{"id":736868,"date":"2026-06-14T20:35:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-14T20:35:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/736868\/"},"modified":"2026-06-14T20:35:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-14T20:35:08","slug":"ariana-grande-review-glittering-hits-and-powerhouse-vocals-in-stunning-return-to-stage-ariana-grande","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/736868\/","title":{"rendered":"Ariana Grande review – glittering hits and powerhouse vocals in stunning return to stage | Ariana Grande"},"content":{"rendered":"

If faced with the choice to erase one\u2019s most painful memories or live with them forever, \u00e0 la Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind<\/a>, you\u2019d 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<\/a>, Ariana Grande<\/a> 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\u2019t a bargain she is willing to make.<\/p>\n

Grande has weathered tragedy and heartbreak in the public eye since her teenage years, including the death<\/a> of her former boyfriend Mac Miller<\/a> and the Manchester bombing<\/a> that killed 22 fans at one of her concerts in 2017. She\u2019s touched on these devastating events on past lyrics, but Eternal Sunshine marks the moment it all caught up to her. She\u2019s spoken about the astrological concept of her Saturn return as making these challenges impossible to deny; Grande joins a long lineage<\/a> of musicians, from Gwen Stefani<\/a> to SZA<\/a>, who have created music in the wake of this stultifying cosmic event, and the conceptually dazzling show\u2019s 23-song setlist leaned heavily on cuts from the album. The show felt especially momentous given that Grande hadn\u2019t been on tour since 2019, wherein she has since starred in two back-to-back Wicked<\/a> films<\/a> and judged The Voice.<\/p>\n

But it wouldn\u2019t be Grande if she didn\u2019t inject a little of her characteristic cheekiness into deeper musings. Fittingly, Grande began her show at Los Angeles\u2019s 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<\/a>.) Surrounded by a cadre of dancers, mic in hand, Grande doubled down on the song\u2019s unbothered ethos with shoulder shimmies and hand flicks. Soon she unleashed the first of several whistle notes she hit this evening \u2013 as though reminding adversaries that she possesses an unmatched gift, that four-octave range.<\/p>\n

Ariana Grande performs at Oakland Arena in California on 6 June. Photograph: Katia Temkin<\/p>\n

The show\u2019s first act underscored this unbothered attitude by launching into horny cuts including Positions, a winking song about a relationship that sees her \u201cjumpin\u2019 through hoops\u201d to make someone happy that also acts as a double entendre about boudoir romps. She donned bunny ears \u2013 also seen on many fans throughout the arena \u2013 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\u2019s 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\u2019s title track for several minutes before launching into the full song: \u201cI don\u2019t care what people say.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s possible to endure so much and still find a way to way to end on a high note.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If faced with the choice to erase one\u2019s most painful memories or live with them forever, \u00e0 la…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":736869,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,75,341],"class_list":["post-736868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/736868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=736868"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/736868\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/736869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=736868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=736868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=736868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}