The Weeknd Brings Out Anitta and Playboi Carti, Premieres Several New Songs at Massive Concert in Brazil
variety.comJem Aswad Executive Editor, Music The Weeknd doesn’t do anything by half, and for his “One Night Only” concert Saturday night at MorumBIS Stadium in Sao Paulo, Brazil, he rose to the moment with cameos from Anitta and Playboi Carti, a giant stage backlit with an enormous video screen that must have been 100 feet tall, dozens of (of course) blinding lights, a YouTube global livestream of the show, and the premieres of several new songs that are presumably from his forthcoming album, “Hurry Up Tomorrow.” The evening’s show was basically an evolution of the “After Hours Til Dawn” concert he brought to North America in 2022 and, in an updated form, to Europe last year: a huge, almost airport runway-like illuminated walkway extending from one end of the stadium floor to another, but with a a giant, temple-like two-story building in the middle, and an illuminated, cross-shaped stage at the opposite end of the walkway from the video screen.
The battery of shrouded female dancers remained from the earlier phases of the tour, as did the stadium-filling light show and its state of the art lightshow, which flashed projected mostly white and red lights from multiple elevated areas of the stadium as well as the stage and runway.
He made full use of the towering video screen, filling it with everything from clouds to a cityscape, waterfalls to explosions, giant cathedral-like windows and even a freakishly huge closeup of his own eye.
As dazzling and crowd-pleasing as the staging and effects were, the setlist was another matter: This was no hits extravaganza, but rather a kind of remix-style set focusing almost entirely on material from the “After Hours” trilogy, with a large number of songs from the 2023 album “Dawn.FM” and eight or.
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