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New albums by established stars are almost always marketed as sequels, but taking a cue from the Beastie Boys' Intergalactic and, say, Mission: Impossible, Madonna's Confessions on a Dancefloor -- and its accompanying stage spectacular, which hit the Garden last night -- is a musical prequel. From the moment Madonna dropped out the rafters in a two-million-dollar Swarovski crystal disco ball, she set out to evoke the adult polyester '70s club culture that her early-'80s nouvelle-vague electropop hits, all rended lingerie and bubblegum insouciance, helped usher into the history books. Allow her the backward glance: in twenty-odd years onstage, it's her first public pang of nostalgia. Having taken a sample of Abba for her recent single "Hung Up," she also appropriated the words "Dancing Queen" for a great white lightbulb-lined cape (brought out late in the show for her version of the infamous James Brown ro utine) and plastered it on tour t-shirts, a move calculated to appeal to her key demographics: gay men and serial bachelorettes. On a personal note, this is a wonderful audience with which to spend a couple of hours. Only at a Madonna concert do you find straight women in the men's bathrooms without the gentlemen batting an eye.More than any pop star before or since, Madonna takes evident delight in curating a Broadway-calibur spectacle. (I'm not sure what Broadway would make of a woman who steps out of a disco ball in jodhpur boots and a riding crop, harnesses a man with a bit in his mouth and rides him like a pony, but here's evidence that lots of well-meaning people will pay big money to see it.) Her performances assault you with imagery, often oblique -- her opening equestrian-themed set, which featured a filmed erotic confrontation between singer and beast to compliment her dancers' onstage horseplay, may or may not have resonated more if you knew she'd broken eight bones in a riding accident last year. Other themes -- pairs of men who attempt to hold hands but never quite succeed; a woman in a dark hooded tunic thrashing about in a steel cage, as if Anakin Skywalker had been interned at Abu Ghraib -- were easier to discern. The music, drawn largely from Confessions, harked backwards; but the lady makes a point of staying up with what's trendy in modern movement technique. During "Jump," her dancers navigated an elaborate set of monkey bars in an exhibition of parkour-style urban-assault gymnastics; and, despite the star’s falling out with her old friend David LaChappelle over a video treatment, many of her show's routines gestured towards krumping, the hyper-aggressive street-dance phenomenon captured in LaChappelle's documentary Rize.
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