LADY GAGA, you’ve outdone yourself
MOTHER MONSTER AND HER TEAM BROUGHT MAYHEM TO LOS ANGELES. GET READY FOR THREE MORE NIGHTS.
Ryan Kahler | Aug 1, 2025
Lady Gaga Opens Her LA Stop of Her Mayhem Ball Tour, Kevin Mazur/Getty Images For Live Nation
Lady Gaga didn’t just launch her Los Angeles stop of the Mayhem Ball on Monday night, she put on a theatrical magic show. Music, fashion, choreo, and a range of emotions that proved, once again, that Gaga is in a league of her own. With 24 dancers, and probably that many production and costume designers behind it all, Gaga and her brilliant team fail to miss a beat. The two hour show was a display of her shedding old skins, honoring past eras, and inviting us into the chaos, glamour, and triumph that define her evolution.
2025 has been monstrous for Lady Gaga, and we are here for the ride. Her new album Mayhem has been praised as one of the finely crafted records of her career, a return to the dance floor with all the unapologetic abandon fans first fell in love with. In April, Gaga headlined the Coachella Music Festival and, quite literally, broke the internet (and her mic). The performance was one of the best the desert has ever seen, a testament to years of hard-earned experience at the highest level. She built an opera house in the desert, crafting a spectacle of production and performance that towered above her peers, all to celebrate with her fans in unforgettable style. Given the success of the show, Gaga decided to pack the opera house on wheels, and take the show around the world starting in the US in 2025 and overseas through 2026.
After seeing the shorter version of the show at Coachella, my goal * warning: privilege alert * for seeing the show a second time was to hopefully make sense of the overarching storyline. Like everything Gaga does, The Mayhem Ball is not just a show, it’s performance art. It is layered, cinematic, at times chaotic — deliberately so. Sometimes you think you’d figured out what was supposed to be happening, and then something else would throw you for a loop. When announcing the tour on Instagram, Gaga revealed why choosing arenas over stadiums was crucial to building this intimate experience:
“We chose arenas this time to give me the opportunity to control the details of the show in a way you simply can’t in stadiums. This show is designed to be the kind of theatrical and electrifying experience that brings (Mayhem) to life exactly how I envision it.”
And the detail is everywhere — in the precision of the choreography, in the towering set pieces, in the seamless costume changes that become part of the storytelling itself. The outfits themselves tell a story and pay respects to her past identities and stages of her career. Sidenote: how the hell does she and her team manage to dress her in six different outfits and four different wigs in the middle of a show?
Photos Courtesy of Kevin Mazur, Getty Images for Live Nation
What I thought was her best possible performance of her career earlier this year at Coachella, Gaga topped tenfold by her performance Monday night. More songs, more dance breaks, more tears. I write this with a sore throat, and aching feet wondering how she is capable of doing this another three nights this week. The show unfolds in four acts, each representing a different chapter in her journey, from inner turmoil to self-acceptance to full-blown rebirth.
From the opening moments, it was clear this wasn’t just a pop spectacle, it was Gaga sharing her career evolution with us in real time. A sweeping video prologue introduced dueling versions of herself, Mother (her current self) and Mayhem (the embodied version of her anxiety, depression, and bad thoughts), as if to remind us that her career has always balanced contradictions: vulnerability and defiance, intimacy and grandeur, chaos and control.
Mayhem wants Gaga to stay sad and depressed, alone and fearful so she can’t thrive. Gaga explains in the press release for her album: “The lady in red is all of you that puts you to the test. Your internal monologue. Can you do it? Will you do it? Are you good enough? Can you handle it? It is about dealing with that challenge to yourself and very often the world around us can reflect it back to us as well." But Gaga wants to fight it so she can feel happiness, creativity, and love. “This side initiates the challenge and this purer side of me that is peering up at all of the negative backtalk, all of the doubt, and facing all that side of me, she completely comes through. I'm up for the challenge. It's about resilience,” says Gaga.
“And Monsters never die. ”
The curtain dropped and there she was in the world’s largest multi-story red hoop dress, which could house a small town (or her team of dancers). The opening chords of Bloody Mary pounded through the arena as Gaga, or perhaps Mayhem incarnate, stood motionless, daring us to blink first. 30 seconds later we were directed to DANCE or DIE, as the body of her dress unveiled like a curtain to reveal the music hall of dancers locked away under her. So, we did. By the end of the act, we weren’t watching Mother Mayhem, we were under her spell.
Throughout the show Gaga pays homage to her lengthy catalog. In the first act she opens with a mix of Judas and Aura (I nearly fell to the ground), then breaks for a costume change straight into Scheibe. Like…hello? The setlist wove Mayhem tracks together with beloved classics like Garden of Eden with Poker Face, and Perfect Celebrity with Paparazzi,
But what there also is to love about the Mayhem Ball is some of the less high-concept moments, including several that have been added to the show since Coachella. On behalf of all long-time fans, we thank you Gaga for resurrecting Summerboy, a gem she hasn’t performed since 2007. It only lasts about two minutes and doesn’t come with any jaw-dropping choreography, yet it somehow feels monumental, capturing the pure joy and camaraderie that makes the Mayhem Ball so special. I found myself scanning the stage, trying to spot her among the dancers, and for a fleeting moment, she completely disappears into them. For these few minutes, Gaga steps off the pedestal and becomes one of them, a playful nod to her crew and a sweet moment of community.
Lady Gaga Sings ‘Summerboy’ for First Time Since 2007 at The Mayhem Ball, Kevin Mazur/Getty Images For Live Nation
The energy between Gaga and her audience was electric. “I had a chat with everybody backstage,” she laughed mid-show. “I was like… it’s Monday, I don’t know what’s gonna happen… You all fuckin’ showed me. You came out here blazing, ready to go.” One of my favorite moments captured Gaga parading barefaced through the dressing room out to the stage for the encore song How Bad Do U Want Me. Her beanie pulled low, as if to say:
This is me. This is all of me.
She closed out the show with Swine from ARTPOP , a fiery nod to an era once misunderstood but now reclaimed with pride. These callbacks weren’t just nostalgia, they felt like Gaga honoring every era that shaped her, every risk she took, every headline and heartbreak that forged the artist standing before us now.
Chromatica Ball, to me, was very much about light and dark, her inner struggles with depression, anxiety in a tangible way. Mayhem Ball, to me, feels like it’s more about her attempt to reconnect with her old artistic self yet realizing she can’t. It’s as if she acknowledges the desire to return to that weird provocative Gaga (the meat dress, the vomit art), while also recognizing that persona as something broken, something that can’t truly come back in its full form.
Gaga almost goes out of her way to not be political in this show, but she consistently honors the LGBTQ+ community, a feat worth celebrating in a year of many political battles for queer folks. Mid-way through Abracadabra, the second song of the show, Gaga’s dancers rip off her red hoop dress to unveil a new dress draped in a sash with the transgender flag colors on it. Later in the show, she continues to honor the community in small but powerful ways: she sheds her veil as pride flags illuminate the stage during Paparazzi, delivers a heartfelt speech to “her community” before performing Born This Way, and even takes a pride flag from a fan during Vanish Into You, parading it around to make the arena feel like a 15,000-person safe space. Just another reason we stan.
Not only does the arena feel like a safe place for gays and their allies, but for the gooeyness of love and romance itself. The emotional contrast in this show is captivating, but exhausting. One second your sweating and jumping up and down, the next you are looking around crying at the beautiful community Gaga brought together that night.
Lady Gaga Illuminated by Pride Rainbow During Paparazzi Performance, Kevin Mazur/Getty Images For Live Nation
But more than anything, I appreciate the big swings Gaga is taking in bringing imagination to life. Her use of costuming, production design and choreography to tell some kind of story. The world needs it, this reminder that pop can still be art and not so formulaic. The Mayhem Ball isn’t just a spectacle; it’s a refusal to play it safe. In an industry where artists regularly follow “the formula”, Gaga is doubling down on risk, passion, and creativity. Every beat, every gesture, every shadow feels intentional, built to make our jaws drop, our paws raise to the sky, and our tears pour out.
Following her four shows in Los Angeles, Gaga continues on to Seattle, New York, Miami, Toronto, and Chicago before heading across the pond for the tour's European dates. The tour is scheduled to wrap up in Australia in December. Mayhem has never looked this good.
SETLIST
The Art of Personal Chaos
Act I: Of Velvet and Vice {Bloody Mary, Abracadabra, Judas, Aura, Scheiße, Garden of Eden, and Poker Face}
Act II: And She Fell into a Gothic Dream: {Perfect Celebrity, Disease, Paparazzi, LoveGame, Alejandro, and The Beast}
Act III: The Beautiful Nightmare Who Knows Her Name: {Killah, Zombieboy, LoveDrug, Applause, Just Dance}
Act IV: To Wake Her is To Lose Her: {Shadow of a Man, Kill for Love, Summerboy, Born This Way, Million Reasons, Shallow, Die With a Smile, Vanish Into You}
Encore: Eternal Aria of the Monster Heart: {Bad Romance, How Bad Do U Want Me, *Swine*}
