Adele doesn’t come to you — you go to Adele. During August, that means going to Munich to see one of the concerts in her 10-show residency, in the custom-built Adele Arena, which holds 74,000 a night. She took the summer off from her Las Vegas residency at Caesars Palace, but she brought Vegas-style spectacle with her — smoke, fire, confetti, fireworks and what has been described as the largest video screen in existence. As effective as this production was on opening night (Aug. 2), some of the best moments came despite that scale — not because of it.
The scale of the show is absurd, and at first it feels like it won’t work — there’s no rise on the floor, so not all the sightlines are great, and the seats on the stands are far away. But be honest — how much can you see from the top tier of the stadium, anyway? Many concert-goers spend a good part of a show looking at a screen, anyway — the Munich production just made a virtue of it. You want to look at a screen? We’ll give you a stylized, curved one that’s 220 meters (240.5 yards) wide — that’s the length of two American football fields.
Even in an era of over-the-top concert production, this was overwhelming. Rather than lean into that, though, Adele just remained her charming self. “What do you think of my screen?” she asked the crowd at one point, as though she had just picked it up at a sale at Best Buy. The staging bordered on the absurd, but it worked because Adele was in on the joke. “I underestimated how f—ing scared I am,” she said at one point. She shouldn’t have been.
She Is the World
Before and after the concert, fans could visit Adele World, a small theme park’s worth of food and drink stands, two carnival rides, a second stage and a merchandise store the size of a big boutique. (This also served to stagger the crowd flow, so it didn’t overwhelm the public transportation system.) It was silly, but it was silly fun: A bar for Adele (Aperol) Spritzes, a mocked-up biergarten, even a stand for spätzle. It all created a nice sense of occasion. These shows were a big deal, but a venue that relies so much on public transportation isn’t suited for tailgating. If you’re going to arrive early, why not take a ride on a Ferris wheel?
“Rumor” on Video
“Hello” is the obvious opener — “I’m always going to start with ‘Hello,’” she told Oprah Winfrey a few years ago. But Adele kicked the show into high gear with the second song, “Rumor Has It,” which showed off what the video screen could do. As Adele belted out one of her most powerful songs, the screen lit up behind her — really, the entire sky seemed to light up behind her — with graphics that evoked tabloids. Sure, the imagery was obvious. But it was also as brash and in-your-face as the song itself. Unlike Adele’s Las Vegas show, which starts with the focus on her and gradually reveals bandmembers and backup singers, her Munich show gets big fast. You could almost feel the video in your body, the way you could feel the bass.
A Modest Proposal
After “Rumor,” Adele took the temperature down a notch, admitting to nerves and asking the background singers to take the train off of her dress, after it had gotten soaked. (It rained just before she got onstage.) Whatever nerves she might have felt, she sure seemed to be having a blast. After “Water Under the Bridge,” Adele even scored an assist for the proposal of a couple in the crowd. “How long have you guys been together?” she asked. “17 years, f— me!” This is the kind of intimacy she delivers at her Las Vegas residency, and it shouldn’t work in a venue that’s almost 20 times bigger. But it did.
The Kid Was Alright
Every few songs, Adele went from larger-than-life diva to charismatic character. At one point, she brought a 7-year-old kid up onstage, along with his older sister. His name was Dion. “And how old are you, Dion?” Adele asked. “Good,” he replied. (He’s a second-language speaker — give him a break.) His sister told the singer how much she had enjoyed drinking in Adele World, where she had spent the afternoon hanging out with fans from Liverpool. “How did you understand them?” Adele replied, without missing a beat. It brought a refreshing lightness to a show that otherwise would have triggered sensory overload.
Piano Man
About halfway through the show, Adele threw a curveball, scaling down to perform with only her pianist, Eric Wortham II, on a mini-stage-style platform set up between the standing-room first section and the seats in the second. The shifting of scale has become standard to the visual vocabulary of stadium shows, but the change was refreshing — here was a woman and her pianist, performing far out into the crowd, backed by a screen that was unforgiving in its detail. After pointing out that it was the first of her songs that found an audience in Germany, she sang “Make You Feel My Love,” a Bob Dylan cover from her first album. (She doesn’t play that, along with “Chasing Pavements” and “All I Ask,” which followed, in Las Vegas.) Suddenly, the crowd grew quiet, with all eyes on her and, for a few minutes, the screen didn’t seem like such a big deal after all.
Skyfall as Big as the Sky
Adele stayed on the platform but traded her pianist for a string section for “Skyfall,” the song she recorded for the James Bond film of the same name. With her full band on the main stage and string players sitting on the semicircular walkway that ran between there and the platform, it was a performance that demonstrated her power as well as her precision. It’s sky, it’s sea, it’s Bond, and with Adele’s soaring vocals the screen loomed as large as the sky itself. As she sang on the platform, columns of smoke rose around her. It as a Bond film opening sequence brought to life on a grand scale.
Fire and Rain
Where there’s smoke there’s fire. After a brief video interlude and a hair and makeup touch-up done in the dark, with the efficiency of a Formula 1 pit crew — it wasn’t generally visible but I was close enough to the platform to see it — Adele launched into a show-stopping performance of “Set Fire to the Rain.” There was no water, as in Vegas, but there was plenty of it on video, and there were bursts of real fire — you could feel the heat. It was larger than life.
You Get a Shirt and You Get a Shirt
Part of Adele’s genius is her ability to puncture her own pomp, and at times, the show drifted into Andy Kaufman absurdity. At one point, Adele read out a seat number and said there was an envelope taped to the underside with 50 Euros. (This was much funnier than it looks in print.) And as she does in Las Vegas, Adele uses a “T-shirt gun” to fire souvenirs into the crowd. Pop, one missed the mark. Pop, another came closer. The vastness of the venue put a damper on the anticipation of catching one, but her sheer joy at playing with this toy was contagious, and that was the real point. If one of the most famous people on the planet can have so much fun firing a contraption loaded with T-shirts, you damn well better smile, too.
Young Glory
“When We Were Young” used the screen creatively, as giant-images scrolled by, surrounded by a border that evoked analog film. It’s a smart visual pun, delivered at the size of a building — childhood photos the size of cars and houses. Then: Confetti. But not just any confetti — confetti of paper made to look like old Polaroids. They thought of everything.
Rolling in the Deep
What other song could end the show? After thanking the audience, as well as the promoters behind the show — “I’d only trust the Germans with this,” she said of the formidable logistics issues — Adele tore into a soaring cover of her most upbeat song. It was punctuated with more confetti, plus fireworks — not a quick burst of them, but a serious display. Most acts would have been buried under the sturm und drang, but Adele’s musicians and her voice seemed to go with it fine. By then, she had been moving, nervous, funny, touching and funny again. She was entitled to triumph and this was it.
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