era in her great album Erotica, delving into it again here. “Erotica” was staged as a stylized boxing match, a nod to the original Girlie Show performance. It’s one of my favorites of hers, not performed often, so it was a thrill to see it. As “Erotica” gave way to an orgiastic “Justify My Love” and “Hung Up,” the infamous red bed from Blond Ambition surfaced. Instead of the simulated masturbation from that 1990 tour, she instead lay on the bed as a dancer dressed as her younger self in the cone bra caressed her from behind. It was a striking moment—Madonnas of two eras coming together, each one a ghost to the other, passing each other in the timestream.
The show was heavy on Erotica and the real treat was the first-ever tour performance of “Bad Girl,” something we’ve been begging to see for years. Madonna’s daughter Mercy beautifully played the piano while her mom sang out this underrated ballad. Just sublime.
In contrast with the dark queer history in “Live to Tell,” “Vogue” was a queer celebration. The house music classic was a full-on drag/fashion show, with all the dancers parading around the runway, with Madonna as judge, giving 10/10 to everyone. There were videos showing all manner of gay celebrations and protests, and was a beautiful nod to the start of voguing in ballroom culture. It was a lot of fun until the cops came and broke up the party. (Well, they were sexy cops in sheer shirts, but still.) This prompted her defiant classic “Human Nature” and a little bit of “Crazy for You” directed at the sexy cop manhandling her (“Strangers making the most of the dark”), which was unexpectedly spicy.
The next few sections of the show weren’t as thematically strong as the beginning, but there was an oblique reference to her near-death experience: the apocalyptic imagery in the interlude “The Beast Within” followed with the defiance of “Die Another Day” and “Don’t Tell Me,” as if Madonna were saying, “Not today, Satan.”
There was also a strong current of family. For the American Life track “Mother and Father,” Madonna and her son David sang before huge images of her parents and his birth parents. When kids are adopted, even under the best of circumstances, there’s always a sense of loss as they leave their birth families, so this was a powerful way to connect her loss with her son’s.
A blitz of a few more hits followed, with an acoustic singalong of “Express Yourself,” concert staple “La Isla Bonita,” and rarity “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,” the latter performed in a pride flag cape while images of artists who influenced Madonna played behind her.
“Bedtime Story” was as eye-popping as the futuristic video. In a skin-tight reflective outfit, Madonna lay down on a huge cube that rose out of the stage, with live video of her projected onto the sides of the cube against surrealist art. From there, she blasted into outer space to belt out “Ray of Light” while soaring over the crowd. This is one of her all-time bangers and it was a completely out-of-control performance, with rainbow lasers shining everywhere. It was insane.
Then she came back to Earth for another Erotica classic, “Rain.” I’ll always have time for this one and it kind of brought the show full circle: She started singing “Love is all we need” and ended (nearly) with “Your love’s coming down like rain.”
Celebration was very front-loaded so the end was a bit of a thud. There was a weird prerecorded medley of “Like a Virgin” and “Billie Jean” (they have similar basslines) while people dressed like Boy Toy–era Madonna and Michael Jackson had a dance off as silhouettes behind a screen. It was OK for what it was but I didn’t see why it was necessary other than that her son wanted to do his Michael Jackson impression. (Personally, I would rather have seen her do a tribute to Prince. He and Madonna were a lot more similar as artists and they actually recorded together.) This meant, oddly, that she didn’t sing anything live from Like a Virgin.
There was a very loud performance of “Bitch, I’m Madonna,” a song that aggravates me. The whole show is “Bitch, I’m Madonna,” so I don’t know why she couldn’t just let her work speak for itself. Still, it was fun watching Bob the Drag Queen and other dancers dressed as Madonna’s past personas. It ended with “Celebration,” a song I can’t be bothered with.
The only complaint I’d have is that the sound was muddy, so I’m hoping we’ll get professional audio and video to clarify the music more and get some detail. For the first time, Madonna worked without a live band (except for a few solo performers), instead opting to use the basic tracks. It was kind of a cool idea since apparently, they used some of the original demos. It made sense to me and had a nostalgic vibe calling back to her days singing to tracks in clubs. Her vocals sounded live to me.
The show crammed in as much music as possible but when she couldn’t sing a song in full, there were still little snippets of things: a few lines of “Causing a Commotion,” the strings of “Papa Don’t Preach,” the arpeggiated synths of “Lucky Star,” whispered prayers from “Act of Contrition” and some deep cuts like “Up Down Suite.” There was also a dense riot of images, drawn from videos, live shows and tabloid stories from the past.
There were two quotes from archival footage I was really happy they used. One was from her tribute to MTV at its 10th anniversary: “You’ve never had more fun with anyone else.” The other was a speech a few years ago after receiving an award: “The most controversial thing I ever did was stick around.”
To me, these quotes get to the heart of what I love about Madonna, and I’m so grateful to be able to have had her stick around for 40 years and give me so much joy and pleasure. And it’s been so special to have the best of friends to share all that with.
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So this is the basic setlist not including some interstitial stuff:
Nothing Really Matters
Everybody
Into the Groove
Causing a Commotion (snippet)
Burning Up
Open Your Heart
Holiday
Interlude: In This Life
Live to Tell
Like a Prayer
Interlude: Living for Love
Erotica/You Thrill Me
Justify My Love/Fever
Hung Up
Bad Girl
Interlude: Up Down Suite
Vogue
Human Nature
Crazy for You
Interlude: The Beast Within
Die Another Day
Don’t Tell Me
Mother and Father
Express Yourself
La Isla Bonita
Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina
Interlude: I Don’t Search I Find
Bedtime Story
Ray of Light
Rain
Interlude: Like a Virgin/Billie Jean
Bitch, I’m Madonna
Celebration
