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6 hours ago
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If faced with the choice to erase one’s most painful memories or live with them forever, à la Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, you’d be forgiven for wanting to wipe them away. On the first night of a five-show run in Los Angeles promoting her 2024 album Eternal Sunshine, Ariana Grande riffed on the idea of memory erasure in an emotive, occasionally zany show that illuminated one of her hardest-won revelations: forgetting her most painful experiences isn’t a bargain she is willing to make.
Grande has weathered tragedy and heartbreak in the public eye since her teenage years, including the death of her former boyfriend Mac Miller and the Manchester bombing that killed 22 fans at one of her concerts in 2017. She’s touched on these devastating events on past lyrics, but Eternal Sunshine marks the moment it all caught up to her. She’s spoken about the astrological concept of her Saturn return as making these challenges impossible to deny; Grande joins a long lineage of musicians, from Gwen Stefani to SZA, who have created music in the wake of this stultifying cosmic event, and the conceptually dazzling show’s 23-song setlist leaned heavily on cuts from the album. The show felt especially momentous given that Grande hadn’t been on tour since 2019, wherein she has since starred in two back-to-back Wicked films and judged The Voice.
But it wouldn’t be Grande if she didn’t inject a little of her characteristic cheekiness into deeper musings. Fittingly, Grande began her show at Los Angeles’s Crypto.com Arena with a theatrical curtain drop to Yes, And?, a strutting dismissal of rumors about who she has chosen to be by her side. (Following her separation in 2023, Grande became a tabloid punching bag when she began dating her Wicked co-star Ethan Slater; they have since broken up.) Surrounded by a cadre of dancers, mic in hand, Grande doubled down on the song’s unbothered ethos with shoulder shimmies and hand flicks. Soon she unleashed the first of several whistle notes she hit this evening – as though reminding adversaries that she possesses an unmatched gift, that four-octave range.
The show’s first act underscored this unbothered attitude by launching into horny cuts including Positions, a winking song about a relationship that sees her “jumpin’ through hoops” to make someone happy that also acts as a double entendre about boudoir romps. She donned bunny ears – also seen on many fans throughout the arena – and a saucy whip routine for her subversive take on the R&B classic The Boy is Mine that sees her not battling it out with another woman for a man, but rather manifesting a romance as her girls support her. Even the show’s most poignant moment, with Grande standing alone on the center stage with a digital looping station and a microphone, featured her layering her spine-jolting vocals on top of one another, repeating a phrase from Eternal Sunshine’s title track for several minutes before launching into the full song: “I don’t care what people say.”
In visuals projected over the screens in between acts, Grande walked through a creepy, flooded house, looking at another version of herself hooked up to a memory-clearing machine. As the show progressed, Grande came to see this not as a gift but its own curse, and trashed the computer. Paralleling this whiplash, the tightly sequenced show featured a mid-section with some of Grande’s more introspective numbers, including a scintillating Safety Net (a song about being terrified of the ultimate unknown: falling in love) before bounding into the club, with back-to-back-to-back anthems One Last Time, Rain on Me and Break Free. But her rendition of Dangerous Woman, during which she dragged a mic stand like a sinuous jazz diva, was the emotional peak of the night with Grande unleashing her pipes on various gobsmacking vocal runs.
After running through much of Eternal Sunshine, many of her most beloved smashes, and the moody Hate That I Made You Love Me from her forthcoming album Petal, Grande closed the show by being beamed up into light-strewn rafters, showing it’s possible to endure so much and still find a way to way to end on a high note.
