Think of pop stars who’ve sold out the Kia Forum for a run of four nights or more this decade. Of course, there’s Harry Styles, who booked a residency of 15 shows at the venue in the fall of 2022, though three of those performances were bumped into early 2023.
Olivia Rodrigo had four nights at the Forum in August 2024. And Billie Eilish played five there in December of the same year. Lady Gaga did a quartet of shows there this summer – and she’s coming back for four more early next year.
Now add to those Dua Lipa, the English dance-pop star who kicked off the first of her four sold-out nights at the Inglewood arena on Saturday, Oct. 4, with a celebration of dance music that ran the gamut of disco and R&B to club bangers and house beats.
For Lipa, who turned 30 in August, it’s confirmation that a decade after her career debuted (quickly making her a huge star in Europe), her current Radical Optimism tour is elevating her to the level of the Olivias and Billies and Gagas here in the States.
Lipa arrived on stage in shadows for the opening number “Training Season,” standing atop a curved, wave-shaped platform, flanked by 12 backing dancers.
Like many of her songs, the dance-pop banger harks back to the disco era in which the singer celebrates making it through a world of bad dates and broken promises. Training season is over, she sang as she strode confidently down to the stage in a metallic gold body suit and matching knee-high boots. If you can’t treat her right, the song continued, you better move along now.
This was the first of four acts in the set, which quickly showed off the arena-sized choreography of the tour. “End of an Era” featured her dancers with white, feathered fans, like those an old-fashioned burlesque artist might use, fanning her, hiding her, and revealing her as she sang. “Break My Heart” included another classic showgirl image: Lipa held horizontally over the heads of her male dancers, one knee bent as she sang.
“One Kiss” finally stirred the audience from watching the spectacle on stage to moving to the club beats of a song created in collaboration with superstar DJ-producer Calvin Harris.
Early highlights also included “Levitating,” her 2020 electro-dance single that compares falling in love to falling through space. Its arrival in the second act garnered one of the biggest crowd responses of the night, as it should — despite stalling at No. 2 on Billboard’s weekly charts, the track was such a constant presence in 2021 that it ended up as the No. 1 single of the year overall in the United States.
As she made her way to the remote stage, Lipa stopped to talk with fans, taking selfies with a trio of 11-year-old girls, and listening in amusement as a young man told her — and the entire arena — his lengthy history of wanting to see her in concert but not managing to do so until now.
On the remote stage, after playing the ballad “These Walls” with her band (who’d slipped onto the stage while she worked the crowd), Lipa also introduced her surprise cover song for the night. Each tour date features a song with some connection to the musical history of the city, and for the L.A. area, Night 1 was a very strong cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain.”
Act III opened with a video of Lipa’s voice reciting commands akin to those of an exercise instructor, before slipping into a quartet of up-tempo bangers, including “Physical” and “Electricity,” which would, in fact, be perfect Dua-cize workout grooves.
The breaks between acts also provided Lipa time to change stage outfits, bodysuit to catsuit, stockings and garter belts, sheer gloves over her elbows. Act IV saw her return to the stage in a sheer white slip dress from Balenciaga to sing perhaps the most romantic numbers in her set.
“How long, how long, can we stay like this together?” she sang in the raw and emotional chorus. “Can we keep falling forever?” Short answer: apparently yes, given that we spotted her fiancé, the English actor-model Callum Turner before the show started.
After the ballad “Happy For You,” which she sang from the peak of the raised platform, she sank through its floor to appear moments later on the remote stage at the center of the Forum floor. There, “Love Again,” one of many fan favorites, provided the visual highlight of the night, as she sang encircled with a ring of rippling flames before the center of the platform rose on cables to continue her performance, hovering above both flames and fans.
She stayed aloft for “Anything For Love” before returning to earth to close out the main set with “Be The One,” another yearning love song with another of the frequent blasts of confetti that punctuated the night.
The encore opened with “New Rules,” like “Training Season,” a take-it-or-leave-me disco number, which slipped seamlessly into “Dance the Night,” her song from the soundtrack of “Barbie,” in which she also appeared as Mermaid Barbie.
“Don’t Start Now,” another of her very best tracks, followed with the crowd joining Lipa on the chorus. “Don’t show up, don’t come out, don’t start caring about me now,” she sang in an I-will-survive mode to the pulsing groove of the beat. “Walk away, you know how, don’t start caring about me now.”
Then, with “Houdini,” the first-released of five singles from her “Radical Optimism” album, she wrapped up the night, disappearing until the second and third and fourth nights of this run of star-making shows.