Esther takes the stage.

Excerpted from a review of Madonna's NYC concert from the Village Voice. I agree with the Stuart Price comments.

'In the early stages of her two-hour extravaganza/ordeal - after a maudlin intro wherein interpretive dancers flail about during the solemn audio testimony of, say, a child-abuse victim or a former gangbanger - she emerges crucified on a life-size sparkly cross, with a mic helpfully attached so she can croon a draggy, canned-sounding version of "Live to Tell" while surrounded by Jumbotron images of destitute, AIDS- orphaned African children who're occasionally swallowed up by CGI fireballs.

Holy shit.

This is my professional reaction. Holy shit. It's a sequence unparalleled in its combination of blasphemy, absurdity, melodrama, humanitarian grandstanding, and preposterous narcissism, all set to her second-best '80s torch ballad.

Instead, we settle for these brief flashes of old-time bravado and, even rarer, vulnerability. At one point our heroine sat down on the catwalk steps, visibly exhausted, content to merely look like an out-of-breath hot mom for a few seconds, apologizing for "fucking up words" and "falling all over the place": a quick peek at the perfectionist insecurity that drives all this grandeur.

She then sang a limp "Drowned World/Substitute for Love," profoundly inferior to "Crazy for You" or even "The Power of Goodbye."

She gave us everything she had, but not what we wanted.'