Show is LIVE now.

It's crazy, but it took me 28 years to finally get around to watching Madonna Live: The Virgin Tour. Sheesh. Look, back in the day I wasn't a fan of hers. Sure, there were a couple of songs that I liked, but you would never seen me buying an album of hers and epecially wouldn't be seen at a Madonna concert. So, how was this? Surprisingly good for what it is. By that I mean in the way the video was put together. It does come off like one like extended music video and this is expected since this was an officially released show by Warner Brothers back in the day.

As for the show itself, music-wise, the band reminded me of watching those cheesy bands that played at Disneyland over in Tomorrowland. The band was good, but you're not gonna seek out who they are. Did they their jobs and did it well. As for Madonna, she has made her name on stage production value. A true production if you will. This one by comparison is pretty lightweight. It's two male backup dancers. That's it. Also, her dancing back then wasn't impressive at all. Kind of the new kid on the block and clearly didn't get to crazy with any kind of choreography at all. As a matter of fact, she basically stuck to 2-3 different moves for the entire show. Repetitive. But her sexuality definitely comes on like gangbusters. I actually enjoyed the songs. It was a good show.

I'm gonna try and see if I can watch every one of her world tours, in order as they happened, year to year. That is if people have them uploaded to YouTube. Otherwise this pet project may collapse faster than a house of cards.

Now THIS is the show that I was expecting to see. Forget everything you've seen in her first two tours (Virgin and Girl). Madonna went balls out in putting together a total package. Unfortunately, it comes at the expense of the band. On the Virgin Tour, the band was front and center on stage. On the Who's That Girl Tour, the band was pushed back and to the side. But on The Blond Ambition Tour, the band is shoved all the way to the side to the point where you don't even know or see them. This was of course done to accommodate the stage show that is full of dance numbers, role playing bits and music video reenactments, including some stuff from her movie Dick Tracy. The show itself was broken up into themes and sections. Overall, I really did like the show experience.

And another thing that I found cool was that the concert film was as it was shot. I don't think there were all that many cuts or edits. What you see on screen is how it played lived. Lots of crowd participation. They even kept the extended 'silent' encores intact. Normally a video editor will go in and cut out all the dead air when a band is back stage doing whatever they are doing. Usually this can be 5-10 minutes long. An edited version would have the performer leave the stage and then it would appear that they came back within 30 seconds to open the encore. But in Ambition, it runs around 7 minutes or so before Madonna comes back. I like it like this, because you get to feel the anticipation of the buildup, just as the fans in attendance are feeling. They even kept the firework show at the very end intact, which ran about 5 minutes long. All in all, a great show. Hey, at least the band finally got some "face" time during the encore.