Lady Gaga has made quite a few grand entrances during her career: hatching from a space egg at the 2011 Grammys, jumping off a platform at the 2017 Super Bowl, stage-diving into the moshpit in an underboob-flashing leatherbabe get-up while dueting with Metallica at the 2017 Grammys, strutting onto a divey drag bar stage rocking some skinny Edith Piaf eyebrows and belting “La Vie En Rose” in A Star Is Born, etc.
But Gaga just may have outdone herself at the opening night of her “Enigma” residency at the Park MGM in Las Vegas Friday. As she hovered in a wire-strung harness, KISS/P!nk-style, above the 5,200-capacity crowd — which included superstar fans Katy Perry, Dave Grohl, Adam Lambert, and Jeremy Renner — wearing a mirrorball-reflective unitard and geometric baby-blue wig, she fingered a keytar and sang her breakthrough 2008 hit, “Just Dance.”
Regardless of whether Gaga wins at the Oscars or Globes, she definitely won over Vegas this Friday. That, of course, is no surprise, since perhaps no other artist in modern pop history is so clearly made for Sin City: Gaga has never shied away from spectacle, yet she can also clean up nice and croon the classics with her old-school pal Tony Bennett. Gaga will explore the latter, kinder, gentler side of her persona in a second Vegas residency, “Jazz & Piano,” in 2019.
“Enigma,” however, was a full-on conceptual production featuring the diva at her campy, crazy best, complete with a Wizard of Oz-meets-Aeon Flux-meets-Barbarella, anime/manga alternate-universe narrative starring Gaga’s artificial-intelligence alter ego: a sinewy, sexy Svedka vodka mascot-lookalike named Enigma.
And she performed “Scheiße” astride a giant animatronic, fire-breathing, chrome Trojan horse/dinosaur. It was all totally ridiculous, and it all totally worked.
