Adele's postponed Las Vegas show is finally here, and it looks worth the wait
“I was a shell of a person for a couple of months,” Adele says of canceling her initial Las Vegas shows
Fans didn’t go easy on Adele when she canceled her initial Las Vegas residency at Caesars Palace in early 2022, a decision she chalked up to “delivery delays and COVID.” But the show must go on, and now, in the wake of her Grammy nominations for her album 30, the artist has risen like a phoenix to complete the promised residency. And we mean literally like a phoenix; there appears to be a lot of pyrotechnics in this show!
Fans shared some clips of the Vegas show on Twitter, and it’s easy to see why Adele exercised patience in putting on this level of a production. A clip of “Set Fire To The Rain” shows her, well, you know, singing amidst fire and rain; in another segment (“When We Were Young”) polaroids of photos from her life flutter down over the audience. At the end of the show, the singer disappears in a burst of glitter. You simply can’t rush that kind of live music magic!
“I definitely felt everyone’s disappointment and I was devastated and I was frightened about letting them down. I thought I could pull it together and make it work and I couldn’t, and I stand by that decision,” Adele said in a recent interview on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs. “I’m not going to just do a show because I have to or because people are going to be let down or because we’re going to lose loads of money. I’m like, the show’s not good enough.”
Given that the residency has moved forward—and judging by the impressive sneak peeks on social media—the show has clearly evolved to an Adele-approved level. Yet the turmoil of her cancellation took its toll: “I was a shell of a person for a couple of months,” she said. “I just had to wait it out and just grieve it, I guess, just grieve the shows and get over the guilt, but it was brutal.”
Safe to say she’s making it up to the fans now—she even gave them a special shout-out by performing the viral “Water Under The Bridge” TikTok dance. After undergoing that “brutal” reality check, it seems that all the drama is (you guessed it) water under the bridge now.