Lady Gaga brings the Chromatica Ball to the MetLife Stadium: Review

A room can accommodate 55,000 people, and just one is enough to dazzle them.

Lady Gaga brought her Chromatica Ball to the Three State Area on Thursday night, beating a spectacular concert at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, NJ.

Gaga opened her 22-track set, hitting two or three tracks once, “Bad Romance”, “Just Dance” and “Poker Face”, and then moved on to the songs from the album of the same name. It’s rare for an artist to perform his greatest hits straight out of the gate during a live performance, and while the audience trembles with energy from that iconic first “oh-oh-oh-oh-oh”, it wasn’t a dance party for the lady of the hour.

Instead, Gaga sat at the top of the stage in an avant-garde costume that restricted her movements, which meant that throughout her career she was boxed as the dominant meat-bearing pop star on the radio who had the eyes of the world on her. all times in the 2010’s.

But the 2022 Gaga is just as great and stronger than ever before. Her choreography was expressive during fan favorites such as “911” and “Babylon” after fibromyalgia forced her to cancel her last tour and her piano vocals “Born This Way” and her powerful theme song “Top Gun: Maverick “Hold My Hand” left fans were thrilled.

The show was more gruesome than Gaga’s previous tours, as was “Chromatica,” the cleansing house album she had written about healing and released in 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic that nearly thwarted her plans to return to the tour.

At one point, she was lying on a floating platform resembling an operating table, wearing a bloody latex bodysuit that echoed her shocking performance at the 2009 VMA. Later, the cutscene featured Gaga reciting an art manifesto with the same grim cadence as her vampire character in “American Horror Story: Hotel.”

Even with dark themes and brutalist scenery, the theatrical Bal Chromatica turned into one big celebration at the end of the evening. “Stupid Love” literally heated, and the flames shot up to the nose bleeds and made the crowd sweat even more than it was already in the middle of summer, followed by “Rain on Me,” one of the most euphoric stadium shows seen in a while.

While Gaga hasn’t announced if any of her idols were in the crowd during her family show (she famously screamed Liza Minnelli at Madison Square Garden on her 2011 HBO special), she took the time to pay tribute to those who came before her.

Gaga dedicated her breathtaking ballad “A Star Is Born” “Always Remember Us This Way” to her frequent collaborator Tony Bennett, who retired from performances in 2021, after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and reminded her Little Monsters that Bruce Springsteen of Jersey inspired The Edge of Glory.

And yet the night was still full of Gaga, the first superstar since Madonna to constantly discover herself and destroy her every time.