Stream It Or Skip It? 

Campy, close-knit, and currently rocking over a million views on her YouTube channel, Lady Gaga in Harlequin Live: One Night Only features the singer, songwriter, and actress in a tiny 2024 set at the Belasco Theater in Los Angeles, informed by the jazz standards and brokedown aesthetic of Harlequin, the album paired with her star turn in Joker 2: Folie a Deux. Harlequin, like the more traditionally Gaga-coded Mayhem, is a 2026 Grammy nominee. And while she’s singing classics by Burt Bacharach and Harold Arlen, accompanied by a little jazzy combo, Harlequin Live: One Night Only still captures the intent and grandeur baked into any Lady Gaga performance. “Hey! Look where I am,” she sings in the showtune “If My Friends Could See Me Now.” “I’ve landed, POW, right in a pot of jam!”

The Gist: In Harlequin Live, when the first thing you see is a barbershop quartet done up in traditional boater hats and stripey Music Man getups, you already know this won’t be a typical Lady Gaga performance. But wait, isn’t to not be typical itself one of her most Gaga traits? This is a musician who a decade ago disrupted her thriving career as a pop star to perform the American Songbook with Tony Bennett. As her bob-hairstyled head pokes out from behind the curtain, and she accesses her jazz-hands-and-dances bag of tricks for the Singin’ in the Rain nugget “Good Morning,” it’s evident Gaga is getting all the way into what the Harlequin stuff represents for her.   

But hey, she’s happy if you’re along for the ride. “Thanks for all the ways that you always come with me,” she tells the adoring crowd of 1500 or so fans. “No matter what road it always takes me on.” As the curtain pull reveals a narrow stage modeled on the decrepit Harlequin cover art, and a group that includes trumpet, trombone, sax, acoustic piano, standup bass, and electric guitar, Gaga continues the record’s track listing. “World on a String.” “That’s Entertainment.” And “The Joker,” which arrives complete with Gaga herself playing a Fender Strat dipped in the color of Jack Nicholson’s face.

As the set continues, broken into concise two and three-song acts, Gaga and her band incorporate vocal scatting, peppy jazz arrangements that become hybrids of rock and funk on the back of a thin dime, and generally establish a woozy, drunken cabaret quality that also subtly incorporates Mayhem’s gothic imagery. The camera frames the singer against the stage lights – she is the entertainer, the clown, a vessel for the crowd. And there’s a rawness here, too, like tears as they run through pancake makeup, a quality accentuated by the camera crews visible as they grab onstage close-ups. For Harlequin, Lady Gaga wanted to reinvent jazz standards. For Harlequin Live: One Night Only, Lady Gaga pulls the material closer to her, even as she belts it out. “I thought a lot about when you’re a kid, singing for the first time,” she tells the crowd from atop the piano. “When you look at the world and it makes you go” [does a little contented hum]. She loves that, “because it makes you feel pure joy.”

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Joker 2: Folie a Deux was even more polarizing than the first Joker film, but with her performance as Lee Quinzel/Harley Quinn, you could actually feel Lady Gaga trying to make it hungrier and weirder. That energy is infused into Harlequin Live. And for another sense of what she’s aiming for with the set and stage setup, consider Personality Crisis: One Night Only, co-directed by Martin Scorsese, where the late David Johansen transformed a New York City club performance into the story of his showman’s life.

Performance Worth Watching: Director of photography Marcell Rév is really on some shit here. An Emmy winner for his work on Euphoria, Rév’s look for Harlequin Live works converts the spatial limitations of the stage into an asset, combines the scattered urban decay of the Joker films with Lady Gaga’s outsized theatrics, and amplifies every dark corner left visible in the production. It makes the whole thing feel that much more intimate.  

Memorable Dialogue: “You know that feeling when you’re a kid, like ‘Please, I want to be a star?’ That’s a lot of what inspired me with the singing on this record.” Can you think of another professional musician, who is basically a global institution, pointing out how her performance sounds like a nine-year-old singing at a recital? On purpose? Integrity: that’s the Lady Gaga Promise™.

Sex and Skin: Four acts, four costume changes – a white lace blouse, a simple shift dress, a broken ballerina party dress, and a Renaissance-inspired harlequin neck ruffle – and even more ways for Gaga to subvert our expectations for pop star fits and aesthetics. 

Our Take: Whenever we see a huge show by a huge star, we always think, wouldn’t it be cool if it was a really small show by the same huge star? Like between the walls of a club, where the close environs could both accentuate and refuse to contain the performance? This film captures such a show by Lady Gaga. And the assertion stands, no matter what you might think of Joker 2 or Harlequin, its companion album. While she does the entire record in order, and her set is steeped in the look and feel of the film, it’s also a freestanding Gaga concert, in a little room, on-brand and powered by her primeval instinct for performance.

Gaga snatches up a kinda creepy baby doll prop for “Oh, When the Saints.” It works! Gaga dances Vaudeville, either nearby or totally on top of a piano. Watch her go! Gaga lustily sing-shouts “The staaaaaage is a world of entertaaaaaaaainment!” with the hand jive to match, and now you’re thinking: what if she had just played Arthur Fleck/The Joker herself? For Harlequin Live, the Belasco’s stage is Gaga’s engrossing live show playground, and that’s before she sings the entirety of “Smile” while laying in bed under the covers.

Maybe jazz standards and showtunes aren’t your thing. Maybe the antagonizing Joker movies left a bad taste in your mouth. But in Harlequin Live, for one night only, Lady Gaga gives you an alternate window into the great, continuing depths of her inspiration. And she sells it.

Our Call: STREAM IT! Lady Gaga has called Harlequin Live: One Night Only a gift for the fans, and we think that’s right – the film renews her belief in the jazz standards-inspired Harlequin material, and delivers on the commitment of her full-scale concert tours by channeling that intensity into a small venue space. 

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.