She performed 79 shows in 39 cities
After cancelling the first stateside leg of the tour due to her 2023 hospitalisation, Madonna launched The Celebration Tour in the UK in October of that year. The rescheduled dates followed in December, with shows in the US and Canada running until April 2024, ahead of five nights in Mexico City and the closing date, at Rio De Janeiro’s Copacabana Beach, on May 4.
It was the most ambitious tour of her career
The Celebration Tour was the 12th tour of Madonna’s career, and the eighth with director Jamie King. The 4,400-square-foot stage is the largest constructed for any of her tours and was inspired by the grid layout of New York City’s Manhattan borough, with Uptown, Downtown, Midtown, East and West stages. A catwalk stretching 230 feet took Madonna 105 feet into the venue, and there was a sequence in which she was elevated high above the crowd for a poignant performance of her 1986 ballad Live To Tell.
The statistics are staggering: more than 200 crew in attendance; 24 onstage performers requiring a colossal 45 wardrobe trunks; 14 spotlights for the “Queen Of Pop” alone and more than 600 intelligent lights to illuminate the stage and arena, with over 8,800 lighting cues.
The show attracted a galaxy of special guests
The early Celebration nights in London featured most of Madonna’s children joining their mother on stage – a particular highlight was Chifundo “Mercy” James, who played the grand piano on the iconic 1993 hit Bad Girl. Rocco joined his mother in Sweden, while the Vogue sequence of the show saw the star joined by a series of guest judges who scored the backing dancers for their performances, in a sequence inspired by New York’s ballroom scene. Casting their votes were Ricky Martin, Jean Paul Gaultier, Diplo, Cardi B and Pamela Anderson, among many others.
The tour finally saw Kylie and Madonna perform on stage together
It was the moment fans had been dreaming about forever. The “Queen Of Pop” and Australia’s “Princess Of Pop” have long been admirers but have only met off-camera a handful of times. On 7 March 2024, at the Kia Forum, in Los Angeles, the world finally got to see the pair together – and even join forces on a spirited duet of Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive, before launching into a brief rendition of Kylie’s global smash Can’t Get You Out Of My Head. Let’s hope this is just the appetiser for a recorded duet in the near future.
Madonna’s iconic outfits were recreated for the tour
Although Donatella Versace created a new catsuit, and Jean Paul Gaultier made a new version of Madonna’s iconic cone bra in a mini-dress, Yohannes and Rita Melssen designed most of the Celebration Tour outfits that paid tribute to Madonna’s influence on fashion. “We wanted to reference everything that she’s done, and make something new out of that,” they told Vogue magazine.
“She is involved in every single process of the costume design,” said Yohannes. “She looks at all the fabrics, sketches and buttons. She cares about who the characters are, and the clothes telling that story.” Inevitably, there was almost as much attention paid to the fashion as there was the music, but little beat the show’s staggering opening sequence, which saw Madonna perform Nothing Really Matters wearing a headpiece by House Of Malakai, with a kimono by Eyob Yohannes.
Many of Madonna’s hit videos featured in a dazzling visual display
For an artist celebrated for her influence on film – and undoubtedly one of the leading pioneers of the music video – The Celebration Tour featured many sequences from Madonna’s classic promo videos. During Live To Tell, images of people lost to the AIDS crisis were projected around the crowd, while the Like A Virgin interlude created a visual reference to the long-standing friendship between the reigning “Queen Of Pop” and the late “King Of Pop”, Michael Jackson. Both dominated pop culture in the 80s, and, of course, Like A Virgin’s iconic production, by Nile Rodgers, owes just a little to Jackson’s Billie Jean, due to that classic bass riff.
