Lady Gaga returns to Melbourne after a decade with The MAYHEM Ball tour, an opus of dark pop reinvention and emotional catharsis.
Lady Gaga made Melbourne wait 45 minutes. She made us wait 10 years.
But when Lady Gaga finally emerged at Marvel Stadium on Friday night, cloaked in gothic couture and dripping with theatrical menace, every minute of both absences was immediately forgiven. The MAYHEM Ball tour marked her first Australian performances since 2014’s ArtRave: The ARTPOP Ball, and what unfolded over the following hours was nothing short of a reckoning with her own mythology.
There was no support act. There didn’t need to be. From the opening strains of The Art of Personal Chaos (The Manifesto of MAYHEM), the stage transformed into a baroque opera house, its Colosseum-like structure bathed in crimson and shadow. This was Gaga reclaiming the dark pop territory she pioneered with The Fame Monster, but filtered through 15 years of artistic evolution, personal trauma and hard-won wisdom.
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The show’s central conceit was brilliantly unsettling: two versions of Gaga, locked in psychological warfare. A video interlude depicted her earlier persona, dressed in angelic white, being beheaded by a newer incarnation swathed in blood red. It was violent, operatic and oddly moving, a visual metaphor for an artist refusing to let nostalgia become a prison while acknowledging that the past never truly dies.
What followed was a set divided into four acts plus an encore, each a distinct chapter in this gothic fairy tale. Act I: Of Velvet And Vice opened with an alternative operatic version of Bloody Mary before careening through Abracadabra, Judas, Aura and Scheiße. These were songs of defiance and darkness, delivered with the theatrical bombast of a Broadway production but the grit of a punk show.
The staging was colossal. That opera house set piece housed dancers in every alcove, moving like ghosts through its tiered structure. Gaga herself traversed the space with commanding physicality, perched atop a towering platform in flowing gothic gown adorned with blood-red roses.
Act II brought Perfect Celebrity and Disease, the grinding industrial singles from her new album MAYHEM, before pivoting to Paparazzi and LoveGame. These older hits weren’t presented as museum pieces but reimagined, given extended intros and alternative arrangements that made them feel urgent rather than nostalgic. It’s a trick few legacy artists manage: honouring the hits without becoming enslaved to them.
The emotional peak came unexpectedly. Seated at a deconstructed piano, hair tucked beneath a veil, Gaga addressed the crowd directly. Tears streamed down her face as she spoke about returning to Australia, about the years that had passed, about the Little Monsters who had never stopped waiting. When she launched into The Edge of Glory as an acoustic piano ballad, the stadium held its collective breath.
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But the show’s most profound moment arrived as a massive rainbow-coloured veil unfurled across the entire stage, billowing in waves across the audience. It was both a celebration and a statement, a reminder that for all the gothic darkness of MAYHEM’s aesthetic, Gaga’s core message of radical acceptance remains unchanged.
The finale saw Gaga reconcile her warring identities. The white-clad angel and red-drenched demon weren’t adversaries to be conquered, she seemed to say, but facets of a whole person. By accepting the monster alongside the legend, she invited her Little Monsters to embrace their own contradictions.
Lady Gaga didn’t just return to Australia. She returned to herself.
