“Wow,” the pop star said to the capacity crowd. “Just wow.”
With that nonsense out of the way, Swift quickly moved on to some of the night’s best numbers — including “New Romantics” and “Blank Space.” The latter was particularly memorable for its crowd participation, with fans singing along at top volume to the lyrics. Indeed, it was slightly intimidating to hear (roughly) 40,000 female voices united on this sentiment, “Boys only want love if it’s torture/Don’t say I didn’t say I didn’t warn you.”
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“And you chose to hang out with me.”
The feeling was definitely mutual. The 50,000 fans screamed in approval at nearly every turn of the approximately two-hour show. When they weren’t screaming, they were singing along — with gusto — to each selection of the 18-song set list or waiting in long Disneyland-style lines to buy $50 Taylor Swift throw rugs and other souvenirs.
Taylor Swift looked out at a sea of handmade signs, outstretched arms, smiling faces and T-shirts with her name on them. She then settled on one word to properly sum up what she was witnessing on Friday night at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara.
Swift is a very different kind of a pop star, of course. She’s not a force-of-nature onstage — say, like, Beyonce, Pink, Madonna or (back in the day) Britney Spears — and can’t bank on being able to sweep a crowd away with a potent combination of charisma and physicality. When she shoots for those big “pop star” movements — like she sometimes does on this current 1989 World Tour — she usually falls flat. You can hide that weakness in a video, but not in a stadium.
Swift played the “1989” material straight, matching the record pretty much groove for groove. That was not the case with the older material, which often received slight to slightly drastic makeovers. It really worked for “I Knew You Were Trouble,” from 2012’s “Red,” with the beat amped up to create an even more driving rocker. It flopped with “Love Story,” from 2008’s “Fearless,” as Swift turned this formerly great country tune into a boring synth-pop number. Even so, however, the lyrics were still quite good.
Still, many of the best moments came when Swift would simply chat with the crowd. She went out of her way to let fans know how much their attendance meant to her.
“This is a really happening place,” Swift said of the Bay Area. “There is a million things that you could be doing on a Friday night in the summer.
One of Swift’s biggest strengths is that she’s just so darn likable, which is a pretty hard trait to convey in a stadium setting. Yet, Swift did a marvelous job on Friday, finding several ways to make her personality come across even larger than the setting. She’d casually talk one-on-one (really, one-on-50,000) with the crowd, sharing observations and stories, delivering moderately preachy pep talks and somehow making us feel like we were the star’s “besties.” The result was the rare stadium show that felt illogically intimate.
She’d later underscore that fans had made the right decision, closing the show with such hits as “Bad Blood,” “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” and, of course, “Shake It Off.”
And why would they want to be elsewhere? They had scored the golden ticket — one of the summer season’s most coveted ducats — to see the nation’s No. 1 pop star.
Overall, they acted as if there was no place in the world they’d rather be.
The touring production featured roughly a dozen male dancers and a somewhat intriguing stage design, which included large video screens and a walkway/platform that was elevated above the crowd late in the show. She even had some special guests — Fifth Harmony, which showed up and performed its hit “Worth It’ with Swift.
That’s not how it started out, however, as Swift opened her set with an overly busy, utterly forgettable run through “Welcome to New York,” the too-easy anthem that also kicks off “1989.” She simply has too much to offer — and too much talent — to hide behind this type of faceless, big-budget production number, complete with a futuristic motif and robot-like dancers.
Swift, who was scheduled to perform another sold-out show on Saturday at Levi’s, wouldn’t let her fans down during her first-ever stadium date in the Bay Area. The 25-year-old Pennsylvania native made the leap from arenas to the big houses look fairly simple – although not quite as easy as her much-publicized jump from country music to the pop world with last year’s “1989.” Yet, she still has much room to grow before she can be considered one of pop’s elite performers.
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