Adele doesn’t come to you — you go to Adele. During August, that means going to Munich to see one of the concerts in her 10-show residency, in the custom-built Adele Arena, which holds 74,000 a night. She took the summer off from her Las Vegas residency at Caesars Palace, but she brought Vegas-style spectacle with her — smoke, fire, confetti, fireworks and what has been described as the largest video screen in existence. As effective as this production was on opening night (Aug. 2), some of the best moments came despite that scale — not because of it.
The scale of the show is absurd, and at first it feels like it won’t work — there’s no rise on the floor, so not all the sightlines are great, and the seats on the stands are far away. But be honest — how much can you see from the top tier of the stadium, anyway? Many concert-goers spend a good part of a show looking at a screen, anyway — the Munich production just made a virtue of it. You want to look at a screen? We’ll give you a stylized, curved one that’s 220 meters (240.5 yards) wide — that’s the length of two American football fields.
Even in an era of over-the-top concert production, this was overwhelming. Rather than lean into that, though, Adele just remained her charming self. “What do you think of my screen?” she asked the crowd at one point, as though she had just picked it up at a sale at Best Buy. The staging bordered on the absurd, but it worked because Adele was in on the joke. “I underestimated how f—ing scared I am,” she said at one point. She shouldn’t have been.
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