'I'm feeling particularly slutty tonight," Stefani Germanotta purred to a sold-out Susquehanna Bank Center on Thursday night.
Known to her fans - as well as anyone who's passed within hailing distance of a working radio or TV set in the last year - as Lady Gaga, she arrived with the kind of explosive force that can incinerate artists unprepared for the spotlight.
Since the success of her insidious, inescapable single "Poker Face," Gaga has staged a blizzard of reinvention, from sex kitten to bondage queen, as well as what might be a visitor from a far more stylish future. Her album The Fame, and its brief follow-up, The Fame Monster, are gratifyingly solid and diverse, drawing on an unabashed love of funk, disco, and electropop that has, somewhat miraculously, transcended the borders of the dance-music ghetto.
But what works in the controlled medium of a photo shoot or the brief span of a music video doesn't necessarily translate to the stage. Lady Gaga may have the mechanics of pop stardom down pat, but as a headlining performer, she is still a work in progress. Her two-hour set - longer by half an hour than all her recorded works combined - was full of dead spots and long breaks for costume and scenery changes that sapped the show's momentum and disrupted its groove.
As a character, Lady Gaga is an attention-starved dominatrix. Throwing herself to the stage between songs, she invited the audience to ravish her, and throughout the show she kept up a constant refrain: "Do you love me? Do you think I'm sexy?" Occasionally, her voice would jump from a baby-doll coo to a raspy scream, as if revealing the needy monster beneath the seductive exterior. But really, she was just trading one act for another. When she dropped the masks, she was more inclined to gush, whether in person or via a video in which she proclaimed her fans "kings" and "queens," demoting herself to court jester.
Apart from fleeting appearances by a guitarist and drummer, who joined her on the piano ballad "Speechless," her onstage company consisted solely of backing dancers, whose rote choreography never matched the outlandish provocations of Gaga's outerwear. Madonna and Kylie Minogue, to name two of her obvious predecessors, make a show of treating their dancers like an extended family, an interaction that adds a note of spontaneity to performances that can seem like elaborate karaoke nights. Gaga seemed isolated on stage, and oddly tentative, as if not quite ready to assume stardom as her right rather than a privilege contingent on each passing instant.
A little humility in a pop star is a good thing, but too much and the spell is broken. Need the audience too much, and they stop needing you.
BY Sam Adams
For The Inquirer
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