More than any pop star before or since, Madonna takes evident delight in curating a Broadway-calibur spectacle. (I'm not sure what Broadway would make of a woman who steps out of a disco ball in jodhpur boots and a riding crop, harnesses a man with a bit in his mouth and rides him like a pony, but here's evidence that lots of well-meaning people will pay big money to see it.) Her performances assault you with imagery, often oblique -- her opening equestrian-themed set, which featured a filmed erotic confrontation between singer and beast to compliment her dancers' onstage horseplay, may or may not have resonated more if you knew she'd broken eight bones in a riding accident last year. Other themes -- pairs of men who attempt to hold hands but never quite succeed; a woman in a dark hooded tunic thrashing about in a steel cage, as if Anakin Skywalker had been interned at Abu Ghraib -- were easier to discern. The music, drawn largely from Confessions, harked backwards; but the lady makes a point of staying up with what's trendy in modern movement technique. During "Jump," her dancers navigated an elaborate set of monkey bars in an exhibition of parkour-style urban-assault gymnastics; and, despite the star’s falling out with her old friend David LaChappelle over a video treatment, many of her show's routines gestured towards krumping, the hyper-aggressive street-dance phenomenon captured in LaChappelle's documentary Rize.

The money shot on this tour comes when Madonna appears on a mirror-tiled cross, outfitted with a microphone and hand rails as neat as shower fixtures, to sing "Live To Tell," which has become her all-purpose social-justice anthem. Calculated to draw headlines for opening night, it's already an anticlimax. Come down, Madonna!, you want to shout, Come down off your cross! And then she does, for the last verse at least, while videos of suffering African children and fireclouds run behind her, culminating in an on-screen shout-out to the Clinton Foundation's web site. Madonna sometimes seems to make the least sense when she's trying the hardest to communicate a big idea. But she also has an intuitive, effortless sensuality that resonates between the big production numbers. The images I'll take with me from last night are two brief moments of abandon and timeless cool: during "Forbidden Love," she's shaking her hips and raising her outstretched arms to the rafters, a small gesture that is as subtle as the song's trickling keyborad lick but hits you harder than the pulsing, volcanic sub-bass. And in "Sorry," a frothy club anthem that got the loudest response all night, she bounded across the stage with a posse of girl dancers and then threw herself into a posture of exquisite repose, whipped back into a corner, arm slung over a railing, crouched in a Brando-ish slouch.

In the past Madonna has let her imagination and her production juggernaut overwhelm her performance; on this tour, she's singing more and singing better than she has in years. Speaking as someone who's always wondered what would've happened if Madonna had stayed in crappy punk bands and never graduated to pop (go Google her original demo for "Burning Up"), I always cheer when she picks up a guitar. For what the set list distributed to the press listed as the "Never Mind the Bollocks section," she came out armed with a Les Paul, raked a swell of feedback, and turned "I Love NY" upside down by setting it to the chords from the Stooges' "I Wanna Be Your Dog," then followed up by setting "Ray of Light" to the ascending lick of the Cure's "Boys Don't Cry." Rock and roll is her least convincing pose, but she's getting better, ringing long sustaining chords and shaking them into feedback. Let's see your mom do that.