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With 'Sticky & Sweet,' Madonna focuses on touring

BY GLENN GAMBOA | glenn.gamboa@newsday.com

October 2, 2008

Madonna, center, performs on stage during her "Sticky and Sweet" tour at the Olympic stadium of Athens, on Saturday, Sept. 27, 2008. (AP Photo)

Ready for Madonna's latest transformation?

For her new "Sticky & Sweet" tour, which makes its American debut on Saturday at the Izod Center and stays for four nights at Madison Square Garden next week, Madonna has adopted yet another new persona. She's reinvented herself as Queen of Tours - a traveling force, like The Who or the Rolling Stones - making the road her primary focus, as well as her primary source of income and attention, instead of album sales and videos.

As with all her personas, outside forces partially influenced the change. Touring is where the bulk of the money is in the struggling music industry these days. It's also a part of the business she can control more effectively, as opposed to depending on radio programmers who play fewer songs and cable networks showing fewer music videos.

She telegraphed her new focus last year, signing an estimated $120-million deal with concert promoter Live Nation, which will release her future records and continue handling her tours. That deal also explains why her current company, Warner Bros., hasn't exactly been pushing her "Hard Candy" album very hard.

Aside from the hit "4 Minutes," the rest of the album has uncharacteristically slid from the spotlight, even though it still has some potential hits, including "The Beat Goes On" with Kanye West.

Of course, by the time she releases her next album, the Material Mom may have moved on to a whole new persona.

'STICKY & SWEET' CONTROVERSIES

"Get Stupid": The video shown during the show includes John McCain in a series of photos with Adolf Hitler and Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe. Barack Obama appears in a series of photos with the Dalai Lama, Gandhi and The Rev. Martin Luther King.

"Like a Virgin": At her concert in Rome, Madonna dedicated "Like a Virgin" to the Pope, telling the crowd, "I dedicate this song to the Pope, because I'm a child of God. All of you are also children of God."

Her private life: Though they don't play out on the stage, questions about her marriage to Guy Ritchie and the nature of her friendship with Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez have generated far more publicity for her than her current single, "Give It 2 Me."

WHAT CRITICS SAY

"Unlike most stadium pop, the 'Sticky & Sweet' tour is not about costumes or dance routines, lthough there are plenty of both. Nor is it about high-tech effects: The electronics are less advanced than on Madonna's 2006 tour, when we were indoors and the entire stage could melt into a screen. Instead, the real creativity has gone into making prerecorded video clips and knitting them into live performance." - Tim de Lisle, Mail on Sunday

"Maybe Madonna thought everyone was having a fun time. My impression, though, was that this was a poorly conceived performance which managed only to cash in on people's trust. ... For me, the Madonna experience was an example of a market failure." - Stephen King, The Independent

"It's less overtly sexual than its predecessors, but like them it's an all-singing, all-leaping, thrillingly choreographed extravaganza." - John Aizlewood, The Evening Standard

BY THE NUMBERS

$12 million: Her record-setting gross take for selling out one night at Wembley Stadium

$248,000: The amount she was fined for ending her Wembley Stadium show 40 minutes late

$25,000: Highest-priced floor-seat ticket on StubHub

653: Number of hours Madonna and her band rehearsed

250: Number of crew and performers on tour

28: Number of performers onstage

18: Number of songs she's performing this tour

9: Number of songs from "Hard Candy" in her set

8: Number of costume changes

WHO Madonna

WHEN|WHERE 8 p.m. Saturday, Izod Center, East Rutherford, N.J.; and Oct. 6, 7, 11, 12, Madison Square Garden

INFO $55-$354.50, Ticketmaster, 631-888-9000, ticketmaster.com