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Rebel Heart Tour press reports, reviews, videos & pictures


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wait what reading the guardian interview it says the HW dancers are transgender. are they really? any of them? i havent noticed

Me neither! And the video I have seen of Holy Water when Madonna is swinging round on a nun I was certain it was on a female dancer.

I love reading such great reviews thanks guys! I do wonder what the hell was meant by calling Devil Pray dodgy, it's one of my first loves of Rebel Heart album. I don't have a great impression yet of how the act looks but the song is stellar.

I find it strange that the internet comments on articles about Madonna are just the same wether she is bashed in the media or like now gets glowing reviews!

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Has the NY Post reviewed it? Yet? NY Times ?

NY Post:

Amy Schumer Gets in the Groove with Madonna at MSG

By Hardeep Phull

Compared to the eye-watering sexual detail that Amy Schumer puts into her comedy skits and routines, watching her flash her underwear to a packed Madison Square Garden and let Madonna feign taking her from behind was practically PG-13 material.

This surreal moment turned out to be a hysterical highlight of the singer’s two-hour gig on Wednesday night. As the dancehall rhythms of “Unapologetic Bitch” bounced around the arena, Madge pulled up Schumer, the two twerked their magic, and the singer then anointed the comic with the title of “Unapologetic Bitch of the Evening.” For this, she was awarded a sock puppet and a banana, which Schumer then pretended to enter into the one part of her body normally reserved for exiting.

It was enough to make even the Queen of Shock look a little uncomfortable, and she duly exclaimed “you’re going straight to hell!” In the context of the rest of the show, it was easily one of the most risqué moments. Sure, there were pole-dancing nuns, half-exposed buttocks, and the insinuation of oral sex at the Last Supper, but these aren’t sights that make Madonna fans gasp anymore. The bigger surprise was the sight of the usually inscrutable megastar exposing herself emotionally.

This year’s “Rebel Heart” album didn’t set the charts alight but those who listened close heard the 57-year-old sounding wounded and reflective, and it’s where the “Rebel Heart Tour” is often most arresting. The Catholic guilt (complete with a melancholic priest) came to the surface again on “Devil Pray” and during the delicate ballad “HeartBreakCity,” Madonna let the pain of her failed relationship with dancer Brahim Zaibat flow into night. “I sound cynical about love because I have good reason to,” she explained at one point, and the way these songs were delivered made it hard to doubt.

But even Madonna’s biggest fans don’t pay to watch a pity party, and Madonna (as she always has done since she first played the Garden 30 years ago) put on a show that was entertaining to the last. A giant cross-shaped walkway connected the main stage at one end of the arena, to a smaller, B-stage at the other end, and every inch was well used. The blood and guts approach to her controversial “MDNA” tour in 2012 was nowhere to be seen. Instead, Madonna relied heavily on impressive set-pieces, elaborate costumes, and tightly choreographed dance numbers, the best of which turned out to be a fabulously vibrant, flamenco-themed medley of hits such as “La Isla Bonita,” “Into the Groove,” and “Everybody.” It’s moments like these that prove Madonna’s version of nostalgia is more inventive than most artists’ version of contemporary. That’s why we still need her, now more than ever.

Before making her cameo in Madonna’s set, Schumer put in a fine performance of her own. Now she’s become a bankable movie star following the success of this summer’s “Trainwreck,” her well of comic inspiration reaches into Hollywood – a world that’s screaming out to be made fun of. Rocking a cocktail dress and slugging straight from a bottle of champagne, she poked fun at the A-list set including Bradley Cooper (“he has some hearing loss from sniping”), model Irina Shayk (“she looks like a panther who f**ked a gazelle, and then f**ked Giselle”), and even joked about seizing Katie Couric’s phone and texting lewd suggestions to the journalist’s husband.

Schumer also announced that she would be playing Madison Square Garden on June 23, 2016. That gives her almost a full year to wreak more havoc across the world’s elite circles, beginning on Thursday night when she opens for Madonna again at the Garden, before the pair move on to Barclays Center on Saturday.

http://nypost.com/2015/09/17/amy-schumer-gets-into-the-groove-with-madonna-at-msg/

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NY Post:

Amy Schumer Gets in the Groove with Madonna at MSG

By Hardeep Phull

Compared to the eye-watering sexual detail that Amy Schumer puts into her comedy skits and routines, watching her flash her underwear to a packed Madison Square Garden and let Madonna feign taking her from behind was practically PG-13 material.

This surreal moment turned out to be a hysterical highlight of the singers two-hour gig on Wednesday night. As the dancehall rhythms of Unapologetic Bitch bounced around the arena, Madge pulled up Schumer, the two twerked their magic, and the singer then anointed the comic with the title of Unapologetic Bitch of the Evening. For this, she was awarded a sock puppet and a banana, which Schumer then pretended to enter into the one part of her body normally reserved for exiting.

It was enough to make even the Queen of Shock look a little uncomfortable, and she duly exclaimed youre going straight to hell! In the context of the rest of the show, it was easily one of the most risqué moments. Sure, there were pole-dancing nuns, half-exposed buttocks, and the insinuation of oral sex at the Last Supper, but these arent sights that make Madonna fans gasp anymore. The bigger surprise was the sight of the usually inscrutable megastar exposing herself emotionally.

This years Rebel Heart album didnt set the charts alight but those who listened close heard the 57-year-old sounding wounded and reflective, and its where the Rebel Heart Tour is often most arresting. The Catholic guilt (complete with a melancholic priest) came to the surface again on Devil Pray and during the delicate ballad HeartBreakCity, Madonna let the pain of her failed relationship with dancer Brahim Zaibat flow into night. I sound cynical about love because I have good reason to, she explained at one point, and the way these songs were delivered made it hard to doubt.

But even Madonnas biggest fans dont pay to watch a pity party, and Madonna (as she always has done since she first played the Garden 30 years ago) put on a show that was entertaining to the last. A giant cross-shaped walkway connected the main stage at one end of the arena, to a smaller, B-stage at the other end, and every inch was well used. The blood and guts approach to her controversial MDNA tour in 2012 was nowhere to be seen. Instead, Madonna relied heavily on impressive set-pieces, elaborate costumes, and tightly choreographed dance numbers, the best of which turned out to be a fabulously vibrant, flamenco-themed medley of hits such as La Isla Bonita, Into the Groove, and Everybody. Its moments like these that prove Madonnas version of nostalgia is more inventive than most artists version of contemporary. Thats why we still need her, now more than ever.[/font]

Before making her cameo in Madonnas set, Schumer put in a fine performance of her own. Now shes become a bankable movie star following the success of this summers Trainwreck, her well of comic inspiration reaches into Hollywood a world thats screaming out to be made fun of. Rocking a cocktail dress and slugging straight from a bottle of champagne, she poked fun at the A-list set including Bradley Cooper (he has some hearing loss from sniping), model Irina Shayk (she looks like a panther who f**ked a gazelle, and then f**ked Giselle), and even joked about seizing Katie Courics phone and texting lewd suggestions to the journalists husband.

Schumer also announced that she would be playing Madison Square Garden on June 23, 2016. That gives her almost a full year to wreak more havoc across the worlds elite circles, beginning on Thursday night when she opens for Madonna again at the Garden, before the pair move on to Barclays Center on Saturday.

THIS!!!

And how brilliant fun with bananasockpuppet UB Amy :lol:

But did the writer not pay attention, she didn't sing Everybody did she?

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WOW! Her tours have generally received good reviews but never like this. With this show, everyone seems to agree that it's time to recognize that she's on a league of her own & that no one comes close. I already knew that but after seeing the show last night, I could see how even the cynics had to admit Madonna's undisputed superiority. The show was a tour de force on every level and it was really so much fun at the same time, from start to finish.

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Rollingstone:

This time Madonna has much stronger new songs to play with, from Rebel Heart — and she brilliantly revamps the hits.

Yes, RebelHeart is indeed one of the best albums she ever did. :clap:
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Entertainment Weekly:

http://www.ew.com/article/2015/09/17/madonna-rebel-heart-review

Madonna reigns over New York’s Madison Square Garden—and reinvents her classics: EW review
by Melissa Maerz

B+

Posted September 17 2015

You don’t get Madonna tickets to see a light-hearted show. You go to watch Olympic-level choreography routines that have been exhaustively road-tested by men who pole-dance on giant crucifixes. You go to see Madge dressed up in elaborately designed samurai, matador, and flapper outfits with so much theatrical flair, they look like they were hand-stitched by the ghosts of Rogers and Hammerstein’s costume designers. You go to see if the 57-year-old can still pull off high notes that are almost as athletic as her high kicks. And if you were at Madison Square Garden last night, as Madonna kicked off a three-night run of shows in her backyard, you saw all of that. But you saw something else, too, something you might not expect. There was Madonna, kicking back on stage, strumming a ukulele–and smiling. Was she actually having a good time up there?

Finally, here was a glimpse of the not-quite-so-serious Madonna. She even set the vibe by opening with a comedian. Amy Schumer staggered onto the stage with a bottle of booze in her hands and quipped, “Who better than me to open up for Madonna? Uh… Any band?” She killed it with dirty jokes involving Katie Couric, the Kardashians, and Abraham Lincoln, warming up the crowd for a set that later found Madonna talking in a Betty Boop voice, cracking jokes with the audience (“You’re too horny for me!” she told a man wearing bull horns), and finally bringing Schumer back on stage to dance to “Unapologetic Bitch” and… er, play with her Sock Bitch puppet.

The playful mood was a surprise, since the show didn’t start that way. She opened with “Iconic,” as a bleak image of Mike Tyson stared the crowd down from a massive video screen and Madonna was lowered from the ceiling in a red and black kimono, writhing around inside a cage made of swords. In voiceover mode, we could hear her sermonizing about how creativity is being crushed by corporate machine—an ironic message for a pop star who has cultivated such a powerful brand, she now sells a Material Girl fashion line at Macy’s. Dancers dressed as gladiators descended upon the stage, in hardware masks that covered their faces, and standing before them as their queen, Madonna, looked like Daenerys Targaryn from Game of Thrones, her long wavy blonde hair flowing behind her, her arms raised up as if to say, Love me! Fear me! As visually spectacular as it was narratively heavy-handed, it felt like a callback to her last tour, MDNA, which featured a dark charade that found Madonna wielding a gun on stage. But when the song ended with video footage of the gladiators knocking over a saintly-looking Madonna statue, the tone changed. Madonna has built a career by playing with what we hold sacred, whether it’s crucifixes or underground dance crazes. Now the only sacred thing she’s tearing down is Madonna herself.

During much of the show, she seemed to revel in her refusal to give the crowd the Madonna they’d always known. The setlist was crammed with material from the new album, disappointing those who came to hear the greatest hits. When she did dip into her back catalogue, she teased the audience with medleys that fused oldies with newer tracks. “Holy Water” segued into “Vogue,” as Madonna cavorted with scantily clad nuns (played by male dancers in ruffled white panties) who swung around on crucifixes that towered at three stories high. Then “Vogue” segued back into “Holy Water,” as the dancers created a Last Supper tableau. She chased a male dancer up a long spiral staircase for “Heartbreak City,” then pushed him off the top and watched him free-fall to the ground as she sulked to “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore.”

When she did play an old favorite at its full run time, she revamped the songs so that they were unrecognizable until the lyrics came in, which might’ve confounded those who wanted to sing along. But many of those new arrangements felt fresh and exciting. She turned “Burning Up” into a rock song, playing a guitar solo on a Flying V. She infused “Deeper and Deeper” with a pulsing house undercurrent that felt contemporary again in a dance-music era where groups like Disclosure reign. Not long after lying on the hood of a car, with mechanics swirling on wheel boards around her, and performing “Body Shop”—a song so literal about its sexual intentions, it doesn’t even qualify as a double entendre—she took on “Like a Virgin,” stripping the song down to little more than her voice and a galloping bass. Her performance of that classic was refreshingly minimal, too: no elaborate set pieces, just Madonna joyfully bouncing around stage. She stuffed the microphone in her pants, ripped open her shirt to reveal a black bra (“Getting hot in here, right?”), and dutifully humped the stage, but the whole thing was meant to be more campy than sexy, poking fun at the provocateur she was back when that song could’ve gotten her banned from the VMAs.

Madonna was winking at us—and maybe at a few others, too. She sang “La Vie En Rose” in French, possibly to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Edith Piaf’s death, or maybe to rile up her rumored rival Lady Gaga, who has claimed the song as her own signature set piece. When Madonna whipped out the ukulele for “La Vie,” then gushed in a faux-naïve Betty Boop voice, “Gosh! A girl can get awful nervous under these lights!” it sounded like she was playfully taking a shot at Taylor Swift, whose golly-gosh enthusiasm and ukulele strumming defined her Speak Now tour. Madonna recently told EW that she and Swift had planned to work on something together after teaming up for the iHeart Radio Music Awards in March, but the collaboration fell apart. Maybe there’s some bad blood?

Then again, maybe Madonna was just being Madonna, not trying to lash out at anyone in particular so much as trying to tease anyone she can. It was fitting that the final third of her show was devoted to matador themes, since Madonna has never stopped baiting her fans. She took a painstakingly long, slow walk up a few steps in her regal matador robe during “Living for Love,” intentionally antagonizing anyone in the crowd who might still be nervous that she’d repeat the famous spill she took at the Brit Awards.

But she also took pleasure in just being a goofball, whether she was pretending to throw back tequila shots during a Spanish-tinged-guitar rendition of “Get Into the Groove,” joining a conga line for “Dress You Up,” or dressing like a sexy Uncle Sam for the closer, “Holiday,” which arrived complete with a big confetti explosion. She even tried to riff with the crowd about her own unluckiness in love, asking the whole room, “Anyone want to get hitched?” Judging by accounts of her previous show in Montreal, the stage banter was scripted. And yet, that was just more proof that, decades after she broke onto the scene in New York, she’s still the ultimate professional, working 16-hour days just to perfect every move, every note, every line of breezy dialogue.

“I’m feeling very nostalgic,” she said toward the end of the show. “Do you people understand that I played Madison Square Garden thirty years ago?” The whole crowd erupted in cheers. “I survived!” she said, breathing hard, but also beaming. She was having fun. And, clearly, having fun was a whole lot of work.

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