To paraphrase Cyndi Lauper and Paul Simon: She’s nonetheless so uncommon in any case these years. Lauper, at 71, is nearing the top of the U.S. leg of what’s being billed as a farewell tour. And as a lot as she stays one thing of a unicorn now, it’s an opportunity to pressure ourselves to recall how actually singular she was when she got here on the scene 4 many years in the past — a time once we usually thought ladies in music could possibly be kooky and flamboyant, or that they could possibly be delicate and clever, however the concept that they could possibly be all of these items directly nonetheless appeared just a little bit out of our grasp. Now that’s not fairly such a H-O-T-T-O-G-O take, because it was then: Lauper fairly properly established forever that women simply need to be multi-faceted.

The setlist for the “Ladies Simply Wanna Have Enjoyable Farewell Tour” runs to 16 songs, which is kind of a couple of greater than the 11 she was doing on common when she final did an enviornment tour, again in 2014. However the variety of songs performed isn’t actually an indicator of how lengthy a Lauper set will final, anyway, because the performances are peppered with monologues during which Lauper goes into “VH1 Storytellers” mode (or possibly it’s extra like “capturing the shit in Queens” mode) for so long as seven or eight minutes at a time. This method tends to be extra the province of intimate theater reveals than enviornment blowouts, just like the one she did this previous week at L.A.’s Intuit Dome. However to her credit score, she bends the viewers to her tempo… even when it requires lastly telling all of the howlers within the crowd to STFU as a result of she will’t hear their shouts previous her in-ears. Lauper really did get them to pipe down for her tales of rising up in an all-female family, or references to document execs who didn’t get her ambition, or warnings about how issues could also be going backward for girls in society usually.

It was nearly form of like attending a type of quintessentially free, late-night, golden-age Vegas reveals during which the veteran performer in residency would get chatty and informal with the viewers… besides with much more feminism. Rather a lot, lot extra.

Lauper’s overt ideas about ladies nonetheless preventing for his or her autonomy have been appreciated, however she might by no means have stated it higher all evening than she did with one quick apart within the opening quantity. The farewell tour begins every evening, as most of her reveals over time have, with a bop — “She Bop,” that’s, her basic ode to feminine self-pleasuring (and a track that dismissed the necessity for a “lion’s roar” 40 years earlier than Chappell Roan discovered the lions missing in “Femininomenon”). Following the lyric “Ain’t no legislation towards it but…,” Lauper threw in: “However give it time.”

None of that is to say that anybody would mistake Lauper’s feel-good tour for a night of agitprop. Not when, for the second variety of the evening, she follows “She Bop” with as explicitly unserious a crowd-pleaser as “The Goonies ‘R’ Good Sufficient,” a soundtrack relic that got here full with rapid-fire movie clips from the Spielberg-produced 1985 child flick. This would possibly’ve appeared like an outlier track within the set, however in Lauper’s thoughts, possibly there’s one thing concerning the “Goonies” ethos that matches in along with her lifelong aesthetic — the one which made it really feel like being a child on the margins was the one enjoyable place to be. Or, simply as seemingly, it counts as pure fan service. Both means…

Her cowl of Prince’s cheekily rueful “When You Had been Mine” supplied the primary actual likelihood to point out that her pipes have been in good, working order. Lauper’s capability to deliver balladic chops to a track with some tempo got here much more to the fore in “I Drove All Night time.” Most likely not many individuals have been pondering of that lusty-sounding late-’80s hit as a Assertion Music. However Lauper set the document straight on that, following her efficiency with some discuss recording it as a result of she “felt that there weren’t any songs about ladies driving,” and having grown up beneath a era of ladies that needed to ask males to take them locations, “to me it was a track of empowerment, and a track that really meant one thing.” After which she adopted that with an admission that she nonetheless can’t parallel-park. Slightly bit Gloria Steinem, just a little bit Gracie Allen.

The visible design of “I Drove All Night time” was an early tip-off within the set to the concept that Lauper can be attempting to introduce a couple of parts that have been, properly, uncommon into the costuming and manufacturing. For that quantity, she held up a part of her roomy white costume as a display, for projections of driving scenes. All through the evening, thereafter, she made it some extent to discuss with and credit score “collaborators” answerable for both her ever-changing wardrobe or her manufacturing setpieces.

Essentially the most clearly spectacular staging occurred throughout “Sally’s Pigeons,” a young quantity Lauper wrote pondering again on a childhood acquaintance who died from the results of a so-called back-alley abortion. It was the one track of the evening Lauper sang and not using a wig, and even the sight of her pure hair, as an alternative simply being seen in her black wig cap, as if to forego even the suggestion of artifice, and likewise prepare consideration as an alternative on what was taking place with out her down on the B-stage in the midst of the world ground. There, what regarded like a pair of tied-together white sheets have been made by unseen winds to bounce above the gang in a type of free-form solo ballet, created by the artist Daniel Wurtzel. On the most simple degree, this was only a good magic act, however it additionally had actual visible poetry to it — a pleasant trick in case you can pull it off.

For a lot of the evening, it appeared as if that B-stage might need simply been created for these dancing sheets, not the singer herself. However she did enterprise out to it in the course of the encore phase, once more making use of no matter very directed wind expertise was at play, holding on to the underside fringe of a large rainbow ribbon that swayed aloft throughout her studying of what has turn into a homosexual anthem, “True Colours.” The present was in any other case mild on — actually absent of — gimmickry, so these excursions into air-driven stagecraft felt good, in an evening when Lauper’s wigs have been the one different particular results.

Lauper had some enjoyable along with her costume and hair adjustments, one among which came about on stage. A black robe on a model rose from a lure door, as Lauper mentioned how the designer Siriano (of “Mission Runway” fame) informed her, “Cyn, the gays need glamour.” She took off her present stage outfit, whereas assuring the gang “I ain’t gonna present you one thing you may’t unsee,” revealing a fundamental black slip earlier than an assistant helped her into the robe. She additionally referenced her ever-changing hair, taking part in up the irony: “I’ve received coloured wigs however my hair is inexperienced.” At one costume-change level, cameras caught her backstage for a number of minutes as a group redid her make-up, modified her outfit and teased out that inexperienced hair. It was exhausting to know whether or not this was a pre-taped phase or was really being broadcast from her dressing room, and if it was the latter, kudos throughout — this little video discursion was an odd spotlight.

You’ve received to present Lauper credit score, additionally, for not going with the obvious setlist. “All By means of the Night time” was the one actual hit that didn’t make it onto this tour, and it’s missed by some, however among the surprising covers that pop up mid-show are way more memorable than a pure recitation of her higher discography, which there’s sufficient of anyway. A rendition of Wanda Jackson’s “Funnel of Love” (from her quasi-roots album of some years again) allowed Lauper an opportunity to placed on a crimson costume, in honor of the rockabilly pioneer’s “satan girl” persona, in addition to to rock out otherwise. Her interpretation of Gene Pitney’s “I’m Gonna Be Sturdy” fell in additional along with her basic balladry.

Most uncommon of all was a fleeing journey to New Orleans with “Iko Iko,” with Lauper adorned in a particularly colourful Mardi Gras outfit that included a washboard vest (one among two devices she performed in the course of the present, the opposite being the recorder). “Iko Iko” wouldn’t have essentially felt like it will be a immediate for one of many night’s feminist asides, however Lauper couldn’t assist declaring that the massive cajón was being performed by band member Mona Tavakoli, whereas in a distant period, it wouldn’t have been thought-about correct for a girl to straddle this explicit piece of percussion.

Naturally, the present ends with “Ladies Simply Wish to Have Enjoyable,” and for all of the talking that Lauper did throughout the remainder of the evening, it will have been enjoyable — or enlightening? — to listen to what she thinks about nonetheless performing a track that’s partly about breaking out a daddy’s sway now that she is in her 70s. Whether or not having such an implicitly youthful signature track is an albatross or a supply of ongoing pleasure, she didn’t say. If I needed to guess, I’d assume she certainly uninterested in the tune many years in the past… however we haven’t, and a very good portion of the gang would moderately riot with out it. After all, it is an empowering message, sung at any age, and Lauper has discovered methods to make it fascinating for herself over time, together with, for the time being, a collaboration with the 95-year-old Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama on the visible backdrops and red-polka-dots-on-white stage outfits for the finale. If Kusama could be seen on the massive screens, unsmiling however approving of those shenanigans, as she nears the century mark, then the clear inference is: Who’s Lauper to balk at re-celebrating her “lady”-hood, at this comparatively tender age?

However the different factor that this signature quantity permits Lauper is a significant pun. She makes use of the massive screens at her reveals to trumpet her Ladies Simply Wish to Have Elementary Rights Fund, which exists by the Tides Basis to assist ladies’s rights and well being initiatives. “I by no means thought in my life that I must struggle once more for autonomy. Proper?” she stated, referencing present occasions and electoral implications with out getting too specific about invoking enemies of these items. “I believe that the struggle goes on.”

As for a way she’ll go on, Lauper stated that she wished to get this tour in earlier than she might — miming pushing a walker throughout the stage — and within the lull earlier than her newest musical-theater piece, an adaptation of “Working Woman,” opens in La Jolla subsequent fall and (with luck) goes to Broadway the next yr. However her farewell to the gang was extra open-ended than that. “See ya subsequent chapter,” she stated. Strolling within the solar, presumably, as at all times.

Cyndi Lauper setlist, Intuit Dome, Inglewood, Calif.:

• “She Bop”
• “The Goonies ‘R’ Good Sufficient”
• “When You Had been Mine”
• “I Drove All Night time”
• “Who Let within the Rain”
• “Iko Iko”
• “Funnel of Love”
• “Sally’s Pigeons”
• “I’m Gonna Be Sturdy”
• “Sisters of Avalon”
• “Change of Coronary heart”
• “Time After Time”
• “Cash Modifications Every little thing”
• “Shine”
• “True Colours”
• “Ladies Simply Wish to Have Enjoyable”