Review: Mitski is fabulous in her highly stylized, brilliantly realized first night at the Met Philly

Mitski is an art-pop singer and a TikTok star, an indie songwriter whose melancholic songs of interior strife boldly reach out with orchestral flourishes and theatrical flair.

She sings about isolation and connects with an audience that’s getting bigger all the time. Back in 2016, she played tiny PhilaMOCA on a triple bill of Asian American songwriters with Japanese Breakfast and Jay Som. Now, she’s less than a mile up the road in North Philly, selling out the spacious Met. Twice.

On Tuesday, the singer whose full name is Mitski Miyawaki entertained with a highly stylized, brilliantly realized, super cool performance that put her in the early pole position in the race for best show of the year. She’s back at the Broad Street opera house on Wednesday.

So many pop stars overreach in trying to keep fans visually captivated, with fancy video foofaraw and exploding stuff. Mitski keeps it simple and puts on a show that looks like nobody else’s.

And speaking of “Nobody,” Mitski included that 2018 hit about the tussle between self-reliance and the need for connection — “I don’t want your pity, I just want somebody near me,” she sang — as part of an encore that included “Washing Machine Heart” that brought the taut 25-song, 90-minute show to a satisfyingly jaunty conclusion.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s talk about the way the show was presented.

Mitski is an able guitar player, but she doesn’t play in concert these days. The singer was flanked by the seven musicians in her band, which included steel guitar and fiddle to bring off the country-leaning songs on last year’s excellent The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, which was recorded in Nashville, where she now lives.

Dressed in black, Mitski was positioned on a circular riser at the center of the Met stage, below the large M at the proscenium’s peak. She jokingly thanked the venue for all the Ms placed throughout the building. “That’s my stage persona for today,” she said. “Delusional diva.”

With only a pair of chairs as props, the stage set had an elegant simplicity, with expert lighting design bathing her in blue, or red, or shafts of white light. It looked fabulous.

Mitski made a dramatic entrance, silhouetted behind a red curtain on “Everyone,” from 2021′s Laurel Hell. “Everyone said, ‘Don’t go that way,’” she sang. “So of course, I said ‘I’ll go that way’.”

The staging was clever and the choreography playful, with Mitski’s intentionally unslick dance moves, a blend of mime, Kabuki, and cabaret, delivered with a dose of old-school Hollywood glamour.

She acted out songs like “I Don’t Like My Mind,” about being trapped in one’s own head, by running up against a wall of light and tumbling to the ground. On “I Bet on Losing Dogs,” she was down on all fours, and then rolled over, playing dead. Several times, she did splits. It’s likely she does a lot of yoga.

Early on, Mitski professed her heartfelt love for the city. “I love Philly,” she said, tracing that affection to the Eagles 2018 Super Bowl victory.

“I was here for that, and people were climbing up pre-greased telephone poles? It was a beautiful night. Something within me was saying: ‘Burn it down!’ I love chaos.”

She does have a taste for it. Charlie Mingus and other avant-jazz excursions were heard in the preshow music. Tamino, the dreamy Belgian Egyptian songwriter whose soaring vocals recall Jeff Buckley and Rufus Wainwright, opened the show with a captivating but somewhat same sounding solo set.

But while there were segments of sonic mayhem that demonstrated the band’s dynamic range and left Mitski emotionally devastated and crumpled on the floor, it was a highly structured show, disciplined down to every sonic and visual detail.

Among the most compelling set pieces was “My Love Mine All Mine,” a Tik-Tok-boosted 2023 hit, in which a triangle of golden objects, some shaped like birds, drifted down from the rafters, glittering above her, and then slowly rising upward as if magically directed by her hand gestures.

The crowd was made up approximately evenly of Mitski’s growing indie fan base who regard her as the complex and original rock star she is, and the teenage enthusiasts that have made her a Billboard chart sensation, thanks to the video social media service where #MitskiToks is a thing.

It was largely a respectful audience, with the full house remaining seated and rapt in their attention throughout. People were so nice, in fact, that they applauded when Tamino finished tuning his guitar. During Mitski’s set, however, moments of silence were occasionally broken by screams of “I love you!” or “You’re so beautiful!”

The object of adulation told the screamers she was wearing in-ear monitors and couldn’t hear them, so their main audience was the person next to them. She also offered photo snappers the pro-tip that they’d get better shots if they turned their flash off. “See,” she said, “I’ve got your interests at heart.”