CHICAGO _ Wrigley Field's concert history for more than a decade has skewed heavily toward classic rock and bro country and drawn a similarly homogenous audience.
But Lady Gaga changed all that in one night. She drew a racially mixed and gaudily costumed audience Friday that packed the creaky ballpark to see its first female headliner. "I feel so proud to stand here ... but sorry you haven't had a woman here for 100 years," she said, exaggerating just a touch. "Welcome to the womb."
She gazed out toward an audience in which spangled hot pants, pink cowboy hats and thigh-high boots were everywhere. And let's not leave out the female fans, who were blinged out as rhinestone cowgirls, bondage queens and showgirls from Venus.
Gaga raced through the usual half-dozen costume changes, but this show was softer on spectacle and strangeness than her past arena tours. Most of the visual weirdness was compressed into video interludes that showed the singer sporting talons and oozing face paint.
The set was split into an up-tempo first half and a lower-key, more intimate part 2. From the opening "Diamond Heart," Gaga brought the rock firepower with a five-piece band and wedded it to dance beats that drew on Euro-disco, hip-hop, Latin music and even country. She played guitar and keytar, and looked at home as the leader of a rock band.
She was more constrained as a dancer, at one point hopping on the back of one of her 10 dancers, a move that left both parties looking uncomfortable. Many of the dance routines suffered from rote choreography, a tacked-on piece of eye candy rather than an integral part of the show. And during a particularly poignant moment in the later acoustic set, the arrival of the dancers verged on intrusive. Similarly, pyro and fireworks were the type of cliches the typically subversive Gaga once shunned.
The singer instead poured her energies into the music, pogoing as she roared, "It was a lie! It was a lie!" in a particularly cathartic moment during "Perfect Illusion." And she vamped it up at the piano on "Come to Mama," a bluesy equality anthem that nailed a central theme of the night with humor and swagger.
At that point the concert took a turn toward vulnerability, as if Gaga went off-script, ditched the costumes and props, and tried to turn the stadium into her living room. She didn't quite pull it off, but not for lack of effort. She offered long introductions and told stories about valued compatriots and family members: her musical director; a friend who recently died of cancer; her father; a late aunt, Joanne, for whom her latest album was named.
Tears flowed, and momentum was lost. One could never imagine Gaga's pop-diva predecessors or contemporaries _ Madonna, Katy Perry, Britney Spears, Janet Jackson _ indulging such intimacy. Amid the wrenching acoustic "Joanne," the sultry pop-soul of "The Cure" and the LGBTQ-rights declaration "Born This Way," she turned "Edge of Glory" into an elegy. It was more akin to Bob Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" than the more bombastic recorded version. The singer's voice dropped barely above a whisper as the song faded, and a hush fell over the audience. It was another Wrigley first � the night's most moving moment also proved to be its quietest.
LADY GAGA SET LIST FRIDAY AT WRIGLEY FIELD:
1. Diamond Heart
2. A-Yo
3. Poker Face
4. Perfect Illusion
5. John Wayne
6. Schei�e
7. Alejandro
8. Just Dance
9. LoveGame
10. Telephone
11. Applause
12. Come to Mama
13. The Edge of Glory
14. Born This Way
15. Angel Down
16. Joanne
17. Bad Romance
18. The Cure
Encore:
19. Million Reasons
