When Madonna took to the mammoth stage set up on Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana Beach on Saturday night in a glittering halo and black kimono, she was greeted by the largest live audience of her four-decade career.
The free show, announced at the end of March, was a grand finale to the pop superstar’s latest world tour, which has delivered 80 shows since last October. Without ticket data, concert crowd size can be difficult to gauge. Riotur, the municipality’s tourism department, estimated that 1.6 million people flooded the 2.4-mile stretch of sand Saturday that had been transformed into a roughly $12 million playground surrounding the 8,700-square-foot tent.
It was the height of Madonna-mania days in the city, where talk of the singer, 65, was inevitable. Her songs poured out of stores and car stereos. Fans gathered outside her hotel and chanted her name. Updates on the concert, which was broadcast on the Globo TV network, dominated local media reports.
The spectacle in Rio was a milestone in Madonna’s career: the victory lap for her first retrospective, called the Celebration Tour, in which she chronicled her rise to stardom, performing hits such as “Into the Groove,” “Like a Prayer” and “Ray of Light” with a troupe of dancers, four of her six children and a wardrobe of elaborate costumes reminiscent of some of her most memorable appearances.
“Here we are, the most beautiful place in the world,” Madonna announced early in the concert, gesturing to the ocean and mountains around her. “This is magic.” Later, she expressed her gratitude for her Brazilian fans. “You were always there for me,” she said. “This flag: this green and yellow flag, I see it everywhere. I feel it in my heart.”
The two-hour Rio show was very close to the Celebration show, with a few exceptions: Madonna added her 2000 track “Music” to the set list, which was reworked as a samba with live drummers and a special guest, the Brazilian drag star Pablo. Vittar. Live to Tell, uploaded as a tribute to AIDS victims, featured photos of Brazilian musicians Cazuza and Renato Russo and actress Sandra Bréa. For ‘Vogue’, Madonna appeared in a glittering dress in the colors of the Brazilian flag and was joined by pop sensation Anitta, who helped ‘judge’ the competitors strutting down the runway.
The show had Madonna fans – many of whom came dressed to honor their heroine in cone bras and lace gloves – screaming and dancing along. Ernesto Magalhães, 42, decked out in Madonna’s “Material Girl”-era style in a dress and boa while balanced on stilts, epitomized the exuberant spirit of the occasion: “I’ve been a Madonna fan since I was 8. I couldn’t to lose this.” Surya Rossi, a 31-year-old illustrator, decided on a last-minute trip from Rio Claro, Sao Paulo, after coordinating with her cousin and staying with friends. “Madonna was a huge influence on me, both as a feminist and as an artist.” , she said. “Her empowering story and approach inspires me.”
It was also something of a landmark for live concerts worldwide. In an era of astronomical ticket prices and rising production costs for major shows, a free concert that draws an audience of this scale is exceedingly rare, especially in the United States. California’s Coachella festival, where a three-day general admission pass starts at about $500, draws as many as 125,000 attendees a day. Musikfest, a mostly free music festival in Pennsylvania, welcomed about 1.3 million visitors over 11 days last year.
“Having a free show like this in recent years is relatively unheard of,” Katelyn Yount, director of festivals at AEG Presents, said of Madonna’s closing. The Hangout, an upcoming music festival on Alabama’s Gulf Coast that is among the annual events produced by AEG, is capped each day at about 40,000 attendees, who pay more than $300 for a three-day pass.
If a show of this magnitude were to be held anywhere in 2024, it would likely be in Rio, where officials have experience with huge crowds. In 2006, about 1.5 million people attended a free Rolling Stones concert on Copacabana Beach, according to Brazilian police and other authorities at the time. An even larger crowd is said to have gathered for a Rod Stewart performance there on New Year’s Eve in 1994.
The idea for the sprawling event was first born two years ago when Luiz Guilherme Niemeyer, an executive at Bonus Track, a live entertainment company based in Rio de Janeiro, approached Madonna’s managers after hearing about plans for the tour . A Rolling Stones concert in 2006 helped convince him that such a thing was possible, he said.
Negotiations stalled until last year, when a Madonna show in Mexico City was announced — her Celebration Tour ticketed dates wrapped up with five nights there at the Palacio de los Deportes — and Niemeyer continued his efforts to convince the pop star’s representatives and secure funding.
“It was an ambitious project for everyone, aiming to attract the biggest audience of her career, and I thought that would help me win her over,” Niemeyer said in an interview last week.
Corporate backers of the concert include Brazilian bank Itaú and Heineken, and the government has also made a significant investment.
Preparation for Madonna-palooza had consumed a section of the city in recent days. A week ago, cargo planes flew about 270 tons of concert material into the city, including costumes and gym equipment. Eighteen audio and video towers were built across the beach and last Wednesday, 4,000 workers set up the stage in a sweltering heat.
Because this was Celebration’s only concert in South America — Madonna last toured there in 2012 — fans gathered from across the continent. In the days leading up to the event, a Madonna impersonator, Izelene Cristina, danced to “La Isla Bonita” at a bus station as she greeted travelers. He would not be attending the concert because excitement over the superstar’s performance had led to a flood of bookings.
“Such is the life of an artist,” he said. “You work to move and entertain people.”
On Monday, Madonna and her tour group of about 200 people arrived in Rio, heading directly to the French Riviera-inspired Copacabana Palace, the luxury hotel near where the stage was built. Later in the week, crowds gathered as close as possible to the stage as the pop star crossed a purpose-built footbridge from the hotel to the stage to rehearse with some of her dancers.
Social media was flooded with clips of Madonna running through songs, including the opener, “Nothing Really Matters.” “Are you happy? Are you ready?” he asked the assembled crowd at one point. The answer: wild cheers. “Okay, just checking,” she replied.
At a pre-concert press briefing, officials discussed the safety concerns that can come with an audience of this size and the unpredictable weather on the coast. Last year, Brazilian DJ Alok scheduled what was billed as the “concert of the century” on Copacabana Beach, but a storm caused some of the crowd to disperse and concertgoers faced uncontrolled walleta problem that at least some faced on Saturday night as well.
Marco Andrade, a Rio police spokesman, told reporters that the department planned to deploy 3,200 officers to Madonna’s concert, compared with about 900 for Alok’s event. He said facial recognition technology would be used at the inspection sites, in addition to drones to monitor the crowd. At the end, the audience spread out to the ocean as well – a collection of boats moored in the waters near the venue.
The atmosphere at the ground on Saturday night was like a World Cup event, street carnival and New Year’s celebration all rolled into one. Street vendors offered shirts, hats, cups and fans emblazoned with Madonna’s face and rainbow colors, while an array of barbecue, grilled cheese, empanadas and Brazilian cocktails caipirinhas were available. To combat the heat, a firefighter on top of a fire truck sprayed a jet of water into the crowd.
As the show ended with a remix of her 2009 track “Celebration,” Madonna addressed the audience one last time: “Thank you, Rio,” adding “obrigada,” the Portuguese equivalent. She smiled and dropped a Brazilian flag, pulled a white veil over her head and went down the stage.