SZA Wowed St. Louis With Stagecraft — and Her Charisma

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STEVE LEFTRIDGE

SZA's show at Enterprise Center was as much a theatrical production as a concert.

Hundreds of people at SZA’s sold-out Enterprise Center concert on Wednesday night were wearing Blues hockey jerseys. The SZA-uninitiated might assume that St. Louisans were flying the colors because it was the night before the Blues’ season opener. But no, silly. SZA is touring behind her smash 2022 album SOS, the cover of which depicts the St. Louis-born singer sitting on a diving board wearing a Blues jersey. If SZA fans didn’t show up in a jersey of their own, the line to purchase one at the merch stands was a mile long. 

Once inside, the dance party was in full swing well before SZA took the stage, with teens and twentysomethings gyrating ecstatically to Cardi and Megan bangers. Half of these fans, decked out in their most scantilicious evening wear, had helped themselves to other people’s seats, a source of considerable disarray early on. 

Surprisingly, SZA herself did not don a Blues jersey all night. Instead, she opened the show in a loose-fitting metallic-gray jacket and matching culottes, even though the show started (and ended) with SZA recreating the album cover, sitting on a diving board high above the stage, establishing the evening’s unifying motif of water, nautical and seafaring imagery. At the end of the first song, the SOS teaser track “PSA,” a screen lowered in front of SZA as her silhouette appeared to plunge from the diving board into the water below. 

From there, the show was an extravagant theatrical production of elaborate set pieces, soaring songs and a young crowd going bonkers for the duration. SZA was in superior voice throughout, although the intensity of the audience’s scream-along passion at times threatened to drown her out well before the digital ocean did. On her recordings, SZA often sings in cursive — employing whispery, dipthongy or vocal fry tools — but she pushed her larynx hard into powerful tonality all night, necessary to overcome 20,000 other voices singing with her and the bottom-heavy brawl of her four-piece band. 

A keyboardist and guitarist flanked stage right; a drummer (with a massive kit) and bassist were tucked away at stage left, clearing the stage for the immense set designs, the kind that have made 2023 a landmark for concert productions. If Taylor Swift and Beyonce established a history-of-live-music-altering arms race for concert tech this year, SZA is right there with them on her first-ever arena tour, spending a fortune to create an epic maritime journey to the bottom of the sea and back. The accompanying allegorical dives into SZA’s psychology is part of the fun. After all, a huge chunk of SZA’s songs are about breakups — hurting from the loss of an ex, missing an ex, trying to get back to an ex, despising an ex, thinking about killing an ex, etc., and the crowd was ready to go into the deep with her. 

A movie screen displaying the title “The S.O.S. Tour starring SZA” set the night’s intention of telling us a story, one that began, after the diving board illusion, with SZA and her four dancers (three gals, one dude) performing on a pier in front of a docked fishing boat. With water swirling and twinkling around their feet and mists descending among the mountains behind them, a gorgeous CGI backdrop that kept changing the time of day, SZA and crew split time between tracks from SOS (“Seek & Destroy,” “Notice Me”) and 2018’s CTRL (“Love Galore,” “Broken Clocks”).

The set then transformed into dilapidated shipyard catacombs, at one point intermixed with video of Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s verse on “Forgiveness,” before SZA reemerged incongruously wearing sparkly undies — a cropped white tank and matching thong — for sultry versions of “Used” and “Ghost in the Machine.” On “Blind,” SZA stood at a mic stand for the first time during the show, allowing for some of her best singing, executing acrobatic runs as water filled the hold behind her. 

Next was black-and-white backstage video footage of SZA rapping to “Smoking on My Ex Pack” while attendants helped her change costumes and touched up her makeup, which, given SZA’s cosmetics proclivities, appears to be a full-time job. The new wardrobe saw SZA dressed in tattered-rag motley — like SZA and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamdress — as she and her dancers appeared on the giant fishing trawler floating in a shimmering sea in front of rain-slicked cliffs, a stunning visual of aquatic dystopia. 

Despite the foreboding scenery, it still felt like party time as the band broke into “Prom” packed with ‘80s dance throb, “Normal Girl” as a gargantuan moon descended behind the mountains, and “Garden (Say It Like Dat)” as the guitarist climbed aboard the boat, the backdrop moved, the boat set sail and the morning sky turned the water pink. SZA had to hang on to the railing while busting out the big notes during the song’s hair-whipping finale. 

“F2F” was the night’s big rocker, featuring an actual guitar solo and the bassist headbanging hard atop the boat’s elevator-equipped control room. SZA performed “Drew Barrymore” sitting on the water-sloshed stage floor a few feet from the front rows of the audience, a moment of intimacy in a show that captured a full range of emotion, from the peaceful waters of SZA’s soul to the squalling tempest of her heart. 

That storm was next. After striking a spread-armed Titanic pose with her dancer on the boat’s prow, the storm hit, with lightning streaks, roiling seas, expressionistic dancing and SZA throwing herself to the ship’s deck. SOS! Thankfully, an orange lifeboat was lowered, and SZA, in a billowing red dress, sat and sang for a ride across the arena high above the crowd, floating on waves of blue light, bound for a lighthouse across the floor. From the lifeboat, she sang some of her best ballads, including “Special,” “Nobody Gets Me” and “Gone Girl,” and had the closest access to fans across the building who filmed her with one hand and professed their love for her with the other. 

Lifeboat be damned, SZA was swallowed by the deep, as she was next seen submerged to the ocean floor next to the boat — now moss-covered — and later an enormous anchor. From the abyss, she performed “Love Language” at the mic stand as a giant shark buzzed her band and led the crowd on “Snooze” surrounded by majestic jellyfish. 

SZA gave scant acknowledgement of St. Louis being a hometown show for her — she was born here but raised in New Jersey — although she shouted out her brother in the building and at one point ordered security not to clear a fan out of an aisle on the floor: “That’s my cousin. Do not move her.” Later, in a friendlier spirit, she told St. Louis, “This means more to me than Madison Square Garden. It means more to me than Barclay’s. It means more to me than any other city.”

However, the hometown perk of the night was the surprise appearance of local girl and breakout star Sexxy Red, who took the stage, danced around to her hits (“Pound Town,” “SkeeYee”) while barely bothering to vocalize into the mic she was holding, removed her heels and exhibited advanced fundament palpitations. SZA declared her approval. “I love everything about you!” she told her. 

SZA seemed to still be gaining momentum and performance confidence even this late in the show, changing into a blue Tron-meets-American Gladiator shorts outfit complete with football shoulder pads for “I Hate U” and “Kill Bill,” a huge crowd favorite.

It’s unclear how the Tarantino-inspired palm trees and fighting terpsichore fit the watery-grave segment, but who’s to question what swims around in the complex deep seas of SZA’s neptunian psyche. In any case, by the time we got to “Good Days,” she was back up on the diving board, dressed this time like a cloud. 

Finally, an old-Hollywood font on the screen announced “The End.” So what happened? Was she dead the whole time? Unlikely. If SZA guaranteed anything during her concert, it was two hours of scintillating life.

Or perhaps the whole adventure was a flight of imagination. After all, with such breathtaking visuals and powerhouse performances, a two-hour cruise on SZA's boat is enough to make fans feel like life is but a dream.