Diversity and confusion

Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter’ show suffers from a kaleidoscopic mash-up of styles that too often becomes a formless mulch in a boomy, cavernous London stadium

- Mark Beaumont

“THIS IS THEATER” reads a message across the gigantic screen dominating the stadium, as an operatic violinist struts and saws her few minutes on the stage, around two-and-a-half hours into the barrage of glitz, glamour and belt-thumbing bootslaps that is Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter show. And it’s a grandscale theater (sic) of the absurd.

For a good decade now, Queen Bey has been a proud pioneer of pop music as progressive art, making wildly exploratory, shapeshifting and genre-splicing albums that have elevated the form and absorbed several others: queer culture dance music on 2022’s Renaissance, country on last year’s Cowboy Carter. Translating them into stadium and festival sets, though, has tended to result in bewildering bombardments of entertainment, and she do-si-dos into a damp Tottenham Hotspur Stadium tonight with her 10-gallon crystal crown apparently slipping.

A country chart hit, Cowboy Carter nevertheless sold a fraction of Renaissance and, though you wouldn’t know it from this packed and roaring house, rumours are that some of the six London performances of this three-hour pop opera in seven acts have struggled to sell. We like it, obviously, but perhaps we don’t want to put an entire Ring Cycle on it.