It took a pandemic and a meme to turn Dua Lipa into a world-class pop star.
The global COVID-19 lockdown kicked in precisely as 2020’s “Future Nostalgia” was loosed upon radio and the world, and a record that might have gone straight to the clubs instead took on a more interior and aspirational aspect for listeners who could only dance in their hearts. When the world opened up again, Lipa was there, ready to be the avatar for delayed gratification.
Then there was the singer’s stage presence, so wooden and enervated on stage that one internet wag commented “I love her lack of energy, go girl give us nothing!” on a video of one of her performances. That comment instantly became widely meme-d, and Lipa both took the ribbing with a healthy sense of humor and self-reflection, appearing to hear the criticism enough to take the necessary action.
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In a way, the above suggests that Lipa is one of our canniest pop stars, taking two events that were completely out of her control and not only riding them out, but using them to her advantage. And when she took the TD Garden stage Tuesday for the first of two Boston shows, she delivered a top-tier pop spectacle so far advanced from her pre-pandemic days that she might as well have been a different performer entirely.
Dua Lipa performed the first of two shows at TD Garden on Tuesday night.Brent Goldman/TD Garden
Rising out of an arched platform amid smoke and slow-motion footage of ocean waves that seemed to pour around her, Lipa opened with a flowing, vulnerable vocal that turned into the Eurodisco pulse of “Training Season.” She drew heavily on club music, not just in the house piano and thump of “End Of An Era” and “Electricity,” and the burbling, big-beat electronica of “Whatcha Doing,” but in the way that many songs segued into one another, much like a dance mix.
And Lipa herself never got lost in it. The singer was confident and assured, largely (but not completely) leaving elaborate choreography to her dancers and simply strutting across the stage instead.
Dua Lipa performs at TD Garden on her “Radical Optimism” tour.Brent Goldman/TD Garden
She also took several digressions from dance-pop and came out a winner in all of them. The simple melodic pop-rock of “These Walls” did a lot to highlight her handsome alto, as did a rendition of the Aerosmith hit “I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing.” (She’s performing a local cover in every city; too bad nobody told her where Donna Summer’s from.)
The glorious refracted-rainbow pop of “Happy For You” recalled “Ray Of Light”-era Madonna, and with its melodic clarity and lyric about love slipping away, sad piano ballad “Anything For Love” could have been Carole King, if only Lipa weren’t on a table-sized platform suspended above the stage.
There were places the concert showed its seams; it was separated into four acts and an encore, and the transitions sometimes meant that the arena was both dark and silent for an unfortunate amount of time. But Lipa had no problem firing the energy back up to 100 upon her return, itself a sign of how good she really is.
And if it’s still funny that one of the once-famously stiff performer’s biggest hits has the commanding lyric “Watch me dance!,” she proved herself more than worthy of the line, dancing or not.
DUA LIPA
With CIL. At TD Garden, Tuesday, also Wednesday.
Marc Hirsh can be reached at officialmarc@gmail.com or on Bluesky @spacecitymarc.bsky.social.
Here’s the setlist from Tuesday night, according to setlist.fm. Keep checking back as the list continues to update.
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