The story goes that Gaga didn’t intend to tour for Mayhem but changed her mind after the positive reaction from critics and fans to these isolated performances. Her show in Rio attracted approximately 2.5 million fans, making it reportedly the most-attended single concert by a female artist in human history. But Gaga didn’t want to perform to crowds anywhere near that size on tour. “We chose arenas this time to give me the opportunity to control the details of the show in a way you simply can’t in stadiums,” she said when announcing the show in March. This may well be true, but many of the details were the same as those in the bigger venues. But what the arena inarguably offers is an intimacy that you can never achieve when there’s a million, or even sixty thousand, people in attendance.
The opportunity to see a musician of Lady Gaga’s stature in a room this size is rare. 20,000 is still a lot of people, but shows on the Cowboy Carter Tour or the Grand National Tour or the Eras Tour would regularly top 50,000 (or, in the case of the later, 70). Even Gaga hasn’t played an arena in New York City in over a decade, opting to bring her pop shows to Citi Field or Met Life Stadium. At that point, a good portion of the crowd is watching the entire concert on a screen. And while some seats in an arena are certainly better than others, this vantage of Gaga is not something you’re likely to get at her peers’ shows, especially given how expensive decent seats at a stadium show have become (if you can even get out of the online waiting room to buy them). When flames shoot from the stage during “Judas,” you can feel the heat.
The smaller stage allows the scale of the show to come across even bigger. When Gaga steps out of a 10-foot spinning skull to sing “Killah,” it doesn’t look like just a dot on the other side of a stadium. Gaga said when announcing the tour that her goal was a “theatrical and electrifying experience” and introduced the set at the top of the concert as an opera. None of this is particularly novel for anyone who knows anything about the star—her public persona has always been costume-forward, and she is an Academy Award-nominated actress—but the environment itself also lends itself to the fantasy. The round arena at MSG does resemble an opera house, and Gaga is consciously placing her work in dialogue with an art form that is technically available for everyone but often associated with the elite.
As much as the smaller venue improves the experience of the Mayhem Ball—and it does—there’s a nagging feeling that the show is only for a select few. Since it’s more or less the same set that Gaga did at Coachella, her fans have likely already seen it. What you’re paying for is the experience of seeing Mayhem in person, and it’s priced like a luxury item. (For transparency’s sake, the press tickets sent to this writer would have cost about $1,100 each had he paid for them out of pocket on the day of the show.) Concert movies and televised performances are nothing new, but rarely do they happen before the tour even starts. It’s perhaps cynical to view Coachella and Rio as advertisements for an expensive tour, but they certainly were good ones. Gaga responded to a demand, and produced the show she wanted to, the kind of over-the-top spectacle that she hasn’t really created since 2013’s Artpop. It was exactly the kind of show fans have wanted for a decade. But most of them will have to catch it on YouTube.
