Lana Del Ray Floats 2023 Lollapalooza to a Vivid, Cinematic Close During Hit-Packed Set: Six Best Moments

You knew Del Ray was going to make an entrance, and boy did she on Sunday night. Walking onto a stage flanked by lit-up two arches featuring sheer screens — behind which twisted two of the singer’s dancers — the California queen strolled out dressed in a white wedding gown. The skirt was short in front, but soon after opening song “A&W” faded away, her six-woman dance crew began to tug at the train and stretch it out for 20 feet behind Lana as they danced under it like kids playing beneath a parachute at recess. “Will you still love me when I’m no longer beautiful?,” Del Rey crooned as the adoring crowd assured her that she should worry about no such things.

As befits any Hollywood siren, Del Rey took a moment a few songs in to get a touch-up. Sitting in a chair near the side of the stage at a table with a burning candle, flowers and a mirror, she perched quietly as an assistant fixed her hair with half a dozen glittering butterfly clips while the instrumental intro to “Bartender” played behind her. During the song, the dancers spun and dipped while holding candelabras and red rhythmic gymnastic balls as Del Rey swooned about the “ladies of the canyon,” temporarily turning the massive stage into an intimate jazz lounge.

During a set that featured lots of intricate movements from Del Rey’s dancers, perhaps the most arresting moment came when a stagehand brought out a rug and laid it down so the singer and her crew could form into a kind of cuddle pile midstage. As “Pretty When You Cry” began, LDR laid on her back in the middle of the cuddle puddle, her dancers entwined with their bosses’ limbs, making shifting geometric shapes as they twisted and crawled around the languid singer. In the camera shot from above, the writhing, undulating mass looked like a scene from an Esther Williams aquamusical from the 1950s.

Adding to the pastoral vibe on a stage that also featured a giant tree strung with Christmas lights, during “Ride” two of Del Rey’s dancers climbed onto swings decked out with flower garlands. The women were pushed out over the lip of the stage, swaying back and forth during the swooning track from LDR’s 2012 Paradise EP. Near the end of the set, Del Rey would take her own turn on a swing as she sang the crowd favorite, “Video Games” while kicking her feet and smiling through her 2011 debut single.

A highlight of any LDR show is the bit where the singer makes her way into the crowd to get up-close-and-personal with her adoring fans. During “Ultraviolence,” Lana gingerly made her way down the steps, into the mud — in her black chunky-heeled shoes — and posed for a series of selfies with barely-able-to-maintain Lanatics. One had a pair of red heart-shaped Lolita glasses that she handed to to the “Every Man Gets His Wish” singer to model for a shot. Having just sung the lyrics about a cult leader, LDR looked every bit like a charismatic pop pied piper as she accepted bouquets of flowers, trinkets and took a series of selfies with visibly overcome fans. One even held up a sign that promised, “Lana it’s my birthday, if you sign me my mom will let me get a tattoo.”

If you start with a dramatic entrance, you better have an equally headline-worthy exit. Which, of course, LDR had. Her festival-closing set matched the glamour and classic L.A. style of her music — at one point her dancer’s moved around her holding those old foil reflectors people used to use to get tan — as Del Rey sang the the Norman F**king Rockwell track “Hope Is a Dangerous Thing for a Woman Like Me to Have – But I Have It” to end her show. In a bit of musical theater, Del Rey swooned toward one handsome man, before tearing herself away and then falling into the arms of another, who picked her up and swung her in circles. Then, two men pushed-and-pulled her, sandwiching the singer between them until she seemed exhausted by the exertion of it all and lay down on her aforementioned long wedding dress train and was dragged slowly off the stage as she softly sang, “Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have/ But I have it/ Yeah, I have it.”