Pop music writer Sean Piccoli has written this review of Madonna’s first “Confessions” concert in Miami for the Sun Sentinel – saying that “pop legend put on fluid and entertaining show”.

The Sun Sentinel website also features a photo gallery of Madonna performing her sold-out concert at the AmericanAirlines Arena made of eleven great shot by Angel Valentin. Click here to see them all.

“If the “Confessions” tour that Madonna brought to AmericanAirlines Arena on Saturday night had anything to confess, it might have been this: The previous tour needed work.

By cutting back on the rigid set pieces and written-in-stone choreography of the “American Life” production, and returning this time with a better batch of songs, Madonna looked and sounded positively revived. In front of a cheering, sold-out crowd, the 47-year-old pop queen put on an entertaining, loose-limbed show.

This was a more physical, liberated performance that seemed to allow Madonna more room to move and to enjoy herself instead of just hitting marks and minding her cues. She sang with confidence in the material from her latest album, Confessions on a Dance Floor, and integrated older songs into a presentation that was both retro and updated.

The excess of metaphor that marks every Madonna tour and concert was on display here, but the juggling act hasn’t worked this well since the stunningly visual tour in support of her Music and Ray of Light albums.

For the first song, “Future Lovers“, Madonna burst out of a giant mirrored ball that opened like a flower, its pieces separating like petals. The theme was equestrienne fetish — Madonna dressed like a steeplechase pro, with bound, bitted and gagged male dancers as her mounts.

For “Like a Virgin“, she hopped on a merry-go-round saddle and pole, and sang as she rode. One of the more prop-heavy numbers was “Live to Tell“, for which Madonna rose into view hoisted on a massive cross. But the fixed pose also let her sing one of her best arena ballads with the poise and control it deserved.

“Live To Tell” also proved to be an effective delivery system for something else: public service announcements.

The curved video screen above the faux crucifixion relayed information about projected rates of starvation in Africa, and the song ended with Web site referrals. This could have been exploitive — Madonna using Third World-suffering merely to add drama — but it didn’t feel exploitive as, say, the “American Life” tour’s war-and-violence video graphics.

If this show was any indication, Madonna has gotten smarter at encoding her charitable aims and concerns about the state of the world into a package designed primarily to entertain. As she approaches 50 she’s getting crafty, like a veteran pitcher learning to replace brute force with guile.

From SunFlorida.com.
Thanks to MikeModerndancer.