Madonna salutes Detroit roots and her dad in high-energy concert of hits at LCA

Some of Madonna’s iconic moments through the years have happened in Michigan, from music video shoots to memorable film scenes — not to mention her Bay City birth and Rochester Hills upbringing.

Monday’s visit, which brought her to Little Caesars Arena for her first Detroit concert in more than eight years, didn’t rise to the level of those defining milestones. But her Celebration Tour stop certainly lived up to that salutary name, celebrating Madonna’s four-decade body of work and its culture-shaking impact.

“I have so much adrenaline pumping in my veins right now. I'm home! Whooo!” she said minutes in. “People don't understand how cool you've got to be, to be from Detroit.”

On recent tour visits, the global star has been increasingly vocal in her embrace of her native region, following years of claims from some here that she snubbed her roots. But Monday night was perhaps the most emotional yet, including a lengthy dedication to her 92-year-old father, Tony Ciccone, who was on hand at LCA.

“My father, he taught me the meaning of hard work,” Madonna said, pausing and clenching her eyes shut. “He taught me the importance of earning your way through life. He taught me that life is not a day at the beach. ... I thank you for that, Dad.”

She also gave shoutouts to the Detroit Institute of Arts and Menjo’s, the Detroit gay club where she got her first taste of nightlife as a teen in the 1970s.

This was a night that promised to be “a journey of my life,” as she told the crowd early on. After years of gripes that her tours overlooked many of her hits in favor of spotlighting her latest material, Madonna has gone all in on the older stuff this time, serving up a nearly 2½-hour bonanza of music with no new album to promote.

Still, it wasn’t some all-encompassing greatest-hits show. The 65-year-old artist would have needed several more hours to showcase her full catalog of charted material; Monday’s set list didn’t even squeeze in all the ones that have hit No. 1.

Rather, Madonna opted for an approach that felt vibrant, dynamic and artistically purposeful as she revisited her storied career, complete with a high-tech stage production to rival those of this era’s hottest young pop stars. The queen of daring reinvention, it seems, has conceived a fresh, relevant way to tap the nostalgia fountain.

It was reliably hardworking, with Madonna strutting, dancing and peacocking her way across the stage and its assortment of catwalks across the arena floor. At 65, she’s still brimming with energy and eager to show it off, and the black knee wrap that adorned her left leg during the show’s early portion might as well have been a fashion statement.

And one tried-and-true feature was intact: She started late. Having hit the stage just after 10:30 p.m., she had fans streaming out to their parking spots just before 1 a.m.

Instrumental tracks provided the musical bed (there was no band), but the vocals sounded as if they were mostly delivered live, barring the occasional harmony stack. At points, Madonna’s voice was frustratingly buried in the mix — often a booming blur of sound and audio effects that would have benefited from a crisper, more fine-tuned approach.

And as always, Madonna was happy to bare flesh, appearing throughout the night in a variety of stylized skimpiness and ramping it up for a sequence of svelte raunch that included the '90s chestnuts “Erotica” and “Justify My Love.”

The regular set was bookended by icy electronic cool with a pair of “Ray of Light” numbers (“Nothing Really Matters” and “Frozen”), with a host of era-evoking sounds in between. Her ‘80s breakout material dominated the show’s early portion (“Holiday,” “Open Your Heart” and a punky “Burning Up” that found Madonna manning an electric guitar), though the show didn’t continue to unfold chronologically from there.

“Live to Tell” — the 1986 ballad that stealthily endures as one of the strongest songs in the Madonna oeuvre — was accompaniment to portraits of figures who succumbed to AIDS, including Michigan’s Christopher Flynn, her early dance instructor.

Visually, it was a night of career iconography, including era-defining outfits occasionally donned by the troupe of dancers who joined her for the show’s tightly choreographed, often artful set pieces. Bob the Drag Queen was a periodic onstage partner-slash-foil, having already endeared himself to the Detroit crowd by giving Madonna’s preshow introduction (“Your hometown girl has come home to roost”).

There were elaborate numbers (“Vogue” with its colorful cast dance-off, “Like a Prayer” with its transgressive Catholic imagery) and elegant ones, including a lovely “Bad Girl” featuring Madonna’s daughter Mercy James at a grand piano. A few tunes were presented with sparse or abridged arrangements (“Crazy for You,” “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina”), and the night eventually wrapped up with the most recent song of them all: a spiky encore performance of 2015’s “Bitch I’m Madonna,” with Nicki Minaj piped in via tape.

LCA didn’t exist the last time Madonna played Detroit — a Joe Louis Arena concert in October 2015 — and this visit came even later than hoped, delayed for half a year after a summer health scare. Following that life-threatening bacterial infection, Madonna launched the tour in Europe in the fall and is currently set to conclude with a run of Mexico dates in the spring.

But no show on the Celebration Tour will be quite like Monday’s in Detroit, thanks in part to the poignant moments that found Madonna paying tribute to her home state and, most notably, her dad.

It was here, she said, that her ambitious work ethic was instilled — “this working-class mentality I have running through my veins.”

And it was Tony Ciccone, she said, who fueled it. Ciccone, a former Chrysler engineer who went on to run a Suttons Bay vineyard, sparked anger in the young Madonna, she recounted onstage Monday. He “said no to everything” — after all, if she wanted to go to the movies or take a ballet class, she should get a job and pay for it.

“But that was the best lesson he could teach me,” Madonna said. “It turned me into the person I am today.”

She also once resented that her father wasn’t always around. With time, Madonna said, she now understands.

“You were gone because you were working hard to support all of us,” she said Monday. “That's something that I didn't really give you credit for. So thank you for that. Thank you for working your f------ ass off for us."

Contact Detroit Free Press music writer Brian McCollum: 313-223-4450 or bmccollum@freepress.com. 

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Madonna salutes Detroit roots and her dad in concert of hits at LCA