Positions<\/a>\u201d from 2020; the singer has a new LP, \u201cPetal,\u201d due next month that she previewed here with a rendition of its lead single, \u201cHate That I Made You Love Me.\u201d<\/p>\n\u201cThis next song is only a week old,\u201d she said Saturday to introduce \u201cHate\u201d \u2014 another loyalty test passed with no trouble by an audience peppered with bunny ears and Glinda wands. (Also in the house: Grande\u2019s mom, Joan, who was welcomed like a pop star herself.)<\/p>\n
All that music to bring to life meant that Grande moved quickly through the two dozen songs she divided into five or six acts. Like the \u201cEternal Sunshine\u201d album, the production traced a loose narrative inspired by Michel Gondry\u2019s 2004 movie \u201cEternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind\u201d; interstitial video bits showed Grande submitting to a memory-wiping machine (before regretting it) and befriending what appeared to be a younger version of herself.<\/p>\n
But if the concert was probably 30% less coherent onstage than in Grande\u2019s mind \u2014 I\u2019m still not sure why one section seemed to take place on Bourbon Street \u2014 it overflowed with discrete moments that showcased her peculiar talents: the voice, of course, with its fluttery high end and its belting Broadway-baby midrange, but also her flair for a vivid image and her slightly twisted sense of humor.<\/p>\n
For \u201cThe Boy Is Mine,\u201d she wore a cat mask and brandished a long leather whip as she sauntered down a runway connecting the main stage to a smaller one in the middle of the arena; beneath her pleading vocals, her live band pushed the song\u2019s slinky R&B groove somewhere close to n\u00fc-metal.<\/p>\n
\u201cThank U, Next\u201d was staged like a sleepover \u2014 Grande trading intimacies with her crew of male and female dancers \u2014 in the world\u2019s coziest nightclub; \u201cImperfect for You\u201d had her and her guitarist jamming side-by-side in a mock-up of somebody\u2019s bedroom.<\/p>\n
![\"Grande's](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/1780901357_868_.jpeg\")
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Grande\u2019s tour is her first since 2019.<\/p>\n
(Katia Temkin)<\/p>\n
Grande strung together her biggest dance hits \u2014 \u201cOne Last Time,\u201d \u201cRain on Me\u201d and \u201cBreak Free\u201d \u2014 at about the halfway mark, and what the bang-bang-bang of it all made you ponder was the tenderness she can find as a singer amid even the most sledgehammering beat.<\/p>\n
Given the global success of \u201cWicked,\u201d I\u2019d have thought the show would feature some kind of musical-theater segment in the home stretch: a bit of \u201cPopular\u201d or \u201cDefying Gravity,\u201d let\u2019s say, or something from \u201cSunday in the Park With George,\u201d in which Grande is set to star next year in London. Instead, she let a camera follow her backstage as she started \u201cInto You\u201d mid-costume-change \u2014 not a novel idea but an effective one \u2014 then sang \u201cWe Can\u2019t Be Friends (Wait for Your Love)\u201d in what looked like a house taken over by vegetation long after a nuclear apocalypse.<\/p>\n
Where do you go from there? Grande chose up, strapping into a harness that lifted her high above the crowd as she sang \u201cSupernatural\u201d before she slipped through a small door in a structure suspended over the stage. She\u2019d finally come back, and now she was gone again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"OAKLAND\u00a0\u2014\u00a0Dressed in a kind of shredded ballerina\u2019s costume, her signature ponytail tied into a bun, Ariana Grande leaned…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":351346,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[23983,34182,123958,9172,6195,63,330,143659,143,72842,145,144,143657,16975,10390,143658,3239,34187],"class_list":["post-351345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-album","tag-ariana-grande","tag-eternal-sunshine","tag-house","tag-kind","tag-los-angeles-times","tag-music","tag-next-song","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-arena","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-pop-star-quirk","tag-position","tag-song","tag-spotless-mind","tag-stage","tag-wicked"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=351345"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351345\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/351346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=351345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=351345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=351345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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