Who will win album of the year? Will Beyoncé or Adele make history? How music’s biggest night pans out is anyone’s guess. But one thing is certain: The 59th Grammy Awards are live now.
James Corden is the host and Beyoncé, Adele, Katy Perry, Metallica, John Legend, Alicia Keys, Keith Urban, the Weeknd, Daft Punk and Bruno Mars are among the artists set to hit the stage.
Beyoncé’s nine-minute performance at Sunday’s 2017 Grammy Awards was among the most ambitious and logistically complex live segment the Grammys, or any other awards show, has attempted.
The expansive medley of “Love Drought” and “Sandcastles” employed two-dozen dancers, a live band offstage and thousands of flowers spread across the full breadth of the Staples Center stage. It also incorporated the interplay of Beyoncé in the flesh with film footage of her pregnant form projected onto a scrim during the number.
The latter element took a good chunk of the 90-minute rehearsal time she was allotted Thursday. She appeared on the first of four days of sessions fine-tuning nearly two dozen live performances for this year’s edition of the CBS telecast.
“Can we bring the image down? It needs to look like her feet are really on the ground,” a disembodied voice boomed over the house public address system as crew members attempted to sync up images on the scrim with the live Beyoncé stand-in on the stage behind it. The goal: To have them appear one and the same for millions of TV viewers.
Minutes rolled by, then more minutes, as nothing appeared to happen.
“What are we waiting on guys?” The voice asked again.
After preliminary run-throughs for the two-dozen dancers to find and hit their marks, Beyoncé joined in, outfitted in a glittering gold chain-mail dress draping her protruding belly (she’s having twins), a thick band of gold rings around her neck and a sunburst-like headdress.
On the first stab with the star on board, she experienced difficulty navigating through a bank of flowers around a chair she was to sit on during the “Sandcastles” second half of the sequence. The chair was quickly turned 180 degrees so she could take her position without first walking around it.
After a third time out, everything appeared to function as planned, at just a few minutes after rehearsals were scheduled to conclude at 9:30 p.m.
But the power of Beyoncé is not to be underestimated.
“Can we do it one more time, please?” she asked, and without a moment’s pause, the answer boomed out: “Of course. Everyone take your places.”
"Thank you," she replied. "I really appreciate it."
Again singing the sequence that first calls a lover out for his lies, and then tells him “I know I promised that I couldn’t stay/But every promise don’t work out that way,” she added a coda with an even more hopeful message, voiced as flower petals floated down from above: “If we’ re going to heal, let it be glorious.”
The stage manager's voice, however, had the last word: "OK everybody. That's a wrap. Strike the set."
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