Dua Lipa's Radical Optimism tour review – momentous show for a star who contains multitudes

The Guardian

24-03-2025

The crowd drawn to a Dua Lipa stadium show turns out to be a mixed bag.
Over the past decade, the three-time Grammy winner's music has infiltrated every aspect of modern life, from your streaming service's algorithm, to your local H&M store, to the Barbie film. As we made our way to our seats at the Rod Laver Arena, countless small children dipped and weaved at hip level, adorned in sequined skirts and cowboy hats. Then, next minute, a 20-something aspiring influencer was being told off by staff for waving her ring light around. Gen X parents watched on, eyebrows raised.
Australia has won the first leg of Dua Lipa's 55-date Radical Optimism tour: a treat for fans in the southern hemisphere who often miss out. The show begins with a blue, oceanic wash of light accompanied by a meditative synth, which gives off the feeling of a wellness floating tank – a collective hypnosis broken by Dua Lipa's radiant entrance from below the stage, in a blush-pink bodysuit. She opens with Training Season, given a Skyfall-like sultry treatment for the first verse. It shouldn't work, but the song wears it well; Lipa's voice is resonant and fit, requiring minimal backing track, as she saunters and sashays among her twelve dancers – not quite standing out but holding her own.
The choreography is at its strongest when all twelve appear at once, hovering and vibrating around Lipa like a kinetic nest. New Rules, Electricity and Don't Start Now are standouts, not just for their savvy movement but simply because that's when all the performers – including Lipa – seem to be having the most fun.
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The Albanian-English pop star has developed an aura of contradictions: a pop star who's also a vocal advocate for Palestinian rights, and a voracious reader who runs her own book club. It's fun to level the Lipa body-rolling her way down the stage's catwalk with the Lipa who produces thoughtful, intelligent interviews with authors like Patrick Radden Keefe and Ocean Vuong.
Radical Optimism didn't quite hit like its predecessor, Future Nostalgia – but the album tracks nestled within this hit-laden setlist produce a few highlights: there's Happy For You, a sweeping power-ballad that sees Lipa standing alone at the top of the stage as the sky time-lapses behind her; and Maria, a Eurovision-ready sapphic ode to her boyfriend's ex-girlfriend.
The show is divided into four acts and an encore, each of which consist of four or five songs each. It's a lavish production, with pyrotechnics, confetti cannon (which exploded so many times they lost their lustre by the final blow) and a giant chrome-finished stage shaped like an infinity-sign, wrapping around itself and adorned with HD screens. It's so vast that the pre-show curtain can't even shield the thing from view.
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But after each act, the lights go down and the show is essentially halted as roadies scurry across the threshold – frantically waving leaf blowers at the confetti littering the stage; juggling neon light prop poles at the barricade; ferrying cymbals to the B-stage – leaving the crowd in a state of suspended animation. This cycle keeps repeating; an incredible run of four songs, performed to perfection – and then a collective noun of roadies urgently setting up pyrotechnics that will blow our minds in exactly three songs' time.
But the energetic lulls are forgiven when Lipa pounds back on to stage armed with so many hits. Even the now decade-old song that broke her out, Be The One, sounds fresh with a new rework; Lipa ponders aloud whether she'll be singing this one for the rest of her life, but she grins through it regardless.
Like Taylor Swift on her Eras tour, Lipa has been singing a different cover every night of this tour – a song that is particularly special to the city she's performing in. In Melbourne she'd already done Highway To Hell and Can't Get You Out of My Head, and on Saturday night she brought Troye Sivan out on stage to sing Rush.
So I can't help but feel a touch of envy for those crowds as I watch a roadie adjusting an incredibly tall microphone stand for Vance Joy and his ubiquitous hit Riptide. To his credit, his voice is crisp and clear alongside Lupa's – but a ukulele is a peculiarly jarring tonal shift for an otherwise sweaty, gritty, club-inspired set.
The encore is the strongest, as Lipa emerges in another corseted bodysuit – this time black, and adorned with chunky chains. A teaser of Dance The Night, Lipa's mega-hit collaboration with producer Mark Ronson for the Barbie movie, leads into 2019's nu-disco Don't Start Now. In final track Houdini, Lipa plays with a version of herself that is inscrutable and ruthless, warning her potential lovers: put a foot wrong, and she's outta there.
Before the show I'd found the oddball crowd a bit off-putting, but as we navigated out of the arena, picking rainbow confetti out of our hair, it made more sense. Dua Lipa contains multitudes – why shouldn't her fandom?
Dua Lipa has dates in Sydney later this month, before touring through New Zealand, Europe and North America