Gaga as a star is reborn in Las Vegas
Oscar nominations in the bag, pop icon Lady Gaga goes to Las Vegas and re-invents herself – again, writes Chris Richards.
It’s Saturday night in Las Vegas, and Lady Gaga is doing that cataleptic-in-victory thing – an applause-bathing pose in which the singer’s freeze-tagged frame sponges up the hot rumble of 10,000 clapping hands while her cold eyes shoot death beams into the middle distance.
Who’s she staring at? For starters: Elvis Presley, Wayne Newton, Cher, Celine Dion, Barry
Manilow, Lola Falana, Tom Jones, Charo and the entire Rat Pack. Britney Spears and Mariah Carey. Jennifer Lopez and Gwen Stefani. Abbott and Costello (Bugsy Siegel booked them at the
Flamingo in 1946).
Donny and Marie (still playing the Flamingo in 2019). Siegfried and Roy, and that tiger who suddenly wanted to eat Roy in 2003. Every chorus girl who ever kicked her toes in the direction of heaven.
Every bendable homunculus who ever signed up with Cirque du Soleil. Every stripper, crooner, magician, dancer and jazzbo who ever came to this glowing wonderland, dreaming that beautiful American dream of turning smiles into money. Even the city’s patron saint and haunting spirit, Wladziu Valentino Liberace.
The only way for Lady Gaga to honour them is to waste them all.
So it goes when you’re trying to reclaim your spot as the biggest entertainer drawing breath. At 32, she’s just a kid out here, but Gaga knows how to be more famous in more ways than anyone in the lot.
Despite her radical posture, she remains pop’s ace student, a virtuoso competitor and a relentless pleaser who recently spent the first decade of her career seeking head pats from the music industry, high fashion, the art world, Hollywood, Bud Light, Netflix, Tony Bennett and the NFL.
Now she’s planting her flag in the Nevada dirt with two separate concert residencies: a futurekitsch pop show called Enigma, performed in sci-fi riot gear; and a standards revue called Jazz and Piano, sung in ball gowns made from pulverised starlight. It’s all going pretty great. So much so, that in the middle of last Saturday night’s pop gig, she roared out to the neon city and all its ghosts: ‘‘This is our town now!’’
Maybe you came here to play, but Lady Gaga did not. Instead of treating Las Vegas as a retirement bunker where fading talents go to halfsing to the least-sceptical audiences on the planet, she’s out here at the peak of her stardom, hitting all the big notes with every atom of her being. For a control-freaky overachiever, it must feel something like paradise. The only person she can disappoint within the city limits is herself. What more could she want?
Lady Gaga’s show started with her dangling from the ceiling on a metallic thread, her spine slightly curved like a fallen rococo angel, her bodysuit shimmering, as if she’d just rolled around in a pile of shattered disco ball.
‘Give her the Oscar!’
That’s what some rando shouted near the big finish of Gaga’s Saturday-night engagement at MGM’s Park Theatre – her fifth Enigma date since