Feb. 5 (UPI) — Mother Monster brought the house down during halftime of Super Bowl 51 — but first, she jumped off the top of it.
Despite anticipation of surprise guests and political statements, Lady Gaga largely stayed away from both during the halftime show at Super Bowl 51 in Houston’s NRG Stadium as she sang live, danced hard and leaped on and off various parts of a multi-level stage during an energetic performance of a medley of her biggest hits.
As she sat down at a piano to play “Million Reasons” halfway through the performance, Gaga checked on the crowd and viewers: “America, world, how you doing tonight? We’re here to make you feel good tonight,” she said. While everybody else was waiting for politics, Gaga’s mission statement for the night was closer to the words “feel good.”
Legendary crooner and Gaga collaborator Tony Bennett introduced her via a short video, but was home sending tweets of support before and after the halftime show. Long-shot rumors that Beyonce would show up proved to be untrue, but Gaga managed to do fine without any help with the heavy lifting.
Gaga started the highly anticipated Super Bowl performance on the roof of NRG Stadium, singing parts of “God Bless America” and “This Land is Your Land” as hundreds of drones formed an LED American flag behind her. The 300 drones were provided by Intel’s Shooting Star drone system, which allows the foot-long-square aircraft to move together while displaying more than four billion color combinations.
Hopping from towers to stages to star-shaped stages with towers, Gaga ran through all of her most well-known hits including “Telephone,” “Bad Romance,” “Poker Face” and “Paparazzi.”
Where the early hype on Gaga’s performance was for a big political statement, she said she would keep to her well-known passion for acceptance and equality, opting for Woody Guthrie‘s “This Land is Your Land,” a protest song, and her own “Born This Way” being as close as she got to any kind of politics.
At the end of the performance, Gaga dropped the microphone, jumped off the stage and was gone — almost as quickly as she’d appeared. It’s hard to think she didn’t make the world feel good for a few minutes.
