At Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour, you wear silver, as decreed by the queen. At the Eras tour, you don an outfit that corresponds to your favorite chapter of Taylor Swift’s career. At Madonna’s Celebration tour, which opened in London last weekend, the crowd’s costumes were decidedly more muted, but no less devotional. A quick scan revealed that a good deal of the audience—mostly middle-aged women and gay men—was wearing T-shirts from past Madonna tours: rare Girlie Show relics from 1993, brightly-colored tees sold on 2006’s Confessions tour, hugely coveted Blond Ambition bomber jackets that date back 33 years. Much of this vintage merch was threadbare and faded—but worn with ecstatic pride.
The shirts made for an appropriate uniform given the show’s unspoken central theme: I’m still kicking. Madonna’s first arena tour in seven years lived up to its name, as a celebration of both her remarkable artistry and of the fact that, yes, she’s still singing and dancing, despite almost all her contemporaries being retired, dead, or relegated to the oldies circuit. The 65-year-old nearly died earlier this year, after a bacterial infection landed her in the hospital; while she didn’t address her illness directly at Tuesday night’s show, she did seem earnestly grateful to see 20,000 adoring fans staring back at her. “Thanks for hanging in there for me, I appreciate it,” she said, before snapping back into Madonna mode: “Now enough of this sentimental bullsh*t.”
When the Celebration tour was announced, it seemed like a capitulation, at long last, to those wishing for a cut-and-dry greatest hits set—something that Madonna seemingly views as a fate worse than death, given her prickly relationship with her own legacy. In reality, the show was far more complicated and curated: While it wasn’t lacking in beloved classics, it often came across like Madonna’s attempt to relitigate the trajectory of her own career, which has experienced more peaks and valleys than nearly any other performer of her ilk. The biggest hits of each of her records were often eschewed for other singles that weren’t as commercially dominant: Ray of Light’s “Nothing Really Matters” instead of “Frozen”; “Into the Groove” and “Burning Up” but no “Borderline” or “Material Girl”; “Bedtime Story” and “Rain” but no “Take a Bow,” her longest-running U.S. chart-topper.
It would be hard to come away from Celebration feeling shortchanged, though. Madonna’s voice arguably sounded the best it has since Ray of Light, when she had undergone rigorous vocal training for Evita. She glided above ballads like “Human Nature” and “Crazy for You,” yodeled through “Ray of Light,” and didn’t miss a beat on any of her ’80s material, recorded when her voice was markedly higher.
