Never let it be said that Lady Gaga doesn’t play three-dimensional chess. She did that, quite literally, in one of a boundless series of production numbers during her Friday night headlining set at Coachella, with a drone camera flying what seemed to be about a thousand feet overhead to catch a Busby Berkeley’s-eye-view shot of the choreography on the giant, checkered game board on the B-stage below, letting Couch-ella viewers see what actual Coachella attendees couldn’t, quite. It was an impressive moment… and, by an hour later in the show, it was hard to even recall, so many show-stopping song-and-dance numbers had happened in the interval. You needed to take notes to keep track of even half of the vividly wacked-out visual setpieces she packed into a 110-minute performance. (Don’t worry, we did.) Maybe the only reason you could still recall the live chess game all that time later in the show was because the final stretch actually did feel like — hey! — a checkmate.
Maybe no one will ever outdo Beyoncé 2018 for sheer dazzle in headlining Coachella sets from beloved divas. But it sure felt like Gaga had spent the last seven years going “Hold my beer” and thinking up ways to make her own mark… or at least make a second mark that was more indelible than the one she left behind in the course of her last Coachella gig of her own in 2017. Only time will tell how this show goes down in the all-time ‘Chella annals, as ranked by millions of judges. But the Little Monsters fan base sure got its money’s worth, with a show that managed — in truest Gaga fashion — to be equal parts bizarro and sentimental. There may have been some dry eyes left in the house by the time she finished sending her love to the teeming masses, but there were no dry insults. Maybe for the first time all day, the comment threads in the comment stream alongside the YouTube livestream was without catty remarks. You could snark about the hilariously unhinged costume choices, if that wasn’t your bag. But singing- and dancing-wise, this was unassailable stuff.
“What’s happening?” she asked at 11:57 p.m., in an interstitial moment of mock-bafflement — and sure, a lot of viewers had been asking that very question since the moment she went on at 11:10. There seemed to be an underlying arc to the narrative of the show, which began with a spoken poem about “the manifesto of Mayhem” and went on to include title cards for Acts I, II, III., IV and V. (Among these were “Of velvet and vice”; “And she fell into a gothic dream”; and “The beautiful nightmare that knows her name,” in case you were not also taking notes.) Anyone who doesn’t think it’s fun to navigate visual confusion might have turned in early for the night, rather than try to make sense of, say, why Gaga’s costuming and design seems to marry soft, giant feathers with thorny wrap-arounds and exoskelton imagery. Or why she was hobbling with a cane for part of the show (echoing the same motif in a recent music video), or putting on a helmet and taking up giant crutches at another point. Sometimes you think you’d figured out what was supposed to be happening, and then something else would throw you for a loop. Take the time Gaga spent in the middle of the show in a large sandbox that seemed to serve as a graveyard, with the undead rising from underneath the sand to menace our white-clad heroine (who seemed to have been executed in that earlier chess match). Ah, zombies! Like “Thriller”? That, we get. But then another person climbed out of the sand in shoulders-to-toes sheer red nylons, and I felt a little bit conceptually lost again.
No matter! These bells and whistles may all have narrative meaning for Gaga and her team, or may just be fun to play with. But in the end, for the rest of us, they’re efficient delivery systems for giving us the old-fashioned grist of show business — that is, world-class belting and hoofing — embedded in odd garnishments that keep things from ever being boring or hokey for a second. Occasionally in this show, one of Gaga’s many looks would resemble something a bit more traditional. Like when she came back out with a black pageboy wig, and a shorter-than-short black jacket, and you might have thought of Sally Bowles even before Gaga was heard in voiceover reciting German in “Scheiße.” Anyway, she always looked as striking as she sounded, which is no small accomplishment on the part of her dressers.
One lingering question among viewers might have been: Was this the unofficial opening of her 2025 tour, which officially starts in Las Vegas on July 16? Some other performers don’t mind doing at Coachella the same thing they do on the road, like Missy Elliott, who preceded Gaga on stage and pretty much did the touring show fans have already seen. For Gaga, though, the answer has to be no, though it hasn’t been stated quite that baldly. After all, she did say, before she ever announced tour dates, that she wanted to do something bespoke for Coachella, which indicated that this performance would not be one long spoiler for the road show to come. The idea that this was essentially a one-off seemed confirmed when she told the crowd: “I wanted to make a romantic gesture to you… I decided to build you an opera house in the dessert.” Ah, so that’s what the back of her massive set was supposed to be. (I had been guessing some kind of combination of motel balconies and Roman ruins.)
But the thing that really cemented that this was not a glimpse of her touring routine? The ramps. Without being on site, it was hard to guess whether the thrusts that took the concert out into the audience at length were really as endless and labyrinthine as they appeared in the camera tracking shots, or whether there was some illusion to that. But boy, it sure seemed like she and her dancers were marching halfway to Idyllwild at various points in the show. Will she be able to bring those seemingly 10,000-foot runways to Madison Square Garden? Likely not. So this was a good chance for Gaga and choreographer Parris Goebel to enjoy the real estate while they had it, with Gage and the dancers not just strutting but actually given interesting bits of business to do in making their way through the field to various stops. Constant, well-trained movement across a large space can be just hella fun — it sure was here.
That dancing can be herky-jerky or rigid, but by the time Gaga got to “Garden of Eden,” she and her team engaged in a funkier style of movement than at other times, and it was delightful. Of course, ’70s and ’80s-style pop-funk plays a big part in her new album, “Mayhem” — there was no mistaking the Michael Jackson-isms of “Shadow of a Man” or the Prince-isms of “Killiah,” highlights both — and so having that reflected in the choreography, here and there, was a kick. This is not the kind of show where people are just gonna go freestyling all of a sudden, but it adds a healthy sense of dynamics to her set when her crew is acting like aliens from the Renaissance era part of the time and like regular human beings at other times.
The biggest difference between Gaga and some of the other performers at Coachella almost goes without saying: live singing. Between the Go-Go’s wonderfully raw performance earlier in the day and Lady Gaga’s set, you could catch a lot of Memorex performances, switching YouTube channels in search of somebody putting a real voice on the line. You could pretty much anticipate that Gaga would not be miming (or at least not often), but it was still a pleasure to hear her lightly panting into the mic now and again, as if we needed proof she was delivering the goods al fresco. It’s old news that she’s one of modern pop’s most gifted vocalists, but it hasn’t really gotten old yet. Not when you can see her do a literal victory lap around the perimeter of the staging era, grabbing fans’ hands and even boosting herself over some of their heads, and not miss a beat.
However bizarrely the show started, it was moony in just about equal measure at the end, as Gaga showed her true colors with earnest songs like “Shallow” and earnest spoken asides to match. (Among those more straightforward songs was “Die With a Smile,” performed at a skull-encased piano, but shortened, as to not to have to take on too much of Bruno Mars’ duet part herself.) Gaga is kind of a softy, for all those literal hard surfaces she builds into some of her outfits. “It’s fucking beautiful out here,” she gushed near the end. “I always feel so blessed to be with the audience because you always teach me something profound. The truth is, we’re all one. It’s just all one fucking thing.” And there was a tender shout-out to her “babe.” Truth be told, the final stretches of sentimentality might’ve been a bit much, if Gaga hadn’t earned the right to get lovey-dovey with us by being such a scary goofball earlier on.
Blessed with a smart sense of dynamics — musical, theatrical, emotional — that extends kind of across the board? She must’ve been born that way. At Coachella, which needed the bar for pure entertainment and talent to be raised this high again, we were good with the cuddles and the claws.
Lady Gaga’s Coachella setlist:
Bloody MaryAbracadabraJudasScheißeGarden of EdenPoker FacePerfect CelebrityDiseasePararazziAlejandroThe BeastKillah (with Gesaffelstein)ZombieboyDie With a SmileHow Bad Do U Want MeShadow of a ManKill for LoveBorn This WayShallowVanish Into YouBad Romance
