Review: Olivia Rodrigo’s deliriously exciting ‘Guts Tour’ and ‘It’s Always Sour In Philadelphia’ T-shirt make a stop at Wells Fargo Center
Rodrigo's 23-song, 1-hour-45-minute set delighted a crowd that sang and screamed along to every word.
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Olivia Rodrigo nearly got upstaged by her own T-shirt.
On Friday night, Rodrigo’s “Guts Tour” finally arrived in Philadelphia, playing to a packed house at the Wells Fargo Center almost a year after the release of the album for which it’s named.
To say that the anticipation was high for the arrival of the former star of the Disney teen comedy Bizaardvark, who vaulted into the pop music firmament with her debut single “Drivers License” and album Sour in 2021, would be a vast understatement.
Limited supply and intense demand — Rodrigo already has a stadium-sized audience, but scheduled just one arena date in town — made the South Philly tour stop the priciest pop ticket of the season.
With Taylor Swift off in Europe for the summer, moms and dads had to shell out $500-plus per seat on the resale market to make their teenagers’ dreams come true.
Not that anybody sat down for long during Rodrigo’s spirited, terrifically entertaining, and highly efficient 23-song, 1-hour-45-minute set, which followed a half-hour of skittering beats and sly love songs by English singer Pink Pantheress, whose given name is Victoria Walker.
Rodrigo, 21, bounded on stage at 8:30 p.m. in a silver crop top and skirt, and Doc Marten boots, joining her road-tested all-female band in kick-starting the show with the crunchy “Bad Idea, Right?”
That song is not only a typically savvy Rodrigo nugget about not being able to resist the temptation of bad behavior — in this case, hooking up with an ex. It also slyly brings the listener in on the transgression with the question mark on the song title: Yeah, I know I’m about to do something stupid, but you’d do the same if you were me, wouldn’t you?
Rodrigo is a sharp, astute writer whose punchy, rocked-out pop songs bear the influence of her contemporary hitmakers such as Swift and Lorde, but also reach back to role models such as Avril Lavigne.
She’s cited Jack White as an all-time fave and his garage rock sensibility was felt particularly toward the playfully trippy latter section of the show on songs such as “Obsessed” and “All American Bitch,” whose title was inspired by Joan Didion’s The White Album.
Such songs as Sour’s “Brutal” are exegesis of the tumult of teendom in the social media age with such lyrics as “If someone tells me ‘Enjoy your youth’ one more time, I’m gonna cry” and “They say these are the golden years, but I wish I could disappear. … God, it’s brutal out here.”
The evidence of how powerfully that resonates with Rodrigo’s fans was apparent everywhere on Friday, from the crowds that gathered around the Guts World Tour Experience Bus outside the Wells Fargo, to the epic merch lines inside the venue, which contrasted with the ghost town vibe in the men’s rooms, which were almost as empty as during the Eras Tour.
Rodrigo’s songs aren’t all spunky rockers. She also has her fair share of piano ballads, and sat down at the keyboard herself for “Drivers License” and “Teenage Dream.”
» READ MORE: ‘Confessions of a 30-year-old teenager:’ The elder millennial Olivia Rodrigo fan speaks
The latter expressed frustration at being condescended to by dunderheaded adults. “When am I gonna stop being wise beyond my years and just start being wise?” she asked. But she also introduced it by saying she wished she could go back to her 17-year-old self and tell her not to worry so much.
On most of the softer songs, Rodrigo was joined by a squad of eight dancers, who didn’t really mesh with the overall singer-fronting-a-rock-band (and occasionally picking up a guitar herself) vibe of the evening. But that was a concession to pop spectacle orthodoxy that she’ll likely outgrow.
The other twist to conventional arena staging was Rodrigo’s mode of getting out among the crowd. She took a seat on a flying crescent moon that floated among brightly lit stars that hung from the arena rafters, and sang “Logical” and “Enough for You.” She not only hung the moon, she sat on it.
While doing so, suspended high above the crowd on the opposite end of the arena from the stage, Rodrigo — a practiced entertainer who made her TV debut in an Old Navy commercial when she was 7 — worked the crowd by asking for screams from alternating sides of the room. She seemed taken aback by the voraciousness of the response.
Hey, it’s Philadelphia, what did you expect? Even some of the teenage girls in my row chose to cover their ears.
Before “So American” — a song believed to be about Rodrigo’s British actor boyfriend Louis Partridge — Rodrigo quizzed fans about who they had come to the show with. Mom, dad, or mom and dad was one popular answer, and boyfriend and girlfriend responses were few.
“Your best friend in the whole world?” was the clear scream-inducing winner, eliciting spontaneous hugs all over the room. After all, what’s the point of going out for the best night ever, if you can’t share it with your bestie?
All of this was a prelude to an encore in which Rodrigo came out in her final costume change for the closing bad boyfriend combo of Sour’s bouncy “Good 4 U” and Guts’ vengeful “Get Him Back!”
Armed with a megaphone, this was the segment of the show where Rodrigo wears a tank tap emblazoned with words shouting out her pop culture faves. Earlier in this tour, that’s meant Gwen Stefani and No Doubt with “Just a Girl” and Sex and the City with “Carrie Bradshaw AF.”
The brilliantly bespoke shirt for the Wells Fargo crowd conflated the title of her debut album with the name of the South Philly-set longest-running sitcom in TV history: It’s Always Sour in Philadelphia. (It’s also the name of a beer by Urban Village Brewing Co.)
Kudos to Rodrigo for that next-level showmanship. Somebody put that shirt on sale, stat! I’m surprised that it wasn’t out there already on the morning after the show.
Here’s the set list for Olivia Rodrigo’s “Guts Tour” at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia:
1. “Bad Idea, Right?”
2. “Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl”
3. “Vampire”
4. “Traitor”
5. “Drivers License”
6. “Teenage Dream”
7. “Pretty Isn’t Pretty”
8. “Love Is Embarrassing”
9. “Making the Bed”
10. “Logical”
11. “Enough for You”
12. “Lacy”
13. “So American”
14. “Jealousy, Jealousy”
15. “Happier”
16. “Favorite Crime”
17. “Deja Vu”
18. “The Grudge”
19. “Brutal”
20. “Obsessed”
21. “All-American Bitch”
Encore
22. “Good 4 U”
23. “Get Him Back!”