Rosalía Brings Masterful ‘Lux’ Tour to L.A.’s Forum: Concert Review

Do you want to know how good Rosalía‘s Monday night show at the Kia Forum was? Here is how good Rosalía’s Monday night show at the Forum was…

Midway through the set, as is the custom on her “Lux” tour, the Spanish singer-songwriter took time out to have a candid dialogue with a guest superstar — each settling down in adjoining, enclosed boxes, set up like a Catholic confessional space that just happens to have a live camera feed, with the purpose of spilling tea on a bad romance. Here, that surprise confessor was Karol G, who’s been perceived by some fans as caught up in a rivalry with Rosalía, although there was no sign of any beef here. Karol spilled the beans on an unnamed ex-boyfriend most of the audience took to be Feid, talking about his mysterious reluctance to have her accompany him on his birthdays, and how the fourth year that this happened, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back and broke them up.

This was a deeply juicy moment (if you speak Spanish, anyway, or had someone nearby to translate): Here were two of music’s biggest stars, in sudden, public alignment, at last, with the bonus of some deep dish being shared about a third fellow celebrity. Who could ask for anything more out of a concert?

Except for, you know, music. So here’s the proof of how good Rosalía’s Monday night show at the Forum was: As much spicy fun as that Karol G encounter was, it was only about the 10th or 15th best moment in the show. The “confessional” segment makes for a hell of a conversation piece, but there’s a lot of heavenliness in this tour’s weirdly wieldy mixture of pop art, high art, diva deliciousness and spiritual ardor.

Expectations for this summer’s “Lux” tour were high after her album of that name turned up on half the world’s top 10 lists last December. Two weeks into the U.S. leg, those hopes are being met, and then some. We’ve seen some awfully good concerts come through Los Angeles recently (Raye’s, Lily Allen’s), but Rosalía’s brilliant road show is up there in the running for Tour of the Year honors. Pound for pound, it offers as much ambition as the “Lux” album itself, a project that had critics and fans striving to find adjectives for pretentious-in-a-good-way. The “Lux” tour comes cloaked in a certain amount of literal and figurative religious garb, per the record. But there are many more moments in which Rosalía comes off as either a down-to-earth pop girlie or as one of the great young song-and-dance entertainers of our time. With or without the album’s deistic references carrying over into the stage show, it’s divine.

Rosalía’s show is delightfully cross-disciplinary, bringing in aspects of ballet and classical music. But at the very beginning of all these cross-referencing moments, there is an actual cross. That occurs right at the start, when some workers bring out a large, upright, white crate, marked “Fragile”… the contents of which are, of course, Rosalía, standing on a small pedestal in a tutu. When the box she’s been carted in in is fully unfolded, the lid attachment ensures that it is laid out in the shape of a cross. Fortunately, the Christian symbolism isn’t too heavy-handed from there. The show is going to be way too visually busy to stay that sectarian, when Rosalía has plans to evoke everything from flamenco culture to Bob Fosse over the ensuing 110 minutes.

The opening stretch is the show’s most static, although there’s not a dull moment in it, as Rosalía performs the first five songs from the mostly stately “Lux,” almost in order. Her entrance has been preceded by an overture performed by an orchestra of about 20 pieces, placed in the middle of the arena’s floor. The neo-classical nature of this first “Lux” section is augmented by occasional blasts of deep, electronic bass sounds. Those thrilling Sensurround effects might make you fear that vibrations frpom the low, low, low rumbling might interfere with planes passing over the Forum to land at LAX, but that is somebody else’s problem.

The upshot of this first section is that while other pop stars have been partying in Ibiza, Rosalía has been taking lessons. Lessons in standing and dancing on pointe, and lessons in being able to operatically deliver what credibly sounds like an aria, in her Italian-language original, “Mio Cristo Piange Diamante.” She could coolly pretend that she’s always been this accomplished in the fine arts, but Rosalía took an early time out to thank two people in the audience, a choreographer she’s worked with for eight years, Charm La’Donna, and a voice teacher she’s had for 10, Eric Vetro, while noting, “I only had one month and a half to learn how to dance in pointe shoes for the first time in my life, and it was one of the scariest things I ever did, I’ve ever tried in my life. But I know it’s gonna be a lifelong process. I’ve accepted it, just as it is with my voice.” These acknowledgements of the challenges she’s faced in learning these classical traditions immediately took the piss out of any pretentiousness she might face for having had the nerve to adopt them.

The show did not stay strictly in the realm of the philharmonic much past the half-hour mark, although, thankfully, the orchestra itself was around for the long haul. A natural transition point arrived with “Berghain,” the first single from “Lux,” which starts off as a symphony and ends with a Bjork lament and profane Mike Tyson sample (both reproduced for the stage version). “His rage is my rage,” she sang, as the electronica took over in the second half of the song, and the orchestra pit turned into a rave, with the string players waving their bows in the air like they just didn’t care. Rosalía had just gone through her first costume change, exchanging the all-white garb of the novitiate for a sleek black dress, and she affirmed the mood shift with a call to action: “You didn’t come to this show just to cry. You came to shake some ass,” she insisted — probably not being too presumptuous on behalf of an audience that had been reared on her more conventional earlier albums. The singer reverted to a more clearly pop-based “Motomami” form for the next stretch… until it was time to cover Frankie Valli.

Cover Frankie Valli? That’s right: Her rendition of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You” had Rosalía positioning herself as a painting in an art museum, gazed upon from behind a rope-chain by a couple dozen fans who’d been selected to come on stage and portray gallery-goers. Before anyone had too long a time to ponder what statement was being made here about the artist/subject gaze, it was on to more provocative stuff. Prior to the next number, “La Perla,” her takedown of a not-so-swell guy, she led into that with the confessional segment with Karol G, turning the remove of the museum into a church where no secrets are kept. If what’s good for the goose is also good for the gander, then maybe Rosalía should confess something about her own love life, on the last night of the tour, if not sooner. But for the time being, everyone got a kick out of Karol taking a spot that previously had been taken on tour by guests from Marcello Hernandez to Maggie Rogers (whose MSG tale of dating an alleged cheater who wrote for the New York Times set off quite a journalistic witch hunt in mid-June, but that’s another story).

“Look, if there’s anything you’ve been wanting to get off your chest, something where you just think, ‘This is a safe space for me’…” Rosalía said in Spanish, as opposed to the English she spoke in for most of the evening. Karol was well-prepared for the drill, explaining how her significant other became oddly avoidant around his birthdays, even though “who wouldn’t want to celebrate their birthday with their partner?” She was “waiting for the excuse for the next year to not be there for the birthday, and then the next year to not be there, and the next year to not be there… Every year was like that, right? There was always a fucking excuse. … What’s the prayer I’m supposed to say, to sort this out?” For the fourth and final birthday, a trip was planned, and at the airport, “he tells me, ‘Take these suitcases down.’ I just stood there. No way, you jerk. But I got off that flight — and I mean, I really got off it… We didn’t celebrate it or anything else.” Rosalía tried drawing out a few more details than Karol seemed ready to go into, before putting a punchline on it, saying (again, in Spanish): “Girl, I have to say that in my country, when someone is a real jerk —a piece of work — we say, ‘What a gem that one is.’ We’re going to celebrate bigger and better than any birthday ever. Because you got rid of that son-of-a-bitch ‘gem.’”

For everyone on hand for night 1 at the Forum, it felt like being present at the formation of the Latin Superstar Diva Avengers. Or so we could hope.

That was not the end of the night’s conversation, as, during a balladic segment where Rosalía laid atop a piano, sipping champagne with her accompanist in advance of “Sauvignon Blanc,” she ended up in a back-and-forth with a birthday boy in the audience named Adrian who turned out to be an instructor who said he teaches a “master class” on the album “Lux.” The album is rich enough that this wouldn’t strike anyone as difficult to believe; the only question is whether he’ll be able to add an additional summer school adjunct course just about this tour.

If the “Lux” tour should end up as coursework of some sort, the most class time might be spent on Rosalía’s performance of “La Perla,” which has choreography already familiar to millions of Americans through shared video clips. In a gambit that Bob Fosse could be proud of, the singer’s troupe of dancers dons all-black, so as to disappear into the woodwork, except for their long white gloves. As the one number in the show choreographed by the Greek master Dimitris Papaioannou, the “La Perla” routine creates masterful illusions in which those seemingly detached forearms come together to form shapes around the singer — a halo, a veil, a frame, even what looks like a metronome as the whole ensemble tilts in one direction. It’s worth the price of admission.

That is not to undervalue the rest of the dazzling choreography that takes place over the course of the night, most of it designed by the trio (La)Horde, who are part of the Ballet National de Marseilles, and the aforementioned Charm La’Donna. None of these dances are very alike, and few of them are ostensibly very over-exuberant or showy, but they all contribute to a vibe that feels in turn sly, soul-searching or just friendly. Rosalía is so into God in these songs, or at least the idea of God as a concept filtered through his female saints, that you aren’t necessarily prepared for her to go sexy on us. And she doesn’t, a lot. But in “Saoko,” the camera goes in for a closeup of a brief bit of twerking as the singer, clad in what looks like a high-fashion designer’s idea of a black widow’s dress, turns out to be wearing hot pink shorts underneath. At the very end of the show, in “Focu ’Ranni,” she and the dancers are all wearing angel wings, in keeping with the night’s recurring spiritual themes, and yet the hoofers are also wearing the equivalent of mom jeans. That exemplifies how there is a sort of coziness to this show, and to Rosalía’s very presence, no matter how ornate and lofty it gets.

Another clear highlight was “La Rumba del Perdón,” which found Rosalía finally visiting the orchestra in the middle of the arena, and treating it as a B-stage. She spoke of her love of flamenco and, while not doing a formal dance for that segment, kicked up her heels nonetheless in an irresistible violet dress. On her way out to that remote spot, she sang “Dios Es Un Stalker” (“God Is a Stalker”) while strolling through a fenced-off passageway through the middle of the auditorium, occasionally putting the microphone into the face of a fervent fan. A performer sometimes gets lucky with crowd interaction moments like that and sometimes doesn’t. But few of us will soon forget the sight of the guy dressed as a nun, screaming the lyrics into a mic that Rosalía admirably did not pull away, apparently enjoying his joyful catharsis as much as the rest of us.

At the very end of the show, in “Focu ’Ranni,” she and the dancers are all wearing angel wings, in keeping with the night’s recurring spiritual themes. Yet these heavenly hoofers were also wearing what looked like mom jeans, and indulging in a light-hearted pillow fight. That exemplifies how there is a sort of coziness to this show, and to Rosalía’s surprisingly unpretentious presence, no matter how ornate and lofty it gets.

There are a lot of images or sounds at cross-purposes on the “Lux” tour, and always delightfully so. I think of the moment when a strobe-light contraption is lowered over the orchestra during a particularly dance-oriented piece of music… and then it starts swinging back and forth, emitting smoke, having turned from a light fixture into what liturgical churchgoers will recognize as an incense-dispensing thurible. Like that massive light fixture turned holy smoke machine, this is one giant Transformer of a show. And if you have a love for classical traditions and everything a modern arena pop show is expected to offer, you may feel like you’ve landed somewhere on the heaven-and-earth continuum, too.