She is a Material Girl

By chicago_chris in Arts & Entertainment on Jul 14, 2004 4:20PM

Fresh off her recent children's books/Kaballah propaganda, Madonna (or, as she's now called, Esther – way to desexualize her, religion!) is performing two more shows in Chicago tonight and tomorrow at that most intimate of venues, the United Center. Reports from Ms. Ciccone's first shows here have been decidedly mixed, but the overwhelming opinion seems to be that she's (gasp!) favoring style over substance. The show features, in some capacity, all of the following: bagpipes, explosions, a skateboarding ramp, video screens, and an electric chair. Yowza! Now that's entertainment!

Apparently, even with all the spectacle, she finds time to sing, too, but supposedly (keep gasping...) this isn't the focus of the show. The Sun-Times' Jim Derogatis wrote yesterday, "Judged against the standards of, say, the Cirque du Soleil, a modern Broadway production or the videos-come-to-life concerts by Madonna offspring such as Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, it was a heck of a show. But call me old-fashioned: I went for the music. And in this department, the Reinvention Tour needed serious reanimating."

Okay, Jim, you're old-fashioned, but we agree that Madonna has such a strong back catalogue – such as all those songs with "Like A ____" in the title – why waste the audience's time and money on pyrotechnics (or new songs from American Life)? Tickets are going for upwards of $300, so we just thought you should know what to expect. Bill Zwecker, meanwhile, delivers another hard-hitting expose, this one on where Maddy eats, shops, and stays when in Chi-town.