Pipine23

Doesn’t look like it’s raining on the wandering live streams within the crowd. 

Stella McCartney was the guest tonight

Hi!
I was at the arena last night, just by the entrance to the floor area and I can guarantee the show started late due to issue with the O2 itself, not M.
Around 8:30 there were still many, MANY people coming down to the floor area (it seems there was only one way in - from door 103), most people had drinks from the bar in plastic cups (even wine bottles) and to get to the floor one had to put all liquids in a paper cup. There was ONE person alone giving out the paper cups, and this delayed the entrance of thousands of people. 

At around 9 people from the production itself came around asking the security guy (at this point joined by another person handing out the cups, but that soon ran out of cups and couldn't find any) and I cleared heard: We're all ready - we are waiting for you!!!! - to which a security supervisor kept saying they can't start until the stairs/entrance area is clear due to security reasons. M's team was coming and going, running around looking nervous. 10min after the last few people got into the floor area, the show started.
 
Partially this is the fans fault - the show was supposed to start at 8:30, and at 8:30 half of the arena was queuing for drinks at the bar. And of course the O2 itself, it was a sh*t show having 1 person alone handing out thousands of paper cups.
Now you could only see this if you were right near it, the rest of the arena kept shouting and complaining she was late unaware this had nothing to do with M and tbh not sure why they don't hand out paper ones at the bars 🤦‍♂️
 

She did the whole show! Madonna has been redeemed. 😂

Would be cool if she switched out Mother & Father with Promise To Try for a suprise 

I’m so jealous of Paris getting Stuart DJing.. sounds like an amazing set.  

I’m so jealous of Paris getting Stuart DJing.. sounds like an amazing set.  

Debbie Harry performed at Coachella this year. She looked pretty decent for being almost 80
 

Joni Mitchell is an extraordinary musician. She is 80 years old. She recovered from a near fatal brain aneurysm at 74 and has taught herself how to speak, move and play guitar again. She is an extraordinary talent who has written some of the greatest music of the 20th century. Whether it’s ignorance that people don’t know who the photo is of or they just think it’s funny to implicitly mock her knowingly, she deserves better. 

Some random thoughts...
1. I love the subversively masked 'apparition' looks throughout the show and wish there were more!
2. I watched the whole show in full on YouTube and thought it felt a little disjointed in parts.
3. I'm torn with regards to the amount of Bob The Drag Queen in the show...
4. Who knew Bad Girl would be such a highlight? Stunning. Moving, even.

Show this to all those people who are saying its all lipsync, Vogue in Antwerpen and she forgets the first few lines here, no backing tracks here and you can clearly hear her start singing a few lines late...
 
https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGJKFsw7B/

I think most of those negative thoughts come from fans who haven't seen it live. Going in I started to like the setlist but was also still sceptical, all that went away as soon as Bob came through the crowd. Even his inclusion feels really suited, someone mentioned the girlie show clown before and to me it was exactly that but in reverse, one person peeping up everywhere in different guises, like a subconscious or the personification of the GP. It just really really worked well up to the point where they descend into the stage simultaniously. The setlist is superb, it lacks many hits but boy does it give back. I just think the last bit is a bit fragmented with an interlude then BS (which also feels like an interlude because you're basicly watching a screen) then two songs and another interlude (the MJ is indeed stupid) but then the impact of all the M clones rising up at once makes up for all of it. Also how beautiful is the duet dance of M with the shadow during Rain. It's been three days but it's still so impressive to me. We can't compare this tour to BA, just as you couldn't compare WTG to anything later, she is a different person and we are living in a different time. But in the here and now I can't imagine what type of show could possibly top what she is serving us now

This video of Rain shows a quite close perspective, her face and expressions are top notch 
 https://www.facebook.com/madonnauniversepage/videos/708828887771209 
... and that smile

 

Eight things we learned from Madonna’s nights of Celebration in London
 
The Guardian takes in a dazzling start to a tour showcasing a career that set the template for modern pop stardom
Laura Snapes
Fri 20 Oct 2023 12.04 EDT
By the end of her four-night stint in London in the past week, Madonna’s status as pop’s ultimate survivor was assured.
Four months ago, it was uncertain whether she would be able to begin her Celebration tour, showcasing a career that set the template for modern pop stardom.
She was hospitalised in June with a life-threatening bacterial infection that left her in intensive care, and observers doubted the 65-year-old would recover in time. As did she.
“I’m pretty damn surprised I made it this far,” she said on the first night. “And I mean that on many levels.”
A total of 80,000 fans packed into the O2 Arena this week and, despite technical hitches on several nights, the tour earned four- and five-star reviews. Critics praised its canny assessment of her musical, cultural and societal impact – although
some tabloids balked at its proud display of her sexuality.
Here, the Guardian looks through her typically dazzling start.
Community at her core
Madonna with her dancers. Photograph: Kevin Mazur/WireImage for Live Nation
Madonna would never have become the star she is without finding a community in 80s New York queer culture, as the Celebration tour made plain. Her dancers were largely Black, Latin, queer and trans, and the exuberance between them felt gorgeous and sincere.
The show’s greatest stylistic influence is ballroom culture, which she first showcased in her 1990 hit Vogue. Her foregrounding of the artform – such as judging a ball competition and having the RuPaul’s Drag Race winner Bob the Drag Queen as an MC – felt like an authentic acknowledgment of a mutually loving bond.
That was underlined by a profoundly moving tribute to her peers and the community lost to Aids: the giant disco ball that twirled during Holiday slumped to the ground, crushing a male dancer. As she started Live to Tell, screens revealed portraits of late friends including Freddie Mercury, Keith Haring, Robert Mapplethorpe and Peter Hujar. She sang to them on a suspended platform, the images multiplying so fast you could no longer make out the men’s individual identities.
Madonna on stage with Bob the Drag Queen at the O2 Arena in London on Sunday. Photograph: Kevin Mazur/WireImage for Live Nation
She’s still scrappy five decades in
Starting three months later than planned, said the musical director Stuart Price, “created an opportunity to further enhance the show”. The performance was full of spectacular set pieces – a spinning carousel filled with muscular male dancers; flying stages; enough biblical symbolism to fill the Vatican – but it also felt thrillingly haphazard, befitting the young Madonna’s make-or-break attitude. That was dramatised in the prelude to Holiday, staged on the steps of famed New York nightclub Paradise Garage with Madonna begging the bouncer to be let in while gorgeous queens sauntered past. It also came through in her seemingly off-the-cuff addresses: beer in hand, remembering her early days playing at punk club CBGB’s before a brilliant guitar-led rendition of Burning Up; beer also in hand on night three as she talked about her anguish over the Israel-Hamas war.
Age is no match for her
Madonna on the opening night of the Celebration tour in London. Photograph: Kevin Mazur/WireImage for Live Nation
One of the most moving aspects of the Celebration tour is its reflection of how much Madonna has had to overcome: poverty and risk as a young dancer in New York; ferocious censure; pop’s ever-present threat of obsolescence. Then there is also the sheer passage of time: the toxic combination of misogyny and ageism, not to mention the physical limitations that a body – and a dancer’s relentlessly flogged body, at that – can take. Madonna has been confronting the former for more than half her life. “The most controversial thing I’ve done is to stick around,” she said in voiceover – a clip from an awards acceptance speech – as newspaper clips lambasting her age spin across the backdrop. But she’s also vanquished the latter: executing a show this physical just four months after her hospitalisation is an astonishing feat; her undisguised knee support sleeve also read as an unapologetic acknowledgment of the exertion and bodily toll entailed in performing at this level aged 65. Her acoustic cover of Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive was well earned – and her voice sounded formidable.
Conquering new sexual frontiers
Madonna writhes on stage with a lookalike. Photograph: Kevin Mazur/WireImage for Live Nation
Nobody has made sexuality into iconography like Madonna. But there was a point behind – almost – every cone bra and shred of latex as she protested prudishness and hypocrisy, sent up the absurdity of the virgin-whore dichotomy and foregrounded eroticism during an era where sexuality could become a death sentence. Onstage, her age added a new dimension to this lifelong mission as she revelled in her status as an object of desire and an enduringly sexual being.
Family is everything
Madonna and her son David Banda perform her song Mother and Father. Photograph: Kevin Mazur/WireImage for Live Nation
During the song Mother and Father, Madonna sang to an image of her mother, while her son David Banda played guitar in front of a screen of his late birth mother. Madonna’s daughters also featured: Lourdes Leon helped judge the drag ball on night one, Mercy James played piano beautifully on Bad Girl and – stealing the show – 11-year-old Estere deejayed and vogued. And in respect of her queer and marginalised fans, she hymned chosen family – the support networks that many people create in the face of rejection and persecution at home.
Wackiness is part of the enterprise
The first half of the tour plots a fairly linear path through Madonna’s history. But once she passed the early 90s, narrative went out of the window in favour of the relative chaos that has become her modern calling card. There were samples of Sam Smith and Kim Petras’s provocative hit Unholy (albeit not Vulgar, Madonna’s actual duet with Smith), a delightful spotlight on the Dominican rapper Tokischa and a strange interlude for The Beast Within, in which Madonna’s dancers trudged through a desert landscape reminiscent of a Star Wars prequel.
Controversy remains her second language
Madonna in full iconoclast mode on stage. Photograph: Kevin Mazur/WireImage for Live Nation
There were, of course, a few flagrant provocations: having paid tribute to Prince, with a purple-costumed guitarist ripping a guitar solo at the end of Like a Prayer, she also included a mashup of Like a Virgin with various Michael Jackson hits, while silhouettes of the two frolicked on screen in reference to their on-screen romance. And on night three, she expanded on her previous allusions to the Israel-Hamas war, lamenting the children killed in the conflict and advocating for “no sanctions, no land given or taken”.
Her star power remains
Despite the tour’s focus on Madonna’s fallibility, it was impossible not to behold the fact the actual Madonna was right there, running through a recent history that felt more like mythology.
Betsy Reed
Editor, Guardian US

I can’t believe how amazing she looks on this tour.. just stunning.  Love all the looks.. the ROL jumpsuit is just perfect. 

I can’t believe how amazing she looks on this tour.. just stunning.  Love all the looks.. the ROL jumpsuit is just perfect. 

I can’t believe how amazing she looks on this tour.. just stunning.  Love all the looks.. the ROL jumpsuit is just perfect. 

I can’t believe how amazing she looks on this tour.. just stunning.  Love all the looks.. the ROL jumpsuit is just perfect. 

I can’t believe how amazing she looks on this tour.. just stunning.  Love all the looks.. the ROL jumpsuit is just perfect. 

OMG.

It's back

Ah that last stream was great… hope he goes live again.

Ah that last stream was great… hope he goes live again.

Ah that last stream was great… hope he goes live again.