Wide range of emotions in Madonna’s concert

From the interesting review by James son Jacelin, Las Vegas Review Journal.

Madonna embraces wide range of emotions in Las Vegas concert

On her knees, she sought penitence with an assault rifle.

But as Madonna begged forgiveness for her misdeeds, she divined plenty more to come like a soothsayer of the naughty.

“My inhibition’s gone away. I feel like sinning,” she purred while wielding a faux AK-47 during a show opening “Girl Gone Wild” Saturday at the MGM Grand Garden, moments after striking a suppliant pose on a stage designed to look like an ornate church, complete with singers dressed as priests engaging in Gregorian chants.

Throughout her career, Madonna has acted as a pendulum between virtue and vice, favoring neither, embracing both.

Now, fresh off a bitter divorce, with a new album “MDNA” that’s among her most unguarded, she has seldom seemed so human or humane.

She’s wounded, angry, petulant and sad, but also emboldened, galvanized and empathetic.

Madonna spelled out these emotions in all caps during her seething and sultry two-hour, 20-song performance, which was divided into multiple segments separated by video interludes, the theme of which was emotional and visual excess hurtling down the pothole-heavy road to redemption.

First up was her wrath.

It was Madonna as a Charlie’s Angel, clad in a curve-hugging black bodysuit, doing cartwheels across the stage and firing a pistol at invisible foes during “Revolver.”

Next, on electro slow burn “Gang Bang,” she was shooting masked assailants in the head inside a set designed to look like a seedy hotel room as blood spattered across a massive video screen in crimson bursts.

Her defiance reached its apex on “I Don’t Give A,” a song that doubled as both an assertion of self-confidence and an angry kiss off to her ex, which Madonna performed while gripping a guitar, sucking her cheeks in and glowering at the crowd before her with eyes that doubled as daggers.

“I tried to be a good girl / I tried to be your wife,” she sang. “Diminished myself /And I swallowed my light.”

This hurt later turned inward on broken-hearted ballad “Love Spent.”

“Would you have married me if I were poor?” she sang with hand pressed hard against her stomach, eyes closed, looking pained. “If I was your treasury / You’d have found the time to treasure me.”

And it wasn’t just her former husband in her cross hairs.

“Express Yourself,” which Madonna performed dressed as a majorette backed by a marching band drumline suspended from the rafters, came buffered with a sample of Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” (a song some have criticized for being a facsimile of the hit in question) followed by a portion of “She’s Not Me,” which could be read as a shot at the younger pop star.

Even some audience members received a little ribbing after Madonna learned the political persuasion of a self-identified gay Republican sitting upfront upon asking the crowd who was going to vote for Barack Obama in the upcoming presidential election.

“A gay Republican?” she scoffed incredulously. “It’s OK. I love you so much that I forgive you.”

A few songs later, after “Human Nature,” she’d drop trou and expose her backside to the crowd.

“Why does anybody show their ass onstage?” she asked of herself afterward. “So that people pay attention.”

Aside from a palpable, often playful measure of impudence, the other main constant in the show was the way in which Madonna continually reconfigured past hits into something new, with some songs being barely recognizable from their original recorded form.

Basque folk trio Kalakan contributed pounding drums and three-part vocal harmonies to “Open Your Heart,” helping turn it into an old world incantation.

The blood was drained from “Like A Virgin,” rendering it a spectral, spare torch song that Madonna sang backed only by piano.

Former dance floor fire starter “Hung Up” was leavened by dreamy synth lines and Auto-Tuned vocals, while “Candy Shop” was similarly reshaped and slowed down with a vamping bass line.

There was so much going on, both in song and onstage, that the show felt a little muddled in places, like someone trying to force together pieces of a puzzle that don’t fit with one another.

But at the same time, the do-your-own-thing ethos at the heart of Madonna’s catalog wouldn’t be served with a played-straight greatest hits performance.

And so Madonna serves her audience by only being concerned with serving herself.

“If it makes you feel good, I say do it,” she sang during a show-closing “Celebration,” and so that’s exactly what she did.