Giant bee costumes and $1,000 tickets: Beyonce’s wild concert history in Vegas
The golden mechanical horse shall fly from the rafters soon enough.
Yes, Beyonce’s gone country, performing astride said concert prop during shows on her current “Cowboy Carter World Tour.”
The pop/R&B/newfound honky-tonk supernova rides the range into Vegas this week for a pair of shows at Allegiant Stadium on Friday and Saturday.
Until then, let’s get further hyped by revisiting her concert history here in town:
Tour: “Ladies First Tour”
Where/When: Mandalay Bay Events Center, April 16, 2004
Attendance/Gross: 9,131/9,378; $778,917
Beyoncé’s first Vegas concert paired her with fellow headliners Alicia Keys and Missy Elliott in a triple bill for the rap/R&B ages. Nicknamed the “Urban Lilith Fair” tour after the pioneering, all-female package tour launched in the mid-’90s, the outing was the first to team up a trio of superstar female R&B performers. It would also be the last tour in which Beyoncé would perform early career cuts such as “Hip Hop Star,” “Gift From Virgo” and “Be With You.”
Tour: “The Beyoncé Experience”
Where/When: MGM Grand Garden, Aug. 25, 2007
Attendance/Gross: 10,171/10,171; $1,251,970
Where/When: Mandalay Bay Events Center, Dec. 30, 2007
Attendance/Gross: Not available
Beyoncé’s first solo headlining show in Vegas sold out in a day. While many of her pop peers lip-sync through their shows, Beyoncé wielded her voice like a broadsword at the first of two MGM Grand shows in 2007, singing from her knees on “Baby Boy,” scatting heatedly with the horn section on “Naughty Girl,” her voice bouncing up and down, up and down, like a kid on a trampoline. And she did it all while headbanging like a Metallica groupie, busting out some air guitar licks, dancing violently in stiletto heels, straddling a love seat fashioned after a pair of hot pink lips and racing through half a dozen costume changes (our favorite was when she dressed up like a giant bee, complete with plastic yellow helmet and fake wings).
Residency: “I Am … Yours”
Where: Encore Theater at Wynn Las Vegas
Venue: July 30-Aug. 2, 2009
Beyoncé’s first-ever residency was in a — relatively — small room with exceptionally big ticket prices for the time: Seats started at $250 and topped out at $1,000 for the four-show stand. Beyoncé referred to the concerts as her unplugged performances, delivering a more stripped-down, intimate show in front of just 1,500 fans a night, backed by an orchestra. If you missed out on the shows then you can still experience them now, portions of them were captured on a double CD and DVD, “I Am … Yours: An Intimate Performance at Wynn Las Vegas,” released in November 2009.
Tour: “The Mrs. Carter Show World Tour”
Where/When: MGM Grand Garden, June 29, 2013
Attendance/Gross: 12,913/12,913; $1,856,203
Where/When: MGM Grand Garden, Dec. 6, 2013
Attendance/Gross: 12,811/12,811; $1,872,823
At the first of a pair of Vegas stops on her fifth concert tour, Beyoncé’s movements were as fluid as the sweat she worked up. At times, the show’s choreography was so awesomely out there, with limbs flying every which way, that she looked like a marionette being worked by an overcaffeinated puppeteer. The show itself was a grand, heart-pounding and heart-rending spectacle, with Beyoncé looking like an action heroine as she whipped her hair about like she was lashing a bullwhip, danced with equal parts grace and fury and sang with lungs on fire. It was an exciting, thunderous performance from a woman at the height of her considerable powers.
Tour: “Renaissance World Tour”
Where/When: Allegiant Stadium, Aug. 26-27, 2023
“Break My Soul” was the lead single to Beyoncé’s smash seventh album “Renaissance.” But it was box office records that were broken during the tour in support of said album. According to “Billboard,” the outing grossed a gargantuan $570.5 million in revenue, attracting an audience of 2.7 million people across 55 shows en route to becoming the seventh-highest-grossing concert tour ever, the highest-grossing tour by a female artist at the time and the highest-grossing tour by an African-American artist. What’s she going to do for an encore at Allegiant Stadium this weekend? Only the golden horse knows.
Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @jbracelin76 on Instagram.
