Lady Gaga performs onstage at Madison Square Garden, Aug. 22. The Mayhem Ball is the pop star’s first headlining concert tour since 2022.Kevin Mazur/Getty Images
Taylor Swift had her Eras Tour, Lady Gaga has her arias tour. A piped-in operatic soundtrack including Habanera from Bizet’s Carmen greeted Gaga-garbed fans on Wednesday at the first of the pop star’s three lavish Mayhem Ball concerts in Toronto.
Gaga herself appeared diminutively atop a towering dress hoop that held, it was soon revealed, a troupe of writhing, caged-in dancers. This was pure Alice in Wonderland out-of-proportion business.
A band was housed in a pair of faux-stone structures of ornate columns. The set design seemed built for Teatro Real, not a hockey arena sponsored by a Canadian multinational banking and financial services company.
The thematic performance, dubbed The Art of Personal Chaos, began with a dramatic version of Bloody Mary, with Gaga dressed in a rich crimson bodysuit that featured studded leg-of-mutton sleeves. The deranged big-beat pop of Abracadabra, off her 2025 album Mayhem, bookended the first of the concert’s four “acts” with the 2008 hit Poker Face.
The “story” involves a woman in white tormented by fear and chaos − a light-and-dark dynamic that called to mind Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or, perhaps, the strange case of Cardi B and Nicki Minaj. Played initially by a Gaga-double dancer, the blond woman in white was flat on the catwalk at the end of Act I.
“Off with her head!” Gaga’s Mayhem persona screamed.
With all due respect to AC/DC and the Met Gala, Gaga has the biggest balls of them all. The lavish, audacious production is an elite extravaganza of arthouse theatre from an ambitious imagination. The gothic fever dream makes Katy Perry’s current Lifetimes Tour look like a high-school presentation in comparison.
Lady Gaga’s Mayhem Ball performance has four ‘acts,’ an imaginative extravaganza of out-of-proportion effects, dramatic costumes and calls for fans to get their ‘paws in the air.’Kevin Mazur/Getty Images
This is Gaga’s first headlining concert tour since her 20-concert Chromatica Ball run in 2022. It is also her first arenas tour since 2018. The smaller venue enhances the drama of a production that has its roots in previous performances to larger crowds this year at Coachella and Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro.
“Welcome to the opera house,” Gaga said early. “This is my house.”
This was an artist ruling the weird world she had created. To that end, Gaga constantly demanded her fans sing, scream, dance, jump and, most often, to get their “paws in the air.” (The New Yorker calls her devoted followers “little monsters,” much in the way the late Dame Edna endearingly addressed her fans as “possums.”)
Did Maria Callas ever tell audience members to get their paws up? No, but even though Gaga’s commands were relentless, the 39-year-old entertainer was putting in so much work herself that her bossiness didn’t come off as unreasonable − especially given her well-publicized history of chronic pain caused by fibromyalgia.
Gaga began Act II wearing a white distressed mini dress in a sandy sarcophagus with skeletons for company while singing Perfect Celebrity and Disease. Gaga and buried dancers eventually emerged. For Paparazzi, she walked the catwalk using steampunk crutches and rocking an arena-length fabric train.
On the set list was the ABBA-esque Alejandro, the rocked pop of Killah, the discoed Shadow of a Man and the Madonna knock-off Born This Way, dedicated to the queer community. Shallow, the hit ballad from the 2018 remake of A Star Is Born starring Gaga and Bradley Cooper, was reimagined as a brooding, industrial number.
On the razzle-dazzle numbers, Gaga’s voice was shouty here and steely there. Toward the concert’s end, though, she took to a keyboard for stripped-down versions of Die With a Smile (her retro-pop hit with Bruno Mars) and Marry the Night (introduced as a “song for a bad day”). The personas dropped, her mezzo-soprano voice was true and warm.
For the finale Bad Romance, her earworm from 2009’s The Fame Monster EP, the elaborate production was back on and the crowd put back to work. Could they sing “Ra, ra, ah-ah-ah/ Roma, roma-ma/ Gaga, ooh la la”? You know they could.
During the encore, fans were allowed a peek behind the curtain when the giant video screen showed a de-wigged, uncostumed Gaga backstage wiping off her makeup. She sang How Bad Do U Want Me as she made her way back to the auditorium. The opera was over, but not until the lady born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta sang Happy Birthday to one of her dancers.
A little niceness and humanness after a night of pizzazz, before the crowd walked back out into the mayhem of the world.
Lady Gaga’s The Mayhem Ball tour continues at Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena Thursday and Saturday, and Montreal’s Bell Centre, April 2 and 3.
