Lady Gaga didn’t blow the roof off NRG Stadium during her halftime show in Houston on Sunday. No need. She just asked nicely, and they cranked it open for her so that Lady Gaga might deliver one of the most spectacular performances in Super Bowl history.
There’d been rumors that she wanted to start things off in the open air and so she did, singing a medley of patriotic songs, the night sky above the stadium and behind Lady Gaga alight with the colored lights of a few hundred hovering drones. And then …
… she jumped, flying via cables to a futuristic tower on the stage below, to open the halftime show proper with “Poker Face,” with its state-appropriate lyrics (“I wanna hold them like they do in Texas, please.”) before turning mid-air somersaults, still on the wires, as fireworks erupted and she finished her descent to the stage.
There’d been a lot of will-she-or-won’t-she talk about whether Lady Gaga, often outspoken in her political and social views, would use this massive platform to make any statements on President Donald Trump’s new administration and early flurry of executive orders in Washington.
Gaga had said earlier in the week that she intended to let her songs speak for her and that’s exactly what she did, her second song in the performance, “Born This Way,” perhaps being her way of making a subtle point about what she feels and believes: “Don’t be a drag, just be a queen,” the song offers at different points. “You’re black, white, beige, chola descent / You’re Lebanese, you’re orient.”
But that was as direct as anything got, with the music – other songs included “Telephone,” “Just Dance” and “Million Reasons,” the only song offered from her newest album, “Joanne” – and spectacle delivering everything you’d want from a super-condensed Lady Gaga show.
Costumes were typically splashy from the silver bejeweled body suit with matching boots in which she first appeared to a wildly bedazzled gold jacket while playing a keytar and singing “Just Dance.”
By the final number, “Bad Romance,” she had stripped down to a pair of sparkly briefs and the kind of shoulder pads one might have worn to Studio 54.
As the song ended, Lady Gaga was held aloft on the shoulders of her backup dance crew, who carried her to a lower platform where she leapt off into, well, who knows, because the cameras didn’t show her landing.
Gone, but certainly not forgotten in our memories of Super Bowl halftime shows.
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