Madonna has been scoring significant critical acclaim and fan adoration for the shows on her career-spanning “Celebration” tour, but just because the tour is gradually making its way toward a conclusion doesn’t mean that she’s done making headlines with it.
To commemorate the conclusion of the tour, Madonna has announced that she’ll be doing a free concert on Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana Beach. The show will take place on May 4, and the attendance is anticipated to be around two million.
Madonna opens her "Celebration" tour in London on October 14, 2023 in London .
Yes, you read that figure that correctly: two million fans are anticipated to be in attendance. And if that comes to pass, it wouldn’t even be the first time that someone drew that large a crowd on Copacabana Beach, although – wouldn’t you know it? – the last person to do so was the Pope.
The concert was initially announced in a story in O Globo. “Yes, it’s true: Madonna is coming to Brazil for a mega show on May 4, which can potentially become the largest show of the Queen of Pop’s four-decade career.”
In short order, Rio de Janeiro’s official tourism office, Visit Rio, took to social media to confirm the news, telling fans to “get ready” for “a free and historic” concert, one which will be paid for by the Brazilian bank Itaú, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary.
The last time Madonna played in Brazil was in 2012, when she performed in three different cities. As it stands, this show in Rio de Janeiro is the only date scheduled for the country this time around.
All things considered, the announcement of a potentially record-breaking concert is a decidedly better reason for Madonna to make the news than the way she popped up this weekend, when she made the mistake of demanding for a fan to stand up and dance, not initially realizing that the fan in question was actually in a wheelchair.
“What are you doing sitting down over there?” Madonna asked the fan from the stage. “What are you doing sitting down?”
Upon venturing closer to the edge of the stage and getting a better vantage point, however, she realized her error. “Oh, OK," she said. "Politically incorrect, sorry about that. I’m glad you’re here.”
The "Celebration" tour was initially announced on January 17, 2023 as a "35-city global tour [which] will kick off in North America on Saturday, July 15th at Rogers Arena in Vancouver, BC with stops in Detroit, Chicago, New York, Miami, Los Angeles, and more before making its way to Europe where she will hit 11 cities throughout the fall, including London, Barcelona, Paris, and Stockholm, among others." Things shifted, however, as a result of Madonna's health woes, which led to the tour actually beginning in London on October 14, where she delivered a two-hour set of hits to a crowd of 20,000 fans.
"I didn't think I was gonna make it," Madonna said during that show. "Neither did my doctors. That's why I woke up with all of my children sitting around me. I forgot five years of my life, or my death, I don't really know where I was. But the angels were protecting me, and my children were there. And my children always save me every time. If you want to know my secret and you want to know how I pulled through and survived, I thought, I have to be there for my children. I have to survive for them."
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