Photo Credits: Chris Young/ Canadian Press
Jane Stevenson of the Toronto Sun writes this piece below and gave Madonna a 4.5 out of 5 stars! I said you ranted and raved! You must love Madonna!! OMG, did anyone watch CityNews at 11pm Saturday nite? Fans were pumped!
Jane said........And not just because of the ballad, You Must Love Me, which the 50-year-old Queen of Pop turned into a much more likeable gypsy folk song with the help of some incredible Romanian musicians last night at the Air Canada Centre during the first of two sold-out shows.
You have to give The Material Girl props for looking as good as she does at a half-century in the middle of an increasingly nasty divorce from British filmmaker Guy Ritchie and continuing to put on a first-class pop show in spite of all the endless chinwagging. As she herself delicately put it later in the show: "I'm working my ass off."
GYRATED
Madonna danced, skipped, crawled, gyrated and thrust her way around the stage for two hours on her Sticky and Sweet Tour while reinventing old songs and highlighting slick new ones from her latest album, the urban-flavoured Hard Candy.
The energy kept up for another new tune, Beat Goes On, which featured Madonna and her dance crew riding the stage in a vintage white convertible along the catwalk to a smaller stage closer to the audience of 17,000.
She can be forgiven then for strapping on an electric guitar for the formerly edgy bondage tune, Human Nature, while video of Britney Spears stuck in an elevator played above her on a circular video screen. Thankfully, the reinvention of Vogue, complete with the horns from her latest hit, 4 Minutes, worked better than later rock versions of Borderline and -- again with that electric guitar!
For the most part, it was Madonna's new material that shone brightest like Heart Beat while video of collaborators Kanye West and Pharrell Williams played with her expertly working the conveyer belt on her catwalk, and She's Not Me, which featured four incarnations of Madonna -- the Marilyn Monroe/Material Girl, the stripper from Open Your Heart, the wedding gowned bride from Like A Virgin and the cone-bra wearing button-pusher.
But it was the thunder and lightning enhanced, visually stunning new song, Devil Wouldn't Recognize You, featuring Montreal keyboardist Ric'key Pageot and Madge in a black cloak atop his piano, that was the evening's showstopper as they rotated on the smaller stage while water imagery danced across the circular video screen enveloping them.
Also good was the upbeat new tune, Spanish Lesson. "Habla espanol?" said Madge, and the equally folky and Romanian versions of La Isla Bonita and the aforementioned You Must Love Me.
And the trio of 4 Minutes -- with video of her duet partner Justin Timberlake -- an electrifying electro version of Like A Prayer and the show-ending new song, Give It 2 Me, are as about as good as it gets at a Madonna concert.
Still, the moment everyone was waiting for, was the new song Miles Away, which everyone believes to be about the woes of having a long-distance relationship with Ritchie.
"This is sort of a love song -- can you dig it? -- for the emotionally retarded," she said while strumming an acoustic guitar during the song's intro.
News flash: Madge has been introducing this song this way since the launch of the North American leg back on Oct. 4 in New Jersey, which The Sun attended, and not just since the divorce was confirmed this past Wednesday.
Much more telling was the chess-imagery that played behind her on a video screen during Hung Up and her declaration: "In exactly 29 moves the queen will topple the king!" There was also her much-talked-about video segment comparing John McCain to Hitler and Barack Obama to Nelson Mandela, and a request segment where she sang a few bars of Express Yourself and Holiday.
WONDERFUL! That is why I did not go to Atlanta this past weekend. It was a tough clashing decision and my staff did a wonderful job over there! I hear she has reportedly settled her divorce for $60 million to Guy Ritchie. What a deal considering she's worth $400 million.
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