From musical theatre to liturgical pop —an exploration of how major icons are rewriting the classical imaginary through contemporary culture.

 

Lady Gaga during The Mayhem Ball Tour, showcasing the theatricality and drama of her stage production. Credit: Lady Gaga Now

 

The Operatic Heritage in Lady Gaga’s Pop

The Mayhem Ball Tour, Lady Gaga’s latest world tour (2025–2026), reinterprets the depths of pop spectacle through an openly operatic lens. Conceived as a liturgy of excess, the show unfolds across four acts and a finale —Of Velvet and Vice, And She Fell into a Gothic Dream, The Beautiful Nightmare That Knows Her Name, Every Chessboard Has Two Queens, and Eternal Aria of the Monster Heart— with a final encore that seals the experience in pure theatrical gold: How Bad Do U Want Me.

Gaga and her team —Michael Polansky, Ben Dalgleish, Parris Goebel— have conceived a production that restores pop to its theatrical roots. The stage, a monumental structure halfway between a coliseum and an opera house, acts as a living organism that transforms alongside the story it tells.

 

Credit: Lady Gaga Now

 

Beyond revisiting her catalogue of hits, Gaga proposes an emotional and visual journey through darkness, duality, and rebirth. The staging becomes a symbolic narrative of identity, featuring twenty-two dancers, a live band, and a scenic design that shifts between baroque excess and minimalist purity. As in any opera, there is conflict—not resolved but sublimated, dramatized with grandeur.

 

The Performative Dimension of Pop

A distinctly operatic heritage reveals itself in every detail: the religious imagery, the theatrical choreography, the spectacular dramatization. Wagner’s idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk —the “total work of art” that fuses music, libretto, staging, and light into a single artistic organism— finds in The Mayhem Ball one of its most dazzling contemporary incarnations.

 

Credit: Lady Gaga Now

 

Gaga reclaims an often-forgotten dimension of pop: its performativity. While undeniably commercial and mass-oriented, pop has always relied on performance to construct meaning and emotion. From Elvis and Madonna to Beyoncé, body language, choreography, and stage design have been essential tools for communicating narrative, identity, and symbolic power. The Mayhem Ball amplifies this tradition, reshaping the concert format into an immersive experience that reclaims opera’s theatricality and translates it into a contemporary language of chaos, duality, and reinvention.

 

A Nod to the Classics: The Phantom of the Opera through Pop

The show’s fourth act reaches its climax with Shallow —the most explicit moment in Gaga’s dialogue with the operatic tradition. Two versions of the artist appear on stage: one pure and luminous, the other dark and untamed. As the scene unfolds, they confront one another beneath a downpour of lights before joining hands —a gesture of harmonious coexistence— and boarding an illuminated boat that glides slowly along a river-shaped catwalk. The reference is unmistakable: The Phantom of the Opera, reimagined through a pop lens.

 

Credit: Lady Gaga Now

 

Yet the power of the moment lies not merely in the visual homage. Unlike Lloyd Webber’s work, where the boat symbolizes the tension between desire and danger, in The Mayhem Ball it becomes a narrative device for introspection and duality. Here, the monster and the muse are one and the same—and the story evolves not through external romance, but through internal reconciliation.

This appropriation of myth reveals Gaga’s strategy as a performance producer: she borrows from musical theatre and reconfigures its language into new symbolic structures for contemporary pop. The boat scene is, at its core, conceptual, it distills in a single gesture the tension between the classical and the modern, between theatricality and mass music.

 

Lady Gaga on the Mayhem Ball Tour. Credit: Samir Hussein / Getty Images

 

Andrew Lloyd Webber himself acknowledged it with irony and admiration after attending the show:

I loved Lady Gaga’s concert (…) It was wonderful to see an opera house on stage, and even better to see a boat with her being rowed across the great auditorium. It reminded me of something I might have had a small hand in.

Webber’s words act as both an implicit endorsement of opera’s reinvention in a modern context and a symbolic reconciliation between musical theatre and pop culture.

 

Credit: Lady Gaga Now

 

The Return of the Classical in Contemporary Pop

The success of The Mayhem Ball cannot be understood as merely musical —it’s part of a broader cultural shift: the contemporary reinterpretation of the classical.

Popular culture is entering a phase of re-enchantment. After decades of postmodern irony and accelerated consumption, new artistic narratives are turning back toward the archetypal —toward myth, classical dramatic structure, and the aesthetics of excess.

 

Credit: Lady Gaga Now

 

Whether born of nostalgia or creative recycling, the return to classical references has become a legitimate form of innovation. But the question remains: how new is it, really? Looking back has always been one of creation’s most fundamental gestures; what’s different today is that this act of conscious appropriation has become part of the aesthetic discourse itself.

It’s no coincidence. In recent years, a quiet current has restored pop’s vocation for spectacle —and almost for ritual. Rather than opposing the classical, many artists are reengaging with it through technology, irony, or spirituality. Rosalía, for example, explores it in LUX —a project where operatic imagery morphs into a sonic architecture, and the human voice becomes raw material for a contemporary ritual. The result is a soundscape that breathes with the solemnity of an oratorio and the precision of a synthesizer.

Dua Lipa, meanwhile, approaches it from the perspective of performance and scenography. In An Evening with Dua Lipa, she recontextualizes her pop repertoire alongside a symphony orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall, building a bridge between the pop concert and the classical recital. Here, choreography, lighting, and orchestral tempo function as parts of a unified sonic dramaturgy —returning to pop its original sense of total spectacle.

 

Credit: Lady Gaga Now

 

Gaga, Rosalía, and Dua Lipa all seem to share a common impulse: to rescue the dramatism of classical art as an organic response to pop’s gradual loss of mystery. The first does it through theatricality and the body; the second, through experimentation and silence; the third, through scenic composition and restraint.

Ultimately, beyond nostalgia, what emerges is a genuine search for connection through depth. Contemporary pop culture, shaped by immediacy and constant consumption, seems to be cracking slightly at its surface, as major icons reinterpret their art from increasingly emotional and introspective places.

In Gaga, Rosalía, and Dua Lipa, there’s an attempt to re-signify the classical transforming both song and performance into experiences that demand attention, contemplation, and complicity. In that gesture lies a powerful message: music remains capable of constructing narrative and sustaining the emotional intensity that, until recently, seemed reserved for the grand stages of theatre and opera.

 

By the LETSGO Pen, Claudia Pérez Carbonell, on November 13th, 2025