Madonna suggests the rumors of her near-demise were not exaggerated

The specter of death hung over Madonna’s Celebration Tour show at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center Saturday night. It wasn’t the touching tribute to Madonna’s friends and others who died from AIDS in the 1980s and 90s; it wasn’t the robed funeral procession leading to a carousel of impossibly ripped dancers hanging, upside down, from a carousel of neon crosses; nor was it the singer’s fairly bizarre tributes to Michael Jackson and Prince. Death was on the pop icon’s mind because, to hear her tell it, death almost greeted last summer.

“This past summer, you may or may not know, I got really sick. I had some strange bacterial infection in my blood, and I almost died,” Madonna told the audience in a several-minute speech toward the end of the show. “And I’m not telling you this because I want you to feel sorry for me. I’m telling you this because the fact that I’m here right now is a fucking miracle.”

True as it may be, the admission is a bit startling from a woman who has been more or less bullet-proof for the past 40 years. Madonna may shrug at any notion of aging gracefully, but there is no denying that she is aging as we all do. The health scare painted the show—a “retrospective,” as she dubbed it at the top of the evening—in a different light. It was a celebration, yes, but it was also a pop star making a case for her own legacy in real-time. In a year where everything Taylor Swift touched seemed to turn to gold, where Beyoncé declared she had “nothing to prove” in her Renaissance film, Madonna moves with a fresh chip on her shoulder.

For the audience, this was hardly a bad thing. A superfan next to me, who had already attended the show the Thursday prior, assured me that this was a great first Madonna concert to attend. She has long avoided treating her shows as a greatest hits set; her previous tours over the past decade were in support of albums MDNA, Rebel Heart, and Madame X, with a handful of hits and deep cuts sprinkled in.

The Celebration set felt more like an Eras Tour stop, as long-awaited fan favorites received prime slots in the show. The set opened with the singer coming up from the floor to perform “Nothing Really Matters” from 1998’s Ray Of Light; “Bad Girl” took center stage as Madonna’s daughter Mercy accompanied her on the grand piano; “Bedtime Stories,” which hasn’t been performed since the mid-90s, got a prime slot before the finale. Even the (perhaps unjustly) derided album American Life got two nods, with “Mother and Father,” a tribute to the mother she lost when she was five, forming an unexpected emotional centerpiece of the show.

“The first thing that came into my head was my mother,” she said following the song while addressing her health scare. “Because my mother died of cancer and she was by herself, alone. And I was thinking, what if I left my children? I wasn’t thinking about me, I was thinking about them and I was thinking about my mother. And how scared she must have been to know that she was going to leave us all behind.” My source in the audience told me it was a different speech than the one she had delivered at the previous show on Thursday evening. Though obviously well-rehearsed—as in, drinking water from prop beer bottles throughout the show—the set still felt raw and spontaneous.

Aside from the dips into tribute territory, the spontaneity generally made for a very fun evening, as when Madonna interrupted herself upon spotting Andy Cohen in the audience. “If you say one more bad thing about me on your show, I’m gonna,” she began before splashing him with her beer bottle of water. “You’re gonna be in so much trouble. You little trouble-making queen. Is that crazy? I don’t know.”

It was kind of crazy of her, but it was also pretty awesome. Madonna’s outward cockiness and willingness to go off script aren’t unprofessional—they’re what make her so good at her job. And the audience was also more than happy to give the attitude right back to her. When Madonna first greeted the crowd, she challenged anyone to find anyone who looked as good as her after such a long career; someone behind me immediately yelled, “Cher!”

Madonna will survive these jabs; she’s survived worse, as a montage of 40 years of press clips and headlines remind us as the set drew to its finale. She doesn’t mind disapproval or hard times. She welcomes them. The latest stumbling block may have been a setback but she only seems more determined to prove how great she is. At that, the Celebration set mostly succeeds. Her voice sounds as good as it ever did, her choreography agile. “Do you envy me? I said, do you envy me?!” She literally bellowed at the crowd. “You should. Because I am the luckiest girl in the world to do what I do for this many years.” There may be no one else of Madonna’s magnitude from her generation left doing what she does. Getting to witness it felt pretty lucky, too.