Review: Taylor Swift kicks off historic 3-night Eras Tour run in South Philly with a dazzling 3-hour spectacle

Taylor Swift sat at the piano on Friday in South Philadelphia during the first show of the sold-out three-night run of her Eras Tour at Lincoln Financial Field and shared tales of her songwriting modus operandi.

The first step, she explained while wearing a marigold-yellow gown designed by Italian fashion house Etro during the witchy Evermore section of the extravagantly staged, exhaustively entertaining, 3-hour-15-minute show, involves putting pen to paper.

”I write my things down,” she said, spilling creative process secrets before “Champagne Problems,” about a would-be engagement that doesn’t work out. “And then I sing them. And then eventually I get to feel them. Because that’s what I do.”

There were feelings aplenty at the Linc on Friday, where the Wyomissing, Pa-raised pop star talked about her father watching Eagles games on Sundays as she was growing up, and welcomed to “my hometown show” a crowd of 67,812 exceedingly enthusiastic fans. Do the math: That means more than 200,000 people — a number far larger than any other mega-pop attraction coming to town this year — will see Swift in South Philly this weekend.

With Bruce Springsteen, she becomes the only artist to play a three-night stand at the Eagles stadium. The multigenerational gathering of Swifties on Friday were bejeweled in sequins and rhinestones, unequivocally ready for the singer’s first Linc performance in five years.

Many were done up in outfits inspired by songs and videos from the 10 albums in the 33-year-old singer’s 16-year recording career, all of which got their own segment except for the very first, Taylor Swift. That could mean wearing a floor-length, 18th-century-style dress complete with Marie Antoinette wig in homage to “Bejeweled,” featured in the seven-song section from Midnights, Swifts’ 2022 album, that closed the show.

Or it perhaps meant building a tiara out of chess pieces, inspired by a lyric from “Dear John,” from 2010′s Speak Now. That song was not performed, as the only one to make the Eras cut from that album — which will be released in a rerecorded version in July — was the dream-like ballad “Enchanted.”

During that “Champagne Problems” introduction, Swift spoke of how her coping mechanism during the pandemic was similar to what’s always guided her: “Write as many songs as I can.” The results of Swift’s determination to bring her creations into fully formed being were on display throughout a multiple-costume-change evening during which her image was projected on a football field-wide video screen that made her appear like a Gulliver-sized pop star come to rule over her Lilliputian subjects.

Swift had fun with her image as a world-smashing pop cultural presence. In the staging of “Anti-Hero,” the Midnights hit in which she refers to herself as “a monster on a hill … lurching toward your favorite city,” she appeared on video towering over a cityscape, unable to stop herself from knocking over everything in her way.

The Eras show is episodic as it efficiently moves from album to album, with impressively detailed set pieces on a journey back and forth through time. Most thoroughly manifested was the segment from 2020′s folklore, with Swift and her band inside a cabin with a moss-covered roof and smoking chimney. It brought to life a fantasy Swift described as “the escapism I needed during the pandemic … picturing myself like a pioneer woman in a Victorian nightgown writing on parchment with a quill.” She moved about during the (perhaps too many) seven songs from the album in a gossamer Alberta Ferretti dress, looking like a heroine from Wuthering Heights.

» READ MORE: Setlist for Taylor Swift Eras Tour in Philly

For oversized pop shows, performers often get among the people by parading down a catwalk. Swift has done that one better with a diamond-shaped stage that extends nearly to the Linc’s 50-yard line. It’s so big, in fact, that during “Blank Space,” a highlight of the pop-savvy stretch from 2014′s 1989, there was room for dancers to ride around on neon-lit bicycles. And that bold aesthetic also shined during the Reputation section, with Swift in a one-legged catsuit and aggressive dub-step beats contrasting with the homespun segments.

But never mind the staging. Swift has become super-proficient at eye-popping spectacle. And she’s increasingly at ease with the exacting demands of a crowd-pleasing enterprise.

The Eras tour does play a little bit long, as Swift strives to spotlight all four new albums she’s released since last touring. But it’s nonetheless so effective that it’s unlikely even those who paid more than $1,000 to sit in Linc nosebleed seats left less than completely satisfied. And that has less to do with presentation, and more with songs. She has so many: catchy, inventively crafted tales perceived as relationship-gone-wrong stories that are really coming-of-age inquiries about memory and regret that create a world a whole lot of people see themselves in.

Are 40-some songs enough to encapsulate the Taylor Swift oeuvre? Not really. That’s why she’s cleverly included a two-song surprise segment that holds fans in speculative suspense, adding mystery to the otherwise highly choreographed show. On Friday, the mini-solo set began on guitar with “gold rush,” ending the debate about whether the song’s line about an Eagles T-shirt is about music or football.

“I love the band the Eagles,” she said. “But c’mon, I’m from Philly.”

The second, which Swift sang while at the piano, was “Come Back … Be Here,” from Red. That expression of longing was requested by Phoebe Bridgers, the emotionally acute songwriter whose superb eight-song set ended with the screaming catharsis of “I Know the End,” was exceptionally well-received. Bridgers, who joined Swift on stage for “Nothing New,” was scheduled to play Saturday and Sunday.

Saturday’s concert opened with Gayle, who also played Friday, getting a sing-along going on her profane hit “abcdefu.” Gracie Abrams is to replace her Sunday.

» READ MORE: Matty Healy made an appearance at Taylor Swift's show at Lincoln Financial Field

An important footnote: The adjunct member of Bridgers’ band was Matty Healy, the 1975 leader rumored to be dating Swift, whose relationship with British actor Joe Alwyn is said to be over. That’s of interest, of course, because Swift specializes in songs inspired by her personal life. But it also provides a key to the Eras Tour, whose nonchronological ordering of albums has puzzled fans and critics, with the show starting with songs from Lover, her seventh album.

The beginning that Lover did chronicle, however, was Swift’s romance with Alwyn. And with that relationship apparently over, a close Midnights listen argues that it’s really a breakup album, with repeated mentions of a woman unhappy being pressured to marry in such songs as “Lavender Haze” and “Midnight Rain.”

Closing the show with those melancholy laced songs, rather than ending with exultant bangers, means ending on a somewhat anticlimactic note, as a highlight-filled marathon feat of endurance that doesn’t come to a dramatic crescendo.

For that moment, you needed to go back more than an hour to “All Too Well,” the titanic, 10-minute kiss-off from the rerecorded Red that’s the apotheosis of Swift’s detail-noticing narrative style. She delivered the exquisite hurt with closed-eyes concentration on such cut-to-the-quick Swiftian lines as “you kept me like a secret, but I kept you like an oath” while calling out a heartbreaker as “casually cruel, in the name of being honest.”

As confetti fell from the sky, Taylor Swift was doing what she does: feeling something, and making sure a stadium full of people felt it, too.