On February 24 2016, Madonna performed in the Philippines for the very first time. Madonna’s Rebel Heart Tour made a stop at the Mall of Asia Arena in Manila, performing for a sold out crowd of 15,710 fans.
Ticket prices were above average and ranged from $70 to $1300.
Madonna added Like A Prayer to the set during the first show and added Crazy For You during the second show (February 25).
On January 30 2020, glowing reviews of Madonna’s first Madame X show in London were published:
Music critic Neil McCormick (The Telegraph) had this to say: Anarchic and experimental – her best show ever? 5 STARS (out of 5)
I’m not sure who was having more fun at the opening of Madonna’s London residency, the audience or the star. She sang, she danced, she joked and she beamed with almost childlike glee at the crowd’s adoring response.
“How happy I am to have made it this far,” she declared, calling London “my second home”.
Madonna first played the city in 1983 to 1,500 early adopters at the Camden Palace. Her next London gig was Wembley Stadium. She was clearly delighted to be back in a venue where she could not just reach out and touch the audience, she could descend from the stage and sit in their laps. “It’s so intimate. It’s gorgeous and a thrill for me to be able to see all your faces.”
David Smyth of the Evening Standard gave the show 4 STARS (out of 5): Madame X is tireless, imaginative and powerfully intimate.
Such drama before Madonna could even take to the stage for her first theatre tour since 1985! Would she arrive drastically late? Would she cancel at the last minute? Tenterhooks all round.
Monday was supposed to be the first of a planned 15 nights at the Palladium, cancelled on doctor’s orders. It was the 10th dropped concert of the Madame X Tour, which began in New York in September and gathered complaints for its late start times.
But tonight at 8.45pm, there she was, dressed as a bloodstained, eyepatch-wearing revolutionary soldier. She was also a spy, a protest marcher and a Portuguese fado singer in the course of a tireless, imaginative show that was far from shrunken arena pop. Thanks especially to an extraordinary troupe of dancers, it was a spectacle that felt more powerful up close.
Like Bruce Springsteen, who showed a different side of himself in his recent Broadway run, and Kate Bush, whose live comeback was more theatre than concert, the 61-year-old has unearthed something new late in her career. The Madame X album may have plummeted out of the charts in an instant, but here its songs dominated and found their purpose.
Batuka, tuneless on record, was euphoric when performed with a mass of smiling, rump-shaking Batuque drummers from Cape Verde. I Rise was far more powerful when backed by footage of anti-gun protests and gay pride marches.
Alexis Petridis of The Guardian, also gave the show 4 STARS (out of 5) and noted: London residency short on hits but big on British banter.
She sings the bare minimum of big hits – Vogue, Like a Prayer, Human Nature – with Express Yourself and La Isla Bonita reduced to interstitial roles (the former performed as a sweet, but brief a cappella duet with her daughter Mercy), and American Life performed in full.
Still, it occasionally serves to remind you that some of Madame X is better than its relatively muted commercial response might suggest – Medellín sounds like the hit single it wasn’t, as does the gorgeous album track Crazy. This is presumably part of the point – the other part being a certain screw-you intransigence designed to underline that we are in the presence of an artiste, not a pop star.
And the BBC had a few fun notes to add in their review:
The audience were required to store mobile phones in sealed pouches as “an intervention for us all”. However, Madonna admitted that even she was getting anxious without a phone nearby.
“I’m having little panic attacks,” she joked. “I’m like, ‘Why is no-one taking my picture?'”
But the gambit worked: Freed from distractions, the audience gave the concert their undiluted attention; while Madonna seemed to relax and have fun without a phalanx of tiny cameras recording her every move.
At one point, she slipped into a British accent and recalled how she’d been ridiculed for developing similarly plummy vowels during her marriage to Guy Ritchie.
“I didn’t know what anyone was talking about until I heard old interviews of myself,” she said. “And then I was horrified and flabbergasted. Why did you let me do that to myself? I’m from Michigan!”
“It’s all Guy Ritchie’s fault,” she decided. “He made me to it.”
On January 22 2010, Madonna participated in the Hope for Haiti Now: A Global Benefit for Earthquake Relief charity telethon. The telethon was the most widely distributed telethon in history. The event was broadcast from Los Angeles, New York and London. There were also live reports from Haiti.
Madonna endorsed the relief efforts of the charity organization Partners in Health, donating $250,000 toward their work with victims of the Haitian earthquake. Partners in Health works to bring modern medical care to the world’s poorest communities and it has had a presence in Haiti for 20 years.
“My prayers are with the people of Haiti,” she said in a statement on her web site. “I can’t imagine the terrible pain and suffering they are experiencing. Sadly the depths of the tragedy are just becoming known and the need for our support grows more urgent with every passing moment.
“I urge all of my friends and fans around the world to join me collectively to match my contribution or give in any way you can,” she continued. “We must act now.”
On December 31 1999, the following Madonna videos were included in the Much Music: Top 100 Videos Of The Century includes Express Yourself #3, Ray Of Light #8 and Like A Prayer #47.
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On July 23, 2024, the press posted photos of Ryan Reynolds, Madonna, and her 11-year-old twins, Stella and Estere, joining Hugh Jackman at the premiere of Deadpool & Wolverine at the David H. Koch Theater in New York City on Monday.
Ryan Reynolds and his Deadpool & Wolverine director, Shawn Levy, revealed during an interview on Andy Cohen’s SiriusXM radio show (via People) that they personally met with Madonna to secure the rights to use “Like a Prayer” in the upcoming Marvel film. The music icon agreed, and the song ended up playing a prominent role in both the film and its trailers.
“It did involve a personal visit to Madonna, where we showed Madonna the sequence where ‘Like a Prayer’ would be used,” Levy said.
“Also, let’s preface it with the fact that they don’t license — that Madonna doesn’t just license the song, particularly that song,” Reynolds added. “It was a big deal to ask for it and certainly a bigger deal to use it… We went over and met with her and sort of showed her how it was being used, and where, and why.”
Not only did Madonna allow Reynolds and the Deadpool & Wolverine team to use “Like a Prayer,” but she also provided a note on how it should be used. While Reynolds isn’t revealing specifics just yet, he said, “She gave a great note. She watched it, and I’m not kidding, [she said], ‘You need to do this.’ And damn it, if she wasn’t like spot on.”
“We literally went into a new recording session within 48 hours to do this note. … It made the sequence better,” Levy added.
In addition to Madonna, the Deadpool & Wolverine soundtrack includes songs from *NSYNC, The Goo Goo Dolls, Fergie, Avril Lavigne, Aretha Franklin, Green Day, and The Greatest Showman soundtrack, among others.
On May 25 2004, Rolling Stone magazine published a review of Madonna’s Re-Invention World Tour with the headline, “Madonna Reinvents herself. Amid images of war and peace, pop star shows she can sing.”
Here’s the review by Barry Walters:
After twenty years in the limelight, Madonna is expected to cause controversy and reinvent herself for every new tour. So for the May 24th Los Angeles opening of her Re-Invention world trek, Madonna did the most unexpected thing she could: She came back as a great concert singer.
Even the most diehard Madonna fan will concede that her live performances have almost without exception been plagued by a multitude of missed notes, breathy passages, and, as of late, fake British accents. But while Mariah and Whitney have of been losing the acrobatic vocal dexterity and lung power on which their reputations rest, forty-five-year-old Madonna, whom few have ever taken seriously as a musician, has never sounded better than she did during the first of several gigs in her adopted West Coast home. Whether rocking out with classic black Les Paul in hand during a metallic rendition of her early club hit “Burning Up,” or performing “Like a Prayer” behind a screen-projected gospel choir, Madonna belted, and did not once seemed strained. In the midst of a $1 million production festooned with a walkway that jutted out from the stage and over the audience, massive moving video screens, a dozen dancers, a bagpipe player, a stunt skateboarder and a whole lot of emotionally charged anti-war imagery, the focus was nevertheless on Madonna, and how she’s matured into a truly great pop singer.
Opening with a yoga-trained twist on her famous Louis XIV-inspired MTV Video Music Awards rendition of “Vogue” and ending on a kilt-wearing finale of “Holiday” against a video backdrop of national flags that eventually morphed into one, the show was thematically simpler and more focused than her last several productions.
The barbarism of war and the necessity of love were at the heart of the entire show, and both played off each other, sometimes for ironic and decidedly uneasy effect. The original military-themed video footage of “American Life” that the singer withheld at the start of the Iraq war was finally unveiled, and then expanded upon during “Express Yourself,” where Madonna sang her anthem of unbridled, intimate communication in front of dancers dressed as soldiers and goose-stepping with twirling rifles.
By contrast, Madonna closed an extended acoustic section of the show with a straightforward and thoroughly committed rendition of John Lennon’s “Imagine” as images of war and poverty-ravaged children eventually gave way to footage of a Muslim boy and his Israeli counterpart smiling as they walked with their arms wrapped around each other.
The heaviness of much of the imagery was balanced by Madonna’s own presence, which seemed remarkably fun-loving and self-assured for the opening night of her most technically complex production. Only when she strapped on an acoustic or electric guitar during several songs and repeatedly glanced at her left hand to make sure it was playing the proper chords did she seem at all nervous. “How many people out there really think that I am the Material Girl?” she asked during a break in her most iconic early smash as she strummed with much deliberation.
For the last several songs, Madonna and her dancers donned black and white kilts, an apparent nod to husband Guy Ritchie’s Scottish heritage, and black T-shirts that read “Kabbalists Do It Better,” a cheeky reference to both her religious studies and the “Italians Do It Better” T-shirt she wore during her video for “Papa Don’t Preach,” a song that was performed without the “near-naked pregnant women” described in pre-tour reports of the show. In a number dedicated for the “fans that’ve stood by me for the last twenty years,” she sang her earliest hit ballad, “Crazy For You,” earnestly and without contrivance.
Madonna’s continued relevance was impressive, but it was even more striking that she’s putting more love and genuine passion into her spectacle than ever.
On May 23 1989, Madonna’s Like A Prayer album was certified double platinum (for sales of 2 million copies) in the USA.
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