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    Madonna’s Celebration Tour, an Experiment in Looking Back

    Her Celebration Tour is the pop superstar’s first retrospective, one which thematically explores her past and perhaps offers a glimpse of how she will chart her future.For 40 years, evolution, rebellion and resilience have been Madonna’s hallmarks, but forward momentum is her life force. She’s been pop music’s premier shark, operating in near perpetual motion: Why would she pause to bask or look back, and risk losing oxygen?So there are understandable touches of both defiance and reluctance to the Celebration Tour, her first road show devoted to hits rather than a new album. The retrospective began its North American leg at Barclays Center in Brooklyn on Wednesday night with all the classic trappings of a Madonna spectacle. But unlike her 11 prior tours of this scale, this one was haunted by ghosts — some invited, and some who crashed the party.The set list began with a moment of birth — not the start of Madonna’s career, but the arrival of her first child — via “Nothing Really Matters,” a song from her 1998 album, “Ray of Light,” about how parenthood rearranges priorities. The anachronism was a table-setter: If Celebration recounts her life story, its arc was animated by her experiences of losing her mother and becoming one, herself. “Never forget where you came from,” she instructed a dancer who served as an avatar for her younger self, whom she then gave a maternal hug.Over two-plus hours, Madonna explored her career through themes which included her bold sexuality.The New York TimesThe first part of the concert, which was divided into seven chapters, was its most carefree (“Everybody,” “Holiday,” “Open Your Heart”). But the joy was built on struggle. Before Madonna took the stage, the night’s M.C., Bob the Drag Queen, reminded the crowd that the singer came to New York City from Detroit with $35 in her pocket and scattered faux bills.Decked out in a teal corset, a black miniskirt and a jacket adorned with chains, Madonna, 65, conjured some of the gritty energy of the late-1970s downtown scene where she first found like-minded creative spirits. It was a relief to be back, she said with a barrage of f-bombs, as she strapped on an electric guitar for a power-chord-heavy version of “I Love New York” blended with “Burning Up.” Vintage photos of CBGB, where she played one of her earliest gigs, lit up on the screen behind her.Glee was soon tempered by devastation: The community of artists who gave Madonna a home was decimated by AIDS, and she presented “Live to Tell” as a powerful tribute. Screens suspended around the stage, which stretched nearly the length of the floor on a series of runways, at first displayed single faces. The images then multiplied, demonstrating the scale of the epidemic. There were simply too many tales to tell.Over two-plus hours, Madonna resisted the simplest routes to depicting her own story. After the first section, the concert was only loosely chronological, leaning instead toward themes: her bold sexuality (“Erotica,” staged in a boxing ring, and “Justify My Love,” staged as a near orgy); her search for love (a salacious “Hung Up,” and the fan favorite “Bad Girl”); her rugged defiance (the perennial cowboy-themed standout “Don’t Tell Me”). She peppered the show with references to previous tours and videos, but skipped obvious choices (“Papa Don’t Preach,” “Express Yourself”) in favor of the glitchy 007 theme “Die Another Day” and a pointed acoustic cover of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.”Madonna’s 11-year-old daughter Estere owning the catwalk during a section devoted to “Vogue.”The New York TimesThe show’s most spectacular number was “Like a Prayer,” which she sang on a dramatic spinning carousel that held shirtless dancers striking poses that mimicked Christ’s crucifixion. The remix’s propulsive bass provided tension, and a quick cut to Sam Smith and Kim Petras’s “Unholy” underscored the original track’s enduring influence.Madonna has always fixed her sights on what’s next, but the artists who have followed her have chosen different paths. This year alone, two women decades her junior turned yesteryear into big business: Taylor Swift has been delving into her prior album cycles onstage, and Beyoncé played stadium shows inspired by styles of dance music that date back before her birth.Madonna has never before indulged in nostalgia, and at this concert, it was clear why. In the ’80s she was rewiring expectations for what a pop career could accomplish. In the ’90s, she was testing how explicitly she could express her desires. In the 2000s, she was finding fresh freedom on the dance floor. In the 2010s, she was bringing new voices into her orbit. But on a tour celebrating the past, it’s impossible to ignore the passage of time. There is less future stretched out before Madonna now, and it’s unclear how she will reckon with it.Until recently, her groundbreaking career was a demonstration of seemingly impossible physical strength. But near the end of the 2020 theater shows supporting her last studio album, “Madame X,” serious injuries took a toll. Madonna’s once inexhaustible body failed her just days before the Celebration Tour was scheduled to start in July, and she was hospitalized with an infection.Over her career, Madonna’s performances have demonstrated seemingly impossible physical strength.The New York TimesAt Barclays, she let her dancers do much of the heavy lifting, though she still handled choreography — mostly in heels — for the majority of the show. At times, skipping down the runway with her blonde hair flying behind, she looked like the carefree upstart who flipped the pop world on its head. At others, a hair behind the beat, she looked like a stage veteran who has endured decades of punishing physical labor.“I didn’t think I was going to make it this summer, but here I am,” she told the crowd early on. She saved space in the show for those who didn’t: In a curious tribute to Michael Jackson, a silhouette of the two superstars dancing together was projected as a mix of “Billie Jean” and “Like a Virgin” played. Someone dressed like Prince mimed soloing on one of his signature guitars at the end of “Like a Prayer.” And, movingly, Madonna honored her son David’s birth mother alongside her own when he joined her for “Mother and Father.”David strummed a guitar to that melancholy song from “American Life” as well as to “La Isla Bonita”; her daughter Mercy accompanied her on a grand piano for “Bad Girl.” But otherwise, Madonna eschewed a band for this tour, instead using tracks edited by her longtime collaborator Stuart Price. The choice removed some of the theater of the show and put extra pressure on Madonna’s vocals, which started out raspy and occasionally strained. (For what it’s worth, the crowd didn’t hit the high notes of “Crazy for You,” either.)Madonna eschewed a band for this tour, a decision that emphasized her vocals.The New York TimesMadonna, long a noted perfectionist, seemed looser and chattier throughout the night. Several pauses to address the audience were dotted throughout the set, and she was elated during a playful tribute to the ballroom scene she spotlighted in “Vogue,” which featured her 11-year-old daughter Estere owning the catwalk. For “Ray of Light,” Madonna looked like she had a blast dancing in the confines of the rectangular lift that ferried her above the crowd.Madonna has long known the power of video, and the most effective encapsulation of her impact came in a montage before the show’s penultimate act that stitched together headlines and news reports about her unparalleled ability to shock the world. “The most controversial thing I have ever done is to stick around,” she said in a 2016 speech highlighting how she’s continually had to battle the twin scourges of sexism and ageism.New Yorkers, she noted onstage, don’t like to be told what to do. But perhaps finally pausing to look back has showed her another path forward: her well-earned legacy era. “Something is ending,” she sang in “Nothing Really Matters” as she swooped around the stage alone, “and something begins.” More

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    Barclays Center Drops SeatGeek and Returns to Ticketmaster

    The Brooklyn venue replaced Ticketmaster, the industry leader, in 2021 in favor of SeatGeek, a competitor. It is not clear why it changed direction again.In 2021, Barclays Center in Brooklyn made a surprising announcement about its business: After nearly a decade with Ticketmaster, the industry leader, as its ticketing vendor, the arena was switching to SeatGeek, an aggressive upstart.Now, barely a year into what had been a seven-year contract, BSE Global, the parent company of Barclays — the home of the Brooklyn Nets and New York Liberty basketball teams, and a destination for major concert tours — is canceling its partnership with SeatGeek and returning to Ticketmaster.The change was revealed on Friday when Barclays announced a concert by the singer and producer Jackson Wang on May 11 with a link to Ticketmaster. SeatGeek, which remains the ticketer for many events already on Barclays’s calendar, will gradually be replaced by Ticketmaster in coming months as new concerts and sporting events go on sale.The abrupt switch, at a high-profile venue in one of the biggest markets in the world, is head-spinning news in the lucrative ticketing business, where Ticketmaster’s dominance has long been a matter of debate and scrutiny.“It’s very rare for such a cancellation,” said Larry Miller, the director of the music business program at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development.“Ticketing platform deals with venue owners are not of short duration,” Mr. Miller added. “I can’t think of a time over the last decade where a major venue has dropped a ticketing platform early on in the deal cycle.”The reasons for the change at Barclays were not immediately clear. Neither BSE Global nor SeatGeek would comment about whether there were any problems with ticketing that may have prompted a switch.In a statement, a spokeswoman for BSE Global said that SeatGeek “provided our fans with a first-class game day ticketing experience, and we’re appreciative of the time and energy they put into our work together.”The president of SeatGeek, Danielle du Toit, expressed no upset at Barclays’ change of direction. “It’s never easy to part ways with a client,” she said in a statement, “but as we look to the future, SeatGeek is grounded in our strategy and road map that are geared towards solving the challenges that plague the live entertainment experience.”Since its founding in 2009, SeatGeek has positioned itself as an industry disrupter. Initially just a resale platform, it has sought to challenge Ticketmaster’s dominance in the so-called primary market — sales directly from a venue’s box office, on behalf of sports teams or performing artists. When BSE Global announced its SeatGeek deal, which took effect in October 2021, the venue company praised its new partner’s “best-in-class mobile platform.”SeatGeek’s clients include major sports franchises like the Dallas Cowboys and the New Orleans Saints, as well as Jujamcyn Theaters, one of Broadway’s major theater owners.But SeatGeek, and other ticketing companies, all still lag far behind Ticketmaster, which sold 485 million tickets in 2019, the last year of business unaffected by the Covid-19 pandemic, an amount that swamps its competitors. Regulators have been monitoring Ticketmaster’s market share since it merged in 2010 with the concert giant Live Nation in a deal that critics suggested would damage competition in the ticketing industry, a consequence that Live Nation has denied.As a condition for its approval of the merger, the Justice Department entered into a regulatory agreement with Live Nation that, among other things, prohibited it from retaliating against venues that do not sign with Ticketmaster by withholding shows it controlled. The agreement, known as a consent decree, was extended by five years in 2020 after federal regulators found that Live Nation had “repeatedly” violated it. At the time, Live Nation did not admit to any wrongdoing, and said that extending the decree was “the best outcome for our business, clients and shareholders.”In an interview, Joe Berchtold, the president of Live Nation, acknowledged that the company is always under scrutiny for its actions in the marketplace. In recent weeks, for example, lawmakers have expressed concern over Ticketmaster’s botched ticket sale for Taylor Swift’s latest tour, and the company was widely condemned for its mishandling of a Bad Bunny concert in Mexico City.But Mr. Berchtold was unequivocal in stating that the company did not break any of its regulatory guidelines with Barclays Center.“I can absolutely confirm,” he said, “that there was no retaliation at Barclays for not using Ticketmaster, in terms of the routing of any concerts.”Tracking the blips and dips in tour dates for concert venues can be an inexact science. But data from Pollstar, a trade publication that covers the live music business, shows that Barclays Center received 13 Live Nation-promoted tours in the year after SeatGeek took over the venue’s ticketing business — a drop for Barclays, which in the years before the pandemic had tended to get about two dozen Live Nation events annually.However during the same period, from 2016 through 2019, the data also indicates the venue hosted fewer shows from independent promoters — those not associated with Live Nation or its major competitor, AEG Presents — from an average of more than 50 a year to less than 20 in the year after SeatGeek took over.SeatGeek and BSE Global declined to comment on the data.Barclays Center competes with Madison Square Garden, as well as the Prudential Center in Newark and the new UBS Arena in Elmont, N.Y., for major concert tours to fill out its schedule. Since 2019, BSE Global has been owned by Joseph Tsai, a Taiwanese-born tech billionaire, who bought out its previous owner, the Russian mogul Mikhail Prokhorov. More