Cyndi Lauper’s Farewell Tour Leaves ‘Em Wanting More: Concert Review

To paraphrase Cyndi Lauper and Paul Simon: She’s still so unusual after all these years. Lauper, at 71, is nearing the end of the U.S. leg of what is being billed as a farewell tour. And as much as she remains something of a unicorn now, it’s a chance to force ourselves to recall how really singular she was when she came on the scene four decades ago — a time when we generally thought women in music could be kooky and flamboyant, or that they could be sensitive and intelligent, but the idea that they could be all of these things at once still seemed a little bit out of our grasp. Now that’s not quite such a H-O-T-T-O-G-O take, as it was then: Lauper pretty well established for all time that girls just want to be multi-faceted.

The setlist for the “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun Farewell Tour” runs to 16 songs, which is quite a few more than the 11 she was doing on average when she last did an arena tour, back in 2014. But the number of songs played isn’t really an indicator of how long a Lauper set will last, anyway, since the performances are peppered with monologues in which Lauper goes into “VH1 Storytellers” mode (or maybe it’s more like “shooting the shit in Queens” mode) for as long as seven or eight minutes at a time. This approach tends to be more the province of intimate theater shows than arena blowouts, like the one she did this past week at L.A.’s Intuit Dome. But to her credit, she bends the audience to her pace… even if it requires finally telling all the howlers in the crowd to STFU because she can’t hear their shouts past her in-ears. Lauper actually did get them to pipe down for her stories of growing up in an all-female household, or references to record execs who didn’t get her ambition, or warnings about how things may be going backward for women in society generally.

It was almost kind of like attending one of those quintessentially loose, late-night, golden-age Vegas shows in which the veteran performer in residency would get chatty and casual with the audience… except with a lot more feminism. A lot, lot more.

Lauper’s overt thoughts about women still fighting for their autonomy were appreciated, but she may never have said it better all night than she did with one short aside in the opening number. The farewell tour starts each night, as most of her shows over the years have, with a bop — “She Bop,” that is, her classic ode to female self-pleasuring (and a song that dismissed the need for a “lion’s roar” 40 years before Chappell Roan found the lions lacking in “Femininomenon”). Following the lyric “Ain’t no law against it yet…,” Lauper threw in: “But give it time.”

None of this is to say that anyone would mistake Lauper’s feel-good tour for an evening of agitprop. Not when, for the second number of the night, she follows “She Bop” with as explicitly unserious a crowd-pleaser as “The Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough,” a soundtrack relic that came complete with rapid-fire film clips from the Spielberg-produced 1985 kid flick. This might’ve seemed like an outlier song in the set, but in Lauper’s mind, maybe there’s something about the “Goonies” ethos that fits in with her lifelong aesthetic — the one that made it feel like being a kid on the margins was the only fun place to be. Or, just as likely, it counts as pure fan service. Either way…

Her cover of Prince’s cheekily rueful “When You Were Mine” (originally recorded before most of the world had a clue who Prince was) offered the first real chance to show that her pipes were in good, working order. Lauper’s ability to bring balladic chops to a song with some tempo came even more to the fore in “I Drove All Night.” Probably not many people were thinking of that lusty-sounding late-’80s hit as a Statement Song. But Lauper set the record straight on that, following her performance with some talk about recording it because she “felt that there weren’t any songs about women driving,” and having grown up under a generation of women that had to ask men to take them places, “to me it was a song of empowerment, and a song that actually meant something.” And then she followed that with an admission that she still can’t parallel-park. A little bit Gloria Steinem, a little bit Gracie Allen.

The visual design of “I Drove All Night” was an early tip-off in the set to the idea that Lauper would be trying to introduce a few elements that were, well, unusual into the costuming and production. For that number, she held up part of her roomy white dress as a screen, for projections of driving scenes. Throughout the night, thereafter, she made it a point to refer to and credit “collaborators” responsible for either her ever-changing wardrobe or her production setpieces.

The most obviously impressive staging occurred during “Sally’s Pigeons,” a tender number Lauper wrote thinking back on a childhood acquaintance who died from the effects of a so-called back-alley abortion. It was the one song of the night Lauper sang without a wig, or even the sight of her natural hair, instead just being seen in her black wig cap, as if to forego even the suggestion of artifice, and also train attention instead on what was happening without her down on the B-stage in the middle of the arena floor. There, what looked like a pair of tied-together white sheets were made by unseen winds to dance above the crowd in a sort of free-form solo ballet, created by the artist Daniel Wurtzel. At the most basic level, this was just a good magic act, but it also had real visual poetry to it — a nice trick if you can pull it off.

For most of the night, it seemed as if that B-stage might have just been created for those dancing sheets, not the singer herself. But she did venture out to it during the encore segment, again making use of whatever very directed wind technology was at play, holding on to the bottom edge of a giant rainbow ribbon that swayed aloft during her reading of what has become a gay anthem, “True Colors.” The show was otherwise light on — really absent of — gimmickry, so these excursions into air-driven stagecraft felt just right, in a night when Lauper’s wigs were the only other special effects.

Lauper had some fun with her costume and hair changes, one of which took place on stage. A black gown on a mannequin rose from a trap door, as Lauper discussed how the designer Siriano (of “Project Runway” fame) told her, “Cyn, the gays want glamour.” She took off her existing stage outfit, while assuring the crowd “I ain’t gonna show you something you can’t unsee,” revealing a basic black slip before an assistant helped her into the gown. She also referenced her ever-changing hair, playing up the irony: “I’ve got colored wigs but my hair is green.” At one costume-change point, cameras caught her iun a dressing room backstage for several minutes as a team redid her makeup, changed her outfit and teased out that green hair. It was hard to know whether this was a pre-taped segment or was actually being broadcast from her dressing room, and if it was the latter, kudos all around — this little video discursion was an odd highlight.

You’ve got to give Lauper credit, also, for not going with the most obvious setlist. “All Through the Night” was the only real hit that didn’t make it onto this tour, and it is missed by some, but some of the unexpected covers that pop up mid-show are much more memorable than a pure recitation of her upper discography, which there’s enough of anyway. A rendition of Wanda Jackson’s “Funnel of Love” (from her quasi-roots album of a few years back) allowed Lauper a chance to put on a red dress, in honor of the rockabilly pioneer’s “devil woman” persona, as well as to rock out in a different way. Her interpretation of Gene Pitney’s “I’m Gonna Be Strong” fell in more with her classic balladry.

Most unusual of all was a fleeing trip to New Orleans with “Iko Iko,” with Lauper adorned in an extremely colorful Mardi Gras outfit that included a washboard vest (one of two instruments she played during the show, the other being the recorder). “Iko Iko” wouldn’t have necessarily felt like it would be a prompt for one of the evening’s feminist asides, but Lauper couldn’t help pointing out that the large cajón was being played by band member Mona Tavakoli, whereas in a distant era, it wouldn’t have been considered proper for a woman to straddle this particular piece of percussion.

Naturally, the show ends with “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” and for all the speaking that Lauper did during the rest of the night, it would have been fun — or enlightening? — to hear what she thinks about still performing a song that’s partly about breaking out a daddy’s sway now that she is in her 70s. Whether having such an implicitly youthful signature song is an albatross or a source of ongoing joy, she didn’t say. If I had to guess, I would think she surely tired of the tune decades ago… but we haven’t, and a good portion of the crowd would reasonably riot without it. Of course, it is an empowering message, sung at any age, and Lauper has found ways to make it interesting for herself over the years, including, at the moment, a collaboration with the 95-year-old Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama on the visual backdrops and red-polka-dots-on-white stage outfits for the finale. If Kusama can be seen on the big screens, unsmiling but approving of these shenanigans, as she nears the century mark, then the clear inference is: Who is Lauper to balk at re-celebrating her “girl”-hood, at this comparatively tender age?

But the other thing that this signature number allows Lauper is a meaningful pun. She uses the big screens at her shows to trumpet her Girls Just Want to Have Fundamental Rights Fund, which exists through the Tides Foundation to support women’s rights and health initiatives. “I never thought in my life that I would have to fight again for autonomy. Right?” she said, referencing current events and electoral implications without getting too explicit about invoking enemies of these things. “I think that the fight goes on.”

As for how she’ll go on, Lauper said that she wanted to get this tour in before she could — miming pushing a walker across the stage — and in the lull before her latest musical-theater piece, an adaptation of “Working Girl,” opens in La Jolla next fall and (with luck) goes to Broadway the following year. But her farewell to the crowd was more open-ended than that. “See ya next chapter,” she said. Walking in the sun, presumably, as always.

Cyndi Lauper setlist, Intuit Dome, Inglewood, Calif.:

• “She Bop”
• “The Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough”
• “When You Were Mine”
• “I Drove All Night”
• “Who Let in the Rain”
• “Iko Iko”
• “Funnel of Love”
• “Sally’s Pigeons”
• “I’m Gonna Be Strong”
• “Sisters of Avalon”
• “Change of Heart”
• “Time After Time”
• “Money Changes Everything”
• “Shine”
• “True Colors”
• “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”