Cyndi Lauper paused early in her set at Intuit Dome on Saturday to share a story of overnight success – her 1983 debut “She’s Unusual,” the Grammy for best new artist that followed – and the career doldrums that followed.
The people at her record label who’d seen potential in the colorfully kooky singer with a big voice left after that record, and their replacements – “This man with a combover,” Lauper said in her still-thick Queens accent – had no idea what she was.
Then her friend Annie Flanders, editor of Details magazine at the time, offered the advice that shaped the rest of her career.
“She said to me, ‘You know, Cyn, there are many chapters in your life,’” Lauper said. “And I had to realize that not just one chapter defines your life if you’re going down this road to create.
“There’s so many chapters in your whole life that one chapter teaches you something, and then you go onto the next chapter.”
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Lauper, at 71, decided this year to turn the page on the kind of touring that can take a toll on performers half her age. The Girls Just Wanna Have Fun Farewell Tour, her first all-arena tour since 1986’s tour behind the “True Colors” album, will be her last, though she’ll still play shows now and then.
She’s currently at work on songs for a Broadway musical based on the movie “Working Girl” – she’s a Tony Award winner for “Kinky Boots” – the tour slotted neatly between its opening in La Jolla in 2025 and Broadway premiere a year later.
“I thought I’d do this thing before I’m [sings a screechy note],” she joked.
In a show that spread 16 songs and almost as many stories about them over nearly two hours, Lauper was in terrific voice, soaring through octaves on new wave rockers, tender ballads and all points between.
The arena stage also gave her room to put on the biggest production she’s had in years that included collaborations with fashion designers Christian Siriano and Geoffrey Mac and visual artists such as Yayoi Kusama, Daniel Wurtzel, and Refik Anadol.
“She Bop,” her slyly cheeky ode to, um, having fun, opened the show with the synth-fueled sounds that defined much of “She’s So Unusual.” It, along with “Time After Time,” “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” and “All Through The Night,” each reached the Top 5, making her the first female solo artist to do so with a debut album at the time.
After “The Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough,” the theme to the 1985 movie “The Goonies,” “When You Were Mine” slowed things down a bit for an achingly lovely take on the song originally written and released by Prince.
The set shifted after “I Drove All Night,” the 1989 single that reached No. 6 and was her last appearance in the Top 40, toward songs written after her conversation with Flanders inspired her to view her career as a series of creative chapters.
“She introduced me to this woman, Allee Willis,” Lauper said to scattered cheers from the audience. “Yeah, you know her she was great. She was a little bossy, but she was great.”
Willis, who died in 2019, encouraged her to write more about her own life, she said. “I didn’t have to do other people’s songs, I could write my story.”
The ballad “Who Let the Rain In,” which followed, was co-written by Lauper and Willis, and one of the first of her more purely personal songs.
After a Mardi Gras-inspired cover of the New Orleans classic “Iko Iko” and Wanda Jackson’s “Funnel of Love,” Lauper did her quick change on stage while thanking Mac and Siriano, both of whom won seasons of “Project Runway,” for their work on her clothes for the show.
“I was wanting rock,” she said of her consultation with Siriano. “He said, ‘Cyn, the gays want glamour.’”
The gays, straights and everyone on-hand cheered and laughed loudly for that.
“I ain’t gonna show you somethin’ you can’t unsee,” she continued as she unbuttoned and removed her jacket to reveal a black slip. “There’s always a slip.”
As a dramatic sculptured gown slipped over her and was buttoned, “I hope that’s enough glamour for ya,” she added.
The humor slipped into hard truths with “Sally’s Pigeons,” a song she wrote about a teenager in her neighborhood when Lauper was growing up who died after a back-alley abortion. Its message, delivered in stark white light on an otherwise dark stage, was accented by an “air fountain” created by artist Daniel Wurtzel in which a large white sheet of fabric swirled and danced at the center of the floor.
The final run of the show shifted back to bigger hits such as “Change of Heart” and “Time After Time,” the 1984 single that was her first of two No. 1 hits.
“Money Changes Everything,” a number originally recorded by the Brains, closed out the main set as a synth-rock bookend to “She Bop,” which built and built until Lauper ended up falling to her knees on the stage, and, still singing, eventually onto her back.
A three-song encore opened with “Shine,” for which Lauper walked out to the mid-floor stage where a rainbow-colored fabric banner danced above her in the air fountain. “True Colors,” her other No. 1 single, which in the years since its 1986 release became an anthem for the LGBTQ+ community, was greeted with cheers and singing from the crowd.
After Lauper paraphrased a quote from the visual artist Yayoi Kusama – “I convert the energy of life into dots of the universe. And that energy, along with love, flies into the sky” – she returned to the main stage where she and the band, now in white coats covered with Kusama-inspired red polka dots, sang “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” the song that launched Lauper’s career, and remains perhaps her most joyful celebration of life.
“I hope you feel happy,” she said at its close. “And hopeful. Because there’s always hope.”
Then, as red-and-white streamers shot over the audience: “See ya next chapter.”
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