The devil, the Statue of Liberty, a glamorous cowgirl, a construction worker, Joan of Arc: These are the dominant archetypes of the costume-clad at Forest Hills Stadium, all here for night two of Chappell Roan’s four-night run. Walking through the venue, I spot not one but two guys dressed as Lady Liberty whose bodies are entirely painted an ashy shade of green; when I compliment one, he says it hardly took any time at all—“only about an hour and a half”—to cover every visible inch of his skin in green paint. The sartorial standard to which Chappell Roan fans hold themselves is high: Glance around the crowd and you’ll see a sea of sequins, perfectly placed wigs, faces beat for the gods, and enough pink cowboy hats to stock every Spirit Halloween in a mid-size city for several years.
The dates at Forest Hills comprise Chappell Roan’s first real New York shows since her star-making set at Governor’s Ball in June of last year. She’s spent most of this summer playing European festivals and before that, has only played a select few U.S. dates—the Grammys, Elton John’s Oscars party, Saturday Night Live—since closing out the relentless tour behind her debut album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. Alongside the New York dates, this run of “pop-up shows,” dubbed “Visions of Damsels and Other Dangerous Things,” includes two nights in Kansas City and two in Los Angeles. The shows are, through one lens, a victory lap after a couple of years of outrageous success: main-stage festival appearances, sold-out tours, chart hits. (When she came to Brooklyn just after the release of her album, for example, she played Brooklyn Steel—a venue seven times smaller than Forest Hills.) But they’re also something of a measured re-entry, after having had to drop out of a festival last fall for mental health reasons and contending with the intense pressures of sudden fame.
Entering a Chappell Roan show means being immediately swept up in a crowd that feels very campy, very queer, very femme: gaggles of teen girls in coordinated outfits posing for group selfies; parents and children in matching Chappell drag; couples holding hands in trans rights t-shirts. Even if some elements radiated brand-activation energy—take your picture with the apple from which Roan emerged at Governor’s Ball! Pose in a set-and-repeat with the giant wig from her “The Subway” video!—there was a purposefulness threaded throughout: You couldn’t wait in the seemingly endless merch line without a chipper volunteer from Headcount approaching to ask if you’re registered to vote, and representatives from the Ali Forney Center for queer youth and New York’s LGBT Center hung around nearby. (After all that, if you wanted your new t-shirt cropped, stamped, and bejeweled, another booth with a shorter line promised “merch customizations.” If that was not enough, there was also, for some reason, a booth offering free Crocs jibbetz.)
The “Visions of Damsels” aesthetic is glamorous and medieval; on stage, the main set piece was a gothic castle, and Roan came out dressed in an ornate pirate cape. She took full advantage of her architectural environs, prompting me to google “parts of a castle” to confirm that the parapet is the walkway she skipped across while singing “Hot to Go!” and the turret is the corner tower from which she belted “California.”
