Lady Gaga Begins Las Vegas Residency—With Playbill Providing Programs | Playbill

Regional News Lady Gaga Begins Las Vegas Residency—With Playbill Providing Programs

Her latest concert series is called Jazz & Piano, which focuses on jazz standards and showtunes from the Great American Songbook.

Lady Gaga Fred Duval/Shutterstock

When Mother Monster asks for Playbills, she will get Playbills. Lady Gaga has begun her residency in Las Vegas, Lady Gaga: Jazz & Piano. It's a series of concerts she is performing August 31–October 5 at the Dolby Live at Park MGM, where she will be playing the piano and performing jazz standards from The Great American Songbook, as well as acoustic versions of her hit songs. And what a better way to celebrate this classic affair than with Playbills?

See the official Playbill from the show below, which Gaga also showed off in a selfie posted on Instagram

The Playbill also contains a note from Gaga, saying that she's been singing jazz standards since she was a teenager. "At 13, I gave my first jazz vocal performance in New York City at a neighborhood boys school. I sang Billy Strayhorn’s 'Lush Life,' a tune introduced to me by my jazz band teacher. Looking back I can’t help but laugh a little thinking about my young teenage self belting out lyrics about loneliness and drowning my sorrows away in a dive bar. I barely understood what I was singing, but I understood the music all the way down in my bones."

She also attributed the inspiration for Jazz & Piano to the late Tony Bennett, with whom she recorded two albums of classic tunes: Cheek to Cheek and Love for Sale (the two also embarked on a tour together 2014–2015.) "Tony taught me that to sing jazz and improvise well, you had to know it like the back of your hand, and the truth is that I do. I’ve been singing these songs since I was a little girl," she writes. Gaga also included a dedication page to Bennett in the show's program.

The August 31 concert featured Gaga channeling old-school Hollywood in red lipstick and platinum blonde hair. Though the Playbill doesn't include the songs that Gaga is performing, the August 31 concert reportedly featured classic standards such as John Kander and Fred Ebb's "Theme from New York, New York," Frank Loesser's "Luck Be a Lady," Irving Berlin's "Steppin' Out With My Baby," and Cole Porter's "Do I Love You." She also performed acoustic versions of her hit songs, "Poker Face," "Born This Way," "Bad Romance," and "Stupid Love."

Besides being a pop star with five studio solo albums, Gaga has visited the musical realm several times over the years. She helped write the music for the film A Star Is Born, where she played an aspiring singer-songwriter (the song "Shallow," earned Gaga an Academy Award for Best Original Song). She performed a Sound of Music medley at the Oscars in 2015, in a segment introduced by Julie Andrews. And she told Lin-Manuel Miranda in 2018 that she "would absolutely do Broadway," and that record executives used to tell her that she was "too theatre."

So are the use of Playbills a sign that Lady Gaga is eyeing performing on Broadway? Well we can think of a million reasons to be excited for this development.

 
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