Lady Gaga Brought Gorgeous Chaos to Fort Worth on Sunday

Lady Gaga’s Mayhem Ball brought a two-night reign through Fort Worth’s Dickies Arena over the weekend. The tour, which immediately topped our list of most anticipated shows of the year upon its announcement, comes at an exciting moment in her already storied journey as an artist. Though she’s a firmly planted fixture in the highest tier of the pop stardom hierarchy, her Grammy-winning album, last year’s Mayhem, unlocked a new zenith of her pop pedigree. In many ways, it was both a return to form and a rush of exploratory sounds.

Sunday’s show in Fort Worth was an electric victory lap for such an apex in her career. A lap she ran through a rock opera fever dream, and one that she told the audience she didn’t want to wake up from. Scattered across the crowd in red lace bodysuits, six-inch platform heels and looks impressively recreated from her various eras (someone in a full pope costume was seated directly in front of us), her fans, known as “Little Monsters,” were happy to oblige as her dream warriors. 

Though the tour is called the Mayhem Ball, the show was titled “The Art of Personal Chaos.” Across the tale’s four separate “acts” and a grand finale, Gaga intertwined the vibrant, disparate fragments of her catalog. Aside from a few overstayed intermissions between acts (we checked ourselves by acknowledging that wig and costume changes of this caliber deserve as long as they damn well need), the format mostly read like a charm. 

She unveiled the first act with “Bloody Mary” from 2011’s pop bible, Born This Way. Opening the show with a deep cut from a record released 15 years ago would seem like a chaotic choice, but the song surged in popularity a few years ago after receiving the coveted modern pop-culture resurrection via TikTok virality. 

What was pleasantly chaotic, though, was her then immediately roaring into 2025’s omnipresent “Abracadabra,” which we didn’t expect from her so soon in the setlist. We then quickly remembered we were watching one of pop music’s greatest iconoclasts. “Feel the beat under your feet, the floor’s on fire,” she sang through the song’s chorus – we didn’t feel the beat from under us nor any fire, but we did feel the ground literally shaking from the dancing that engulfed the crowd.   

Throughout the night, the production was beyond Broadway-worthy. She greeted her monsters atop a two-story bird cage draped with lush red curtains. By act two, she reemerged on the stage from a grave box, lying next to a skeleton, for a shortened version of “Perfect Celebrity.” Her dancers were soon exhumed from the gravel around her to launch into the dark, electropop-powered “Disease.” 

She introduced Act Three, titled “The Beautiful Nightmare That Knows Her Name,” appearing from a giant skull. Strutting down the stage’s phallic runway through favorites like “Applause” and “Just Dance,” she screamed, “Texas, get your fucking paws up!” The sheer showmanship of her dancers, catapulting from every end of the stage through vouging battles and back flips, cannot be overstated in bringing these tracks to life, too.

Act Four was the longest chapter, and early in the set, she jumped from Mayhem to The Fame as she traded dancing on “Kill For Love” for a guitar under Berlin basement club-esque red lights for “Summerboy.” The latter felt truly special, given that much like “Bloody Mary,” it’s hard to imagine we would have been gifted with its inclusion on the setlist had it not also had its own trending moment on TikTok last summer. The Mayhem Ball marked the first time since 2007 that she performed the song live.

Of course, the long-held LGBTQ battle cry that is “Born This Way” erupted at Dickies Arena. It was tucked deep into the show, but in a lot of ways was being set up to match the profound impact it holds in a place like Texas, particularly right now. She understood the importance of it at this moment, too. 

“Texas, you deserve to dance,” she told us in the first act. And by the time she arrived at her anthemic love letter to the LGBTQ community, she asked the audience, “Where is the queer community? This show is for you, your joy, your freedom, your queer Texas art.” 

Admittedly, we weren’t as excited for the fun to dial down as she transitioned toward her big ballads in the back half of Act Four. (With a vault of glittery pop hits stacked as tall as hers, can you blame us?) We were again reminded that we were watching one of the most enduring pop artists of the 21st century, who has built a career on proving we should never make the mistake of assuming we have her figured out.

Her vocal runs on “Million Reasons” were chill-inducing enough, and then she sailed – vocally and literally – into “Shallow” from A Star is Born as the titular character from Mayhem joined her in a mythological novel-like boat. Eventually, she floated to the end of the runway where a piano awaited her to begin “Die With a Smile,” the colossal, Grammy-winning, and Bruno Mars-featured song that likely brought out some suburban North Texans who once upon a time made her the object of Satanic Panic. 

Truly the most beautiful moment of Act Four – and maybe even the entire night – though, arrived with “Marry the Night.” In a black sequined veil, still behind her piano, she prefaced the pared-down rendition of the song with “I know things are very scary right now, and I’m thinking about everybody in Texas. I feel very honored to be here.” From nearly any other artist making their every-few-years rounds through our home, this might have seemed like a version of going through the “we’re so glad to be here” script. From her, it felt like a hyper awareness of the role she holds for so many Texans who yearn to be loved back. 

Any wet eyes in the arena were soon dried by the time we had to lock in to get our “rah rah” on for the encore of “Bad Romance” – the already atmospheric hit somehow felt even more formidable live. In true Gaga form, she came back out to the stage on a hospital bed pushed by dancers in witch doctor masks. 

Toward the end of the show, she did promise us that though she’s nearly 20 years into her career (we shuddered at this inadvertent reminder that we are, in fact, getting old), she’ll continue to meet us for the next 20 years if we’ll have her. 

If we are to be so fortunate as to receive invitations from her world of gorgeous chaos that existed on Sunday, we’ll meet her there every time.