“Have you met me?” asks Madonna drily, a handful of songs into the third night of her Celebration tour. It’s a rhetorical question, given the singer’s hit-saturated 40-year career, her enduring status as the highest-grossing touring female performer of all time, and all the fans who have come in cosplay – not to mention the silly money being charged for VIP tickets. Having long resisted performing greatest-hits sets in favour of staging new work, Madonna recently relented, perhaps prey to a retrospective mood. Since about 2019, she has been trying to mount a self-directed biopic that is now on ice, its energies redirected to charting her career across 78 worldwide dates.
Madonna isn’t just wryly referring to her fame tonight, though. She makes the quip standing next to an avatar of her younger self, a dancer whose face is disconcertingly blurred by a see-through mask. “I’m proud of her,” says Madonna to howls of approval, “she didn’t listen to the naysayers.”
