Grande’s not bad — but she should be amazing
So much has changed for Ariana Grande over the past few years.
Notably, she has grown in fame and fortune, as well as in critical acclaim as a recording artist.
Yet one thing remains constant:
She’s not very good in concert.
Her show Tuesday, which kicked off a two-night stand at the Chase Center in San Francisco, was yet another maddeningly mediocre offering from a performer who should be capable of delivering so much more onstage at this point in her career.
Not that the fans seemed to mind — much. They were behind her from the get-go, cheering wildly as she first took the stage to sing “God Is a Woman” and showering her with vocal support for the next hour or so. Yet eventually, Grande’s lackluster performance seemed to suck the energy right out of the room and the crowd definitely appeared less into the show as it approached the homestretch.
Grande just seemed to be going through the motions for much of the evening, doing very little to try to take the show to the next level. Maybe she was fatigued, which would be understandable since she has been on the road pretty much nonstop since March.
More troubling, however, was her unwillingness to engage the crowd or bring any real personality to the proceedings. The crowd surely would have loved to have heard her tell a story or two, or even talk about how her week is going, but she stayed pretty much quiet between songs.
That aspect was magnified by her ongoing strategy to avoid the spotlight — quite literally — in concert. Just like her “Dangerous Woman” Tour, which came to San Jose’s SAP Center in 2017, this road show is intentionally lit in a way that makes it hard to follow what’s happening onstage. The stage is bathed in muted, dimly lit colors, without the benefit of a traditional bright spotlight following the star around, and the result is that Grande just sort of blends in among her dancers and even, to some degree, the fans around her. She simply doesn’t have the stage presence/charisma to get away with doing something like that.
The star did kick off the show in dramatic enough fashion, first appearing on stage with her dancers gathered around a table, à la “The Last Supper,” as an intro to “God Is a Woman,” which hails from the tour’s namesake album — 2018’s “Sweetener.”
She remained on a roll early on, buoyed by the tremendous excitement of the crowd, as she rolled through “Bad Idea” and “Break Up with Your Girlfriend, I’m Bored,” both of which can be found on Grande’s most recent album, 2019’s “Thank U, Next.”
But Grande had a hard time sustaining any real sense of momentum, in part because the show was divided up into too many segments, usually broken up by video interludes, which slowed everything down to a crawl.
Perhaps we could have forgiven some of those starts and stops if the different parts felt, well, different. When someone like Madonna, Katy Perry, Beyoncé
or Lady Gaga changes from, say, Act 1 to Act 2 — you notice the difference. But there was a sameness — and, even worse, a blandness — to each and every act in Grande’s show, to the point where one wondered why they even bothered with the changes.
Grande did sound pretty good during the show, although her vocals weren’t quite as sharp or strong as one gets from her studio recordings. The crowd, however, was magnificent, singing along with gusto for most of the night, before tiring out a bit toward the end.
As she was bringing the main set to a close, Grande finally emerged from the shadows and fully addressed the crowd.
“You’ve been amazing,” she said. “Your energy has been wonderful.
“I don’t want this show to end.”
Wish I could have said the same.