Lady Gaga Toyota Center April 8, 2011
See pics of Mama Monster and her minions in our slideshow.
Lady Gaga fell off her piano stool Friday night at the Toyota Center, during her newish "You And I," a sweetly nostalgic and classic AM radio cut from her upcoming Born This Way. To be clear, she had just been bending the keys with the heel of her stiletto boots while pounding out the notes, so she was already testing gravity.
She got up and promptly finished the song in front of the elegantly burned-out shamble of keys and wires, with just her voice.
"You will never see me lip-sync. You will never see some rich bitch limping through a set," she screamed five minutes later, after a costume and scenery change. She howled it with force during a moment of introspection in front of her pit of Monsters.
Welcome to Lady Gaga Country.
Friday night's Gaga was Rocks Off's second in less than a year, and of the two, this was probably the best, or at least the most thrilling. From the piano drop to the slip-up after a fan threw a glow-stick at her, which made her lose her footing during "Poker Face," the show was the same but completely different than the one we saw last July.
The opening was the same, with Gaga climbing down a stairway bathed in purple light, to the Virgin Mobile telephone call to a lucky fan in the mezzanine. OK, the merch was different, but that's a quibble.
Overall, what was different was her marked increase in viciousness. Gaga seemed leaner and hungrier than last year's show. She was on the prowl, not just traipsing through a set of columns and meeting dance and lighting cues.
She's been living this "Monster's Ball" tour for almost two years now, so it's like walking into your house every night, reassembled from the ground up in a new arena every day in another city.
And yeah, the whole storyline running through the show is corny, with a band of lithe, toned, and sweatily-attired misfits trying to get to this mythical "ball," but on this leg of the tour the plot has been largely abandoned for Gaga to take us to dominatrix church in between songs. She likes to scream.
