Why Lady Gaga’s Mayhem Ball Matters: Breaking Down a Tour That’s the Ultimate Tonic for 2025

Lady Gaga is having a ball… and so are we. It’s been a hell of a 2025 for her: A few months ago, she put out what might be the most purely enjoyable album of her career, “Mayhem.” Now, she’s fairly freshly embarked on what will stand as the quintessential large-scale tour of the year (or at least go down as caught up in a tie with Beyonce’s), the Mayhem Ball. She no longer dominates the cultural conversation quite the way she did when her most outlandish outfits made her the target of late-night TV jokes; she’s become too normalized to keep an entire nation’s rapt attention. Yet the one-two punch of that album and this tour are effectively establishing that Gaga is in the best, most enviable position she’s ever been in — doing stuff that rates with the things fans consider their favorites, and completely avoiding the schadenfreude that ought to be afflicting anyone 17 years into her superstardom. It feels like she’s even earned the good will of the world’s big meanies, as well as its little monsters.

The Mayhem Ball touched down at L.A.’s Kia Forum for four sold-out shows this week, with the two remaining SoCal shows set for Friday and Saturday ight. I caught the tour opening in Las Vegas just over two weeks ago, so I should’ve had all my Gaga needs met for a while. But — warning: privilege alert — I found myself wanting to go to the first night of her Forum stand, too, like a moth drawn to The Fame. It’s a big-ass spectacle, with 24 dancers (and probably about that many production and costume designers behind it all), so maybe it’s no great mystery as to why a road show like this has repeat value. But there’s a feeling engendered by these concerts that goes deeper than the old razzle-dazzle. Dare we try to put our pointy, spindly, red-gloved finger on it?

Well, first of all — another big duh here — there’s the fact that it is a one-woman, two-and-a-half-hour Pridefest, which is no small shakes in 2025. Gaga almost goes out of her way not to be political in this show, but with the lengthy thanks to “the community” that preface “Born This Way,” and her willingness to pick a rainbow flag out of a crowd and parade it… it does have the effect of making an arena feel like a 15,000-person safehouse. A safehouse not just for the gays and their allies, actually, but for the gooey expressions of love and romance and “vanishing into you” that become a bigger part of the show when Gaga turns into a talker at the end of the night. It took this cruel an age for the sheer assertion of agape love to feel like a subversive act, the way it sorta does during the sentimental final stretch of Gaga’s show.

But, setting aside national moods and that sort of outside stuff, the mixture of things that Gaga represents visually and tonally is fascinating. Because is she subversive at this late stage of the game, or just… cuddly? Can she be both? The answer’s yes, as poorly as that ought to work out on paper. Gaga remains as determined as ever to adopting the imagery of the art world’s avant-garde, even as she becomes more accessible to the masses by the minute. There’s a funny and likeable contrast between her halfway-scary costumes, which continue to have literally thorny or sharp-edged elements, and the bigger part of her personality that’s just all about being Embraceable Her. She’s just the walking and strutting combination we need, now more than ever: an avowed softie who still loves to put on an exoskelton outfit.

When the “Mayhem” album came out in March, the line on it is that it was a high-spirited return to funky dance-pop that was unpretentious to a tee. If you thought Gaga got too big for her britches with stylistic or thematic expansions like “Joanne” or “Artpop,” here was the album to bring you back into the fold with some nostalgia for the dancefloors of eras past and not so very much on its mind. But if you expected that simpler ethos to carry over into a less frilly tour… surprise! What is the opposite of unpretentious? Is there a way to use the P-word and not have it count as a pejorative? Probably not, so let’s just say that the Mayhem Ball has a scope and ambition that make it nearly the opposite of the record it’s named after. Of course, we can dig Gaga when she’s asking us to “just” dance. But it’s her penchant for going gargantuan on us (has anyone coined gaga-ntuan?) that really makes her a delightful and necessary mainstay in the downsized era of TikTok pop.

I’ll admit that one reason for going back to see the show at the Forum, after previously catching it at the Vegas opening (and a slightly shorter version as part of the Coachella livestream in April), was to see if I could finally make sense of its overarching storyline. Gaga may not do concept albums, per se, but she does concept tours, so this one — subtitled “The Art of Personal Chaos” — invites you to ponder exactly what’s on her narrative mind, from the portentous prelude forward. A widescreen video opening has two Gagas, a Lady in White and a Lady in Red, reciting in unison a manifesto about finding reconciliation between “dueling twins,” one a little nastier than the other. Gaga takes turns dressing up as one color-coded aspect of her psyche or the other, mirrored by face-obscured dancers taking on the opposite role when needed for an on-stage showdown. (This doesn’t really account for why, at a mid-point in the show, Gaga puts on a dark slip and is suddenly a Lady in Black, but who’s going to complain about a little thematic confusion when someone’s doing that good a job of rocking a little black dress.)

Did I “get” it more, what was happening, on a return viewing, when Gaga was literally playing three-dimensional chess with her hooded doppelganger queen? Sure, kind of. The basic takeaway: The artist has a war going on within her soul … and brother, don’t we all. But more than anything, I just appreciated the big swings Gaga is taking by using costuming, production design and choreography to try to tell some kind of big, loose story at all. The pop world has its share of theater kids right now, but Gaga may be the last of a breed in believing that an arena or stadium tour can be its own coherent mega-saga, as opposed to a series of mini-movies. Her “dueling twins” on this tour are twin Ziggys, and the result is kind of like her Glass Spider tour, only less floppy. Watching this show, however lost you might get, one thing is constant and for certain: Glam-rock is back, baby, and it feels great.

When I said a minute ago that the Mayhem Ball wasn’t conceived just a series of mini-movies, that’s not to knock mini-movies. The Eras Tour and the Cowboy Carter Tour both did just fine offering a knockout series of vivid production numbers, and if the individual moments are finally what Gaga’s tour is most remembered for, that’s no slight against a road show that has so many good ones. My colleague Steven J. Horowitz already broke down some of what makes this show sail in his smart review of its opening night in Vegas. I can’t help but also reprise a few of the standout moments that stay in mind (many of them held over from what viewers first saw in the Coachella livestream):

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. The “Mayhem” tour contains copious amounts of Prince, Michael Jackson and Nile Rodgers influence, and this version of the show has a deliriously engaging mid-section devoted to some of that stuff, along with a few similarly spirited oldies that have been resurrected from her catalog for the occasion.

One highlight lasts only a couple of minutes, yet it feels oversized in how it exemplifies the on-stage community spirit that makes the Mayhem Ball so fun. That is the version of “Summerboy” that Gaga has inserted into the middle of her show for the first time since 2007. With my camera out, I zoomed in to try to pick out Gaga amid the chorus line, but this is the one time that she gets so lost in it, you really can’t find her. It’s not as if she’s giving any of those two dozen dancers short shrift during the night — there are a lot of freestyling moments while she’s doing costume changes — but it’s a further sign of respect to her hoofers that, for two minutes or so, anyway, she’s happy just to become one of them.

That spirit returns at the very close of the show, with the coda that has been added since Coachella — a post-credits sequence that’s better than anything DC or Marvel ever put in to tickle exiting customers. “How Bad Do U Want Me?” is the biggest joy-bomb on the “Mayhem” album, and whatever instinct kicked in to move it to the show’s fakeout/surprise finale spot was as brilliant as anything else that was conceived for it. The audience watches her on the big screen removing the last vestiges of her makeup before she leads a parade back onto the stage, beanie-bearing and wigless. (Never, of course, was there ever a more appropriately titled choice for an encore number.)

After seeing this gleefully stuffed show again, it felt triply ironic when I found myself in a social media comments thread where some guy was offering Gaga what he thought was a compliment, proffered for the wrong reasons. The discussion was about Katy Perry and her mishap with the suddenly falling butterfly she uses to fly out over the audience on her tour, which is sort of thing that prompts older dudes to bust out their “You pop stars get off my lawn” sentiments. He said, paraphrasing, “Lady Gaga used to use gimmicks like that, but since she worked with Tony Bennett, she realized she could get by on just singing, without props.”

Of course, somebody who believes that has not been following the plot, at all, and really ought to be dragged, kicking and screaming and in horror, to the mega-spectacle she is putting on this summer. Part of what’s wonderful about Gaga is that she has had her “authentic” moments, seeing how the other half lives, and proved she can play things as straight and bare-bones as anyone — but was not seduced into thinking she had to stay there just to abide by anyone else’s idea of credibility. The world flattered her by telling her how conventionally pretty she looked in “A Star Is Born”… but that didn’t lull her into thinking she should not go back to looking so alien when she resumed playing the role of Lady Gaga. Neither did her success in doing the Jazz & Pop standards show in Vegas make her think that she should retire her freak flag for good.

Like the city of Austin, she’s keeping herself weird, while also going completely warm on us — two qualities that we need to hold at a premium in the mid-2010s, when a chilly kind of normcore feels more like our default destination. She’s on the right track, baby, and after one of these shows, you might even feel for a minute like we are, too.