Live! Lady Gaga @ TD Banknorth Garden (Boston, MA)

The goal of a good concert by a major pop artist, whether Lady Gaga, Britney Spears, P!nk, or Christina Aguilera, is not musical; it’s spectacle. By that standard, it’s clear that there’s no reason to evaluate Lady Gaga’s concert at Boston’s TD Banknorth Garden too deeply from a strictly musical perspective. If you’ve seen the music videos, the costumes, heard “Bad Romance,” it’s clear that she’s going to measure up. The show is outfitted to her style – complete with a so-close-to semi-coherent storyline about getting lost on the way to the “Monster’s Ball” (“The greatest party in the world!”) as an excuse for skits and costume changes. So the most interesting things about Lady Gaga’s current tour are not necessarily the most entertaining things.

It would be easy to summarize the inventive theatrical aspects of the show and leave it there. It opens with Gaga performing “Dancing in the Dark” while her silhouette is projected on a big screen. There’s a car with a piano in its hood. She sings “Monster” while in a costume that resembles a sea anemone. Some music video outfits get re-used for the tour. There’s an enormous blood-flowing fountain during “Alejandro.” One of her dresses has moving parts. Trap doors and moving platforms everywhere on stage. Oh, and a 40-foot sea monster ties into “Paparazzi,” and somehow makes sense.

These things measure up and are spectacular. The sea monster, in particular, is a “Wow” moment, and her dancers’ choreography is tight and exciting. In a show this big and structured, there’s not much room for spontaneity. Everything is planned for maximum entertainment value, and things are paced relatively well in terms of song choice.

The show wasn’t perfect, though. Part of it is a problem of quantity of material. Hearing “Just Dance,” “Pokerface,” on “Bad Romance” on the radio five times an hour for a year can’t fool anyone: but Gaga only has an album (and an eight-song add-on to that album) to her name. That turns out to be about 85 minutes of music. It doesn’t help when both are packed with filler – songs like “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich” felt like an afterthought both musically and visually. But again, the music is beside the point.

So, there was lot of between-song time. Posing for pictures. Skits to move the “Monster’s Ball” plot along. Personality-less dance music matched with abstract video clips to allow for costume changes and stage setting. Even if excusing a moment taken to call a fan and chat with her before upgrading her seats (sponsored by Verizon for charity), things sometimes felt padded. The show’s rhythm was start-and-stop throughout the night. It’s a necessary evil, given the number of costume changes (and how intrinsic fashion is to Gaga’s appeal), but the lulls dulled the show’s momentum frequently.

The most revelatory thing about the concert was musical, though. For three songs in the middle of the show, Gaga played a set on piano. It’s here that things the fans don’t see in music videos or hear in singles surface. For one thing, she’s got a strong voice. It’s surprising how powerful she sounds when she’s on, mainly because songs like “Pokerface” have that autotune stench all over them. For this reason, “Brown Eyes,” from her debut The Fame, came off fantastically, especially in a show where just about every song sounded exactly as it did on record. It was like a whole new tune.

She also played an actual whole new tune, a roots-rock number that sounded like prime Elton John (for the old fogeys, I’m talking some Tumbleweed Connection shit). It doesn’t measure up – so very little in all pop music can measure up to Sir Elton – but it was surprising to hear a song stripped down of any electronic or pop influences and still be damned good. Maybe that shouldn’t be surprising from someone who spent a time writing songs for Britney Spears, but to actually hear the solid foundation that lies underneath that avalanche of hooks on her singles was a joy.

Finally, the piano set was the only time that it seemed like there was an honest-to-God person running the show. Sitting there at the piano in fishnets and bra and panties, talking about exes, breaking nails mid-song and joking about it, it seemed for once like an intimate club show despite being in the same venue where Celtics fans root madly. Letting the audience sing the first verse and chorus to “Speechless,” then pausing a bit to seemingly appreciate it, Lady Gaga seemed vulnerable, which is a bigger shock than anything she could deliver in a music video or robes made of Kermits (that outfit, unfortunately, was not used for this tour).

Despite being a show full of surprises and spectacle, much of Lady Gaga’s current iteration of the Monster’s Ball tour is predictable. That’s not to say it’s a letdown at all; everything is precisely planned while remaining varied. Even expecting the unexpected, there’s plenty of surprise and novelty on this iteration of the tour. But the songs are exactly as they are on their albums. The thrill is all in the spectacle, and even from my last-row seat, the atmosphere got me up and dancing any time there was action on stage. But the soul of the show is in that piano set; after all the glitz, the music’s got to stand up. That’s where it’s proven that it does.

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About the Author

Jere is not from Chicago. Nor is he from Parts Unknown. But he sure loves to hear things. Follow him on Twitter!

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