MADONNA didn’t let the Irish summer put a dampner on her performance in Dublin last night, as she sang in the rain.

It only took 25 years, but the Twin Cities finally got its third date with Madonna.

“There’s only one queen, and that’s Madonna.” So declares Nicki Minaj, closing her verse on I Don’t Give A, off the Material Girl’s dozenth studio album MDNA.

Madonna thrilled a packed du Arena on Sunday night in the first of two Abu Dhabi shows that offered a visually dazzling performance.

Madonna’s got her back up and it’s fun to watch it goin’ down. Just give into it.

It’s possible Madonna will always have a fascination with her rude bits and why not when they still look this good.

Madonna rocked Dallas Sunday night when she performed to a sold-out house at the American Airlines Center. While on stage Madonna apologized for Saturday’s cancelled show, promising to sing her heart out that night to make up for the previous night, and that she did. Madonna was one of the very few performers that I have never seen, so I was excited about the show. But, little did I know how awesome that the night was going to be.

US pop icon Madonna hit the stage running at Abu Dhabi’s Yas Island stadium on Sunday in her first ever concert in the Gulf, days after launching a world tour in Israel.

“Tel Aviv, are you ready?” That’s what Madonna asked the crowd of about 33,000 last night as she kicked off her MDNA world tour at Ramat Gan stadium. And they roared back.

Madonna has kicked off her MDNA world tour in Tel Aviv, Israel, wishing peace in the Middle East.

The 53-year-old entertainer regales fans in a two-hour dance and song extravaganza.

Some gluteus. Some maximus. Part way through an outstanding display of pop Madgematazz late on Wednesday evening, the ring mistress Madonna slowed things severely down, rendering a hit that was once shiny and new as a melodramatic minor-key waltz. As a pianist in top hat and tails struck the notes of Like a Virgin, the famous blonde lady next to him pulled down her pinstriped pants, revealing a thonged, toned behind.

After raking in more than $115 million from her 34 shows overseas, Madonna brought her “MDNA” tour, guns blazing, to the U.S. Tuesday night. The show, at Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center, did not start until 10:24 p.m., which added insult to injury to some who paid $355 top ticket, according to reports. The only explanation offered by Madge was “I want to apologize for being late. We had many changes to make from Europe to America, and I wanted the show to be perfect for you because my fans deserve it and quite frankly I deserve it.”

Gun-toting vixens. Blood-spattered motel rooms. Point-blank executions. Acrobatic militiamen. Gratuitous cleavage shots. No, this isn’t a scene-by-scene breakdown of a new Quentin Tarantino movie, it’s the first half an hour of Madonna’s new live show which blazed into Yankee Stadium on Thursday night (and will be reprised Saturday night).

Half mens, half machine: ook in Brussel hield Madonna zich strikt aan het scenario van haar visueel overdonderende MDNA-tournee. Maar wat het meest ontbrak, waren de hits.

Madonna’s life-long themes of church and spirituality once again dominated The Material Girl’s so-called MDNA show as she launched a two-night stand at the Air Canada Centre in front of a sold-out crowd on Wednesday night.

Madonna has kicked off her new world tour in Israel with a call for peace in the Middle East and a performance featuring her son Rocco.

Gerrick D. Kennedy of the L.A. Times recently broke down Madonna’s MDNA Tour by the numbers. Among his findings: 89 shows in 28 countries (18 — including the show in KC — are places where Madonna has never performed), 90 speakers hung on stage, 700 pieces of wardrobe required for all of the onstage performers, 374 tons of pure stage, and even 16 different kinds of salad dressing required by the crew from craft services. This is some high-maintenance shit.

A WOMAN dressed in leather murdering men with a Kalashnikov rifle in the Paradise Motel sounds more like a Quentin Tarantino film than a pop concert.

The pop queen kicks off her world tour with excessive gun-toting, a new cone bra and a dig at Lady Gaga.

Madonna treated tens of thousands of ecstatic fans in Israel to the inaugural show of her “MDNA” world tour on Thursday, performing in a country where she has long claimed a special bond.

So Madonna’s holed up in a fleapit motel, glugging shots of bourbon. She’s just shot this guy, who may have been her lover, as per the lyrics of Gang Bang, one of the more arresting electronic tracks from her most recent album, MDNA. As she recovers, masked assailants come at her, one by one. The 53-year-old dispatches each of them gymnastically, like a cross between Catwoman and Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. Cool! Madonna’s murder spree goes some way to even out pop’s ridiculously unfair body count. In murder ballads by guys like Nick Cave or Neil Young you lose sight of how many women meet their end by their man, “down by the river”.

Already thirty-four dates into the globetrotting MDNA Tour, Madonna embraced the opportunity to address her first American audience at Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center on Tuesday (Aug. 28).

Halfway through her two-hour show at the Sprint Center on Tuesday, Madonna acknowledged the raucous response she’d received from the crowd that nearly filled the place. And in so many words (including a couple that can’t be printed here), she apologized. To paraphrase: This is the first time I’ve been in Kansas City. What took me so long?

Set-heavy and music-lite, Madonna’s latest tour is enough of a visual treat that musical issues barely factor.

Human contortionists festooned with wings. Robed monks, mysterious crooning priests. Gunfights in seedy hotels. Dramatized murder, with blood splattered on a billboard-sized video screen. A warrior-ninja spinning nunchuku.

It was a concert that opened with an act of contrition and closed with a robed church choir paving the road to a Celebration. In between there was fake blood, pretend guns, the return of the infamous conical bra, whiffs of sadomasochism and poison-tipped political commentary, as well as allusions to the pop art of Roy Lichtenstein, movies by Oliver Stone and Stanley Kubrick, Brecht-Weil cabaret, Asian mysticism, Cirque du Soleil-style tightrope acrobatics, and Basque folk music.

Forget marriage, motherhood and the kabbala. Madonna’s startling new “MDNA” tour — which made its first American drive-by at Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Arena Tuesday night — finds her angrier, darker and more unhinged than on any road show of her 30- year career. It’s an idea-intensive, message-packed enigma wrapped in a “what-the?” ethic that must be seen to be believed.

Madonna, after all these years, still feels shiny and new. Her latest tour, which stopped by the Air Canada Centre on Wednesday and Thursday, was a spectacle of the grandest kind.

As we have all surely learned by now, Madonna does not do half-measures.

Finally, after 29 long, agonizing years pop icon Madonna performed a concert in St. Louis, Missouri. Well, only 27 if you count from her first National or World tour in 1985. Either way, the bottom line is that St. Louis has been hungry for some Madonna. On Thursday night, the wait was over as the most successful female performer in music history played to a packed Scottrade Center and amazed many who witnessed the spectacle firsthand.

If ever you need a concise summary of Madonna’s year, the billing for her New York dates will do nicely. There’s Madonna, her name in no way styled to resemble that of a party drug. And there’s Avicii, a Swedish stadium-dance wunderkind riding a mad-money trend of the same.

“Oh my god.” As these lines, the opening exhortation from “Girl Gone Wild,” the opening track from MADONNA’S new long-player, MDNA, reverberated around the cavernous environs of the TD Garden, and a large digital crucifix adorned the Jumbotron onstage, and cloak-covered minions toiled onstage amidst the swinging of an enormous thurible with frankincense bellowing out, most in attendance probably thought they knew what they were in for: some light blasphemy, a circus-smorgasbord of dancing, and a smattering of hits from the Material Girl’s three-decades-deep catalogue.

Madonna is considered a living legend, a cultural icon and one of the best performers of her time. She is one of the most influential artists in the history of American music, and last night at the Scottrade Center we found out why: hard work and natural charisma.

Who would have the chutzpah to argue that Madonna’s sold-out Bell Centre performance Thursday night was anything but the show of the year?

50 year old women in lace seemed to be the rule rather than the exception upon entering Scottrade Center on Thursday night for the long sold out Madonna engagement and her first ever St. Louis show. The queen of over the top pageantry and a special brand of provocateur brought her MDNA world tour to town for a night heavy on new cuts as well as some Madonna classics thrown in for good measure.

In a “manifesto” about her latest tour, Madonna insists that the guns and violence that open the show are metaphors. “When you watch a film there are usually good guys and bad guys…Sometimes I play both.” That last admission is an edifying one for an artist whose image has so often been taken at face value by both the media and the public. Duality—good and bad, light and dark, masculinity and femininity, freedom and confinement—has been a running theme throughout Madonna’s 30-year career, and for better or worse, her MDNA Tour pushes it to the extreme.

Madonna had some explaining to do to her St. Louis fans Thursday night when she brought her MDNA Tour to a sold-out Scottrade Center. After performing a percussion-fueled Open Your Heart that ended with a break-dance spotlight with her son Rocco, she acknowledged that it was the first time she had brought one of her extravaganzas to town.

This point was made midway through the show when Madge, clad in the white majorette get-up from Give Me All Your Luvin’ mashed her hit Express Yourself with Lady Gaga’s similar-sounding Born This Way, adding a chant of She’s Not Me to hammer home the point.

Madonna liet bij de aftrap van haar MDNA-tour in Tel Aviv zien dat ze nog altijd op eenzame hoogte staat. Na-aper Lady Gaga kreeg in het heilige land zelfs een onvervalste sneer.

Pop superstar Madonna kicked off a new world tour on Thursday wishing peace on the Middle East even as she showcased grim dance routines depicting violence and bloody gunmen among her more colorful numbers.

On the first night of her new world tour, the singer pointed the assault rifle and a pistol at her half-naked dancers.

In een lang niet uitverkocht Boudewijnstadion liet een verkouden Madonna grote ambities zien en horen, maar ook dat deze MDNA-show nog niet vast in zijn schoenen staat.

Om 22.15 uur was het dan eindelijk zo ver. Vanuit haar biechtstoel, gewapend met een kalasjnikov en begeleid door de griezelige religieuze gezangen van het Baskische trio Kalakan trapte Madonna het langverwachte, maar ook bekritiseerde concert in het Koning Boudewijnstadion af voor zo’n 37.000 fans.