Lady Gaga concert like last Saturday.

So, I'm glad I went to the Lady Gaga concert, but I don't think I'm sold on her as a performer.

First off, the show had all these little things that were wrong with it. Like, the opening act was 7:30pm, then it was 45 minutes till the 2nd act began after the 1st act ended, and then a full hour after that till Lady Gaga came on - it made like just no sense. And, when she was at the piano, the piano should have been angled differently so she wasn't turned away from like 1/2 of the audience...

(There was some other stuff like that as well, but I can't remember exactly what now.)

Second, the show was very visual and she needed a deep stage, but I bet it was planned for theaters that were narrow and deep, rather than the one the show was moved to, which was not that deep, but broad; so much of the choreography and everything would have been better if you were sitting directly in front of the stage, and it should have used the stage more so people didn't feel gypped if they were sitting towards the wings of the theater.

Third, her biggest strength was her singing. Usually it doesn't come out on her up-tempo songs that have a lot of bass beat and shit like that, but during the middle part of the concert it was her on the grand piano singing some slow stuff, and she held the audience in the palm of her hand - you could have heard a pin drop. This is unlike Madonna, who dies whenever her voice has to hold the audience.

Fourthly, she gave multiple (genuine) shout-outs to her fans for supporting her through hard times, but a few times she or her act also started to schill herself. "This is a movement, and the fans write their own history," an announcer intoned between changes of set. She also made explicit that everyone should call themselves "monsters" and do this little claw thing with their hand during concerts, which I found very lame.

Fifthly, Lady Gaga is *not* a performance artist, however much she and her fans tell everyone that she is. She does one thing well -- she mixes colors, designs, textures, and different types of light in unexpected ways, and the only new thing she ever does is put out a new combination. The costumes and set pieces got very repetitive and blurred together, and were not memorable overall; there were no memorable moments due to that stuff...

Perhaps the only one was when she was singing "Paparazzi" and these dancers came out holding a large-pole between them like a trussed-up woman would be carried on by cannibals, only Lady Gaga had this crazy hairdo that was tied to the middle of it, and they kind of threw her around the stage while she sang.

But, it was a nice image that went nowhere. I feel many of her set pieces were more tableaus than concert acts - that is, they would have looked nice as photos, but didn't work holistically with the music.

So, unless she starts singing a lot more slow stuff or gets her shit together and does something better with her act, I'm probably not going to go to another concert of hers.