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Madonna (3.5 stars)—May 27, MGM Grand Garden Arena

Josh Bell

Las Vegas is the perfect place for a Madonna show. Her concerts are full-scale megaproductions, as much about the visuals and stage design as the music. They're also playful and creative and don't subordinate her music to the spectacle. Last week's show was a visual feast, but it also gave a pretty good sense of where Madonna's at musically.


With more than half of the show dedicated to songs from her recent Confessions on a Dance Floor (10 in all), it was easy to spot the new songs that will endure ("Hung Up" proved a perfect closer, and recent single "Sorry" got the entire crowd dancing), and those that won't (most of the rest). If the audience was disappointed at hearing only a handful of Madonna classics, though, they didn't show it, reacting enthusiastically in almost equal measure to songs new and old.


The old tunes got makeovers that varied in effectiveness, with the two most striking coming in the show's first half: Madonna rode a saddle attached to a stripper pole during a wonderfully reinvigorated "Like a Virgin," and, in the show's most controversial moment, attached herself to a mirrored crucifix to turn "Live to Tell" from a ballad about lost love to a lament for starving children in Africa, with images and statistics projected around her.


But a slowed-down, disco-fied "Erotica" was repetitive and lifeless, and "Paradise (Not For Me)," from 2000's Music, proved a dour low point. Even in her missteps, though, Madonna was nothing but fascinating. During "Lucky Star," a song from way back in 1983, Madge was draped, James Brown-style, in a white cape labeled "Dancing Queen." Some might think it one affectation too much, but watching her writhe around on the stage, without any background dancers to bolster her, during the mediocre new song "Let it Will Be," you could have little doubt that this was still the hardest-working woman in show business.

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