Chappell Roan Live Review: Queen for a Night

Photo by Ragan Henderson

The devil, the Statue of Liberty, a glamorous cowgirl, a construction worker, Joan of Arc: These are the dominant archetypes of the costume-clad at Forest Hills Stadium, all here for night two of Chappell Roan’s four-night run. Walking through the venue, I spot not one but two guys dressed as Lady Liberty whose bodies are entirely painted an ashy shade of green; when I compliment one, he says it hardly took any time at all—“only about an hour and a half”—to cover every visible inch of his skin in green paint. The sartorial standard to which Chappell Roan fans hold themselves is high: Glance around the crowd and you’ll see a sea of sequins, perfectly placed wigs, faces beat for the gods, and enough pink cowboy hats to stock every Spirit Halloween in a mid-size city for several years.

The dates at Forest Hills comprise Chappell Roan’s first real New York shows since her star-making set at Governor’s Ball in June of last year. She’s spent most of this summer playing European festivals and before that, has only played a select few U.S. dates—the Grammys, Elton John’s Oscars party, Saturday Night Live—since closing out the relentless tour behind her debut album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. Alongside the New York dates, this run of “pop-up shows,” dubbed “Visions of Damsels and Other Dangerous Things,” includes two nights in Kansas City and two in Los Angeles. The shows are, through one lens, a victory lap after a couple of years of outrageous success: main-stage festival appearances, sold-out tours, chart hits. (When she came to Brooklyn just after the release of her album, for example, she played Brooklyn Steel—a venue seven times smaller than Forest Hills.) But they’re also something of a measured re-entry, after having had to drop out of a festival last fall for mental health reasons and contending with the intense pressures of sudden fame.

Entering a Chappell Roan show means being immediately swept up in a crowd that feels very campy, very queer, very femme: gaggles of teen girls in coordinated outfits posing for group selfies; parents and children in matching Chappell drag; couples holding hands in trans rights t-shirts. Even if some elements radiated brand-activation energy—take your picture with the apple from which Roan emerged at Governor’s Ball! Pose in a set-and-repeat with the giant wig from her “The Subway” video!—there was a purposefulness threaded throughout: You couldn’t wait in the seemingly endless merch line without a chipper volunteer from Headcount approaching to ask if you’re registered to vote, and representatives from the Ali Forney Center for queer youth and New York’s LGBT Center hung around nearby. (After all that, if you wanted your new t-shirt cropped, stamped, and bejeweled, another booth with a shorter line promised “merch customizations.” If that was not enough, there was also, for some reason, a booth offering free Crocs jibbetz.)

The “Visions of Damsels” aesthetic is glamorous and medieval; on stage, the main set piece was a gothic castle, and Roan came out dressed in an ornate pirate cape. She took full advantage of her architectural environs, prompting me to google “parts of a castle” to confirm that the parapet is the walkway she skipped across while singing “Hot to Go!” and the turret is the corner tower from which she belted “California.”

Roan has the presence of a seasoned veteran but the discography of a newbie—just one album and a handful of singles—and here, she sang nearly every single song she’s released. She’s an explosive performer, all full-throttle charisma and showstopper vocals; the cheering was deafening when she belted the bridge of “Good Luck, Babe!” and the outro of “The Subway.” Still, after the latter track, Roan confessed she had a migraine, which—she noted despondently—would restrict her headbanging.

Still, Roan’s live band dialed up the rock factor of many of her songs, with heavy guitars undergirding the choruses of “Naked in Manhattan” and “Good Luck, Babe!” Roan introduced a cover of Heart’s “Barracuda” by saying it was “the best rock song ever by the best rock band ever,” a compliment I would have found very heartwarming by itself—let’s get Chappell’s army of young queer Zoomers streaming Dreamboat Annie!—but then she introduced Nancy Wilson to the stage to perform the song alongside her, which positively ripped. Even Roan’s ballads felt lively; she camped up “Picture You,” for example, by hanging a blonde wig on the mic and serenading it.

Before performing “Coffee,” Roan reminisced about having recently walked by the Bowery Ballroom, the site of her first New York show. Seated in a giant throne in the corner of the stage, she said it was all feeling very full-circle: She was disappointed that the migraine meant she couldn’t give 100%, but it was making her reapproach the set and find a little flexibility—and in turn, she said, this show’s “very loose and fun” nature reminded her of her style back in those early Bowery days. She really did seem to be having fun, often stopping to laugh mid-song—as when she played the deep cut “Love Me Anyway,” a non-album track from 2020. “I love you because when I say ‘I don’t wanna talk’/You always call me,” she sang, then stopped herself: “I’m laughing because that line is insane,” she told the crowd. “Don’t call me if I say don’t call me!”

The set ended with “Pink Pony Club”—an escapist fantasy that describes the small-town dream of finding purpose and community under brighter lights somewhere else. Forest Hills Stadium is perhaps too small a venue for a star at Roan’s level, but the roar of the crowd during that final song made the space feel both enormous and intimate, the timbre of much-needed togetherness in a time when queer community feels increasingly under threat. Even if Roan wasn’t at 100%, it nonetheless felt like she and the crowd gave it everything they had.

Originally Appeared on Pitchfork