Music review: Cyndi Lauper
Cyndi Lauper says farewell in a show bursting with colour, nostalgia and female empowerment.
Striding across the stage in a silver and black bodysuit with hair a mermaid shade of blue as she belts out the vocally shattering range of ‘She Bop’, it’s hard to believe Cyndi Lauper is 71.
In the moments before the show begins, the giant LED backdrop pulses with a flashing reel of Lauper’s incredible body of work, reinforcing that this is an artist with a career spanning decades. And that is exactly what the crowd gets — a showcase of a vibrant legacy stretching from her years fronting Blue Angel in the early 80s to her final country-inspired studio album — all of it performed with her trademark panache.
Getting the fans on their feet, Lauper opens with a blast of 80s nostalgia. With ‘She Bop’, the quirky and infectious pop hit which caused controversy on its release with its references to female masturbation, Lauper shows she’s still got both the voice and the presence that rocketed her to fame. Followed by ‘The Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough’ and ‘I Drove All Night’ she proves her voice still has all the power, range and quirky syncopation that became the trademark of her sound.
The show then moves on from the early albums that consolidated her fame — 1983’s She’s so Unusual and 1986’s True Colours — into a more retrospective mode with a selection of highlights from her later recording career and her side hustle composing musicals such as the incredible Broadway hit, Kinky Boots.
With every song accompanied by video artwork projected onto the rear LED screens and regular (but swift) transformations in hair and fashion, Lauper turns her concert into a living art piece. The gorgeous strains of ‘Who Let in the Rain’ from her 1993 album Hatful of Stars is performed in front of a silvery torrent and the melancholic ‘Sally’s Pigeons’, a heartbreaking pro-choice song, is accompanied by hand-drawn illustrations based on Lauper’s childhood memories of Queens in New York.
Personal favourites ‘When You Were Mine’, ‘Iko Iko’, ‘Money Changes Everything’ and ‘Time After Time’ demonstrate her versatility as Lauper glides effortlessly between pop, punk and ballad. Anyone in the crowd only there for the 80s nostalgia would’ve been astonished by the show’s mid-section which showcased the range of Lauper’s influences, from rockabilly to blues and country. Lauper honours the female queens of rock that influenced her development, treating us to her cover of Wanda Jackson’s ‘Funnel of Love’ from Lauper’s country-inspired album, Detour (2016).
Many of the highlights of the performance arrive in the spaces between the songs. Despite the huge venues, Lauper wants the experience to feel intimate, and she regales us with anecdotes and monologues between the numbers. Delivered in her distinctive New York twang, she draws in the crowd, revealing the warm, working-class Italian-American beneath the eccentric artistic flair, who saw the struggles of the mothers, grandmothers and girls around her and has remained true to her roots in her fight for equality and the empowerment of women. Before breaking into ‘I’m Gonna Be Strong’ from her days with the band Blue Angel, she remembers, “I just wanted to have the same civil liberties as any man.”
Audacious, authentic and with her fame arising from her vivid individuality, Lauper is constantly reinforcing the idea of the performance being an artistic collaboration. Accompanied by musicians and singers, many of whom have been with her for decades, Lauper constantly spoke of the artists alive and dead who influenced her own evolution or had collaborated on aspects of this farewell tour. Singling out French artist Sonia Delauney as the inspiration behind Lauper’s own ideas about ‘living art’, the show was peppered with callouts to poets, fashion designers, visual artists and other musicians — anyone who had actively designed or inspired elements of the show.
This idea came to a crescendo with the show’s closing numbers. Walking through the audience to a minor stage, she performed ‘True Colors’ while a Daniel Wurtzel designed Air Fountain billowed rainbow-coloured fabric around her.
Subscribe for updates
Then the song the whole crowd had been waiting for, ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’ was belted out against a background and costumes designed by living legend, Yayoi Kusama, a conceptual artist whose genius wasn’t globally recognised until well into her elder years. Joined on stage by The Veronicas, who had opened the show with a brilliant set combining their own hits with a range of covers from the 80s, the audience were on their feet, showing their abiding love for this icon of artistic individuality and feminist empowerment.
“Keep going!” Lauper yells before an explosion of red and white streamers covers the crowd, bringing this musical and visual spectacle to a close. And who better to believe than a woman still booking out arenas at 71 years of age, who carved her place in musical history by remaining steadfast to her own unique and utterly authentic artistic vision?
Cyndi Lauper performed at the Adelaide Entertainment Centre on Thursday April 10