OC Register (July 26th 2018)
Gwen Stefani gets intimate with her career-encapsulating ‘Just A Girl’ Las Vegas residency
Singer-songwriter and Anaheim native Gwen Stefani seems to have done it all.
She fronts the multi-platinum, Grammy Award-winning rock band No Doubt and has enjoyed a lucrative, three-album solo career. She’s had several fashion lines, her very own fragrance and a makeup collaboration with Urban Decay. She played Jean Harlow in the 2004 Martin Scorsese film “The Aviator,” voiced DJ Suki in the 2017 award-winning DreamWorks animated feature, “Trolls,” created her own children’s animated television series, “Kuu Kuu Harajuku” for Nickelodeon and starred in her own “You Make It Feel Like Christmas” NBC holiday special back in December. She’s been a judge on NBC’s “The Voice,” where she met her current beau, country singer Blake Shelton, and she’s the mother of three boys, Kingston, Apollo and Zuma.
More recently she was flirting with the idea of a new challenge, something she had never done or possibly ever dreamed of before. That’s when Las Vegas called.
Stefani just wrapped the first half of her 25-date residency at the Zappos Theater inside the Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino on the Las Vegas Strip. The show, titled “Gwen Stefani – Just A Girl,” kicked off in front of a sold-out audience on June 27 and played select dates through June and into July. The residency returns to the venue for more dates in December, including New Year’s Eve, as well as dates in February and March.
The show is Stefani like the general public has never seen her before as she’s been given the full-blown Vegas treatment on stage. From start to finish the two-hour performance is quite the spectacle, with so many moving parts, a killer backing band – including No Doubt horn-players Stephen Bradley and Gabrial McNair – some of the best, most enthusiastic and interactive dancers in the business and countless backdrop and wardrobe changes. There are jumbo glittery bananas, cupcake thrones and a spectacularly choreographed country western- themed bit that includes swingin’ saloon doors, nudie suits and chaps.
“It has been really rewarding and I’m also kind of proving to myself that I could do something so hard,” Stefani said during a recent phone interview. “Its been like, ‘Whoa,’ I have to train every day to keep my body healthy enough to get out there and do that. It’s fun and I’m enjoying it and I knew it would be something that I’d look back on and go, ‘Oh my God, I only have three more shows … until December’.”
The show is very physically demanding, Stefani said during one of her off days where she was enjoying a cup of coffee in the backyard of her Los Angeles home, watching her boys, now ages 12, 9 and 4, play outside. It’s equally as emotional, she notes as the show actually chronicles the story of the now 48-year-old’s life – for better and for worse – thus far.
The set list includes a mix of Stefani’s solo material, No Doubt songs and even a couple of covers that are paired with video clips of Stefani talking about her life and some never-before-seen home movies that she’s sharing with her audience. There are ups and downs from her bleeding-heart lyrics in “Don’t Speak,” “Misery” and “Used To Love You” to the more upbeat songs that find Stefani picking herself back up with “Hollaback Girl,” “Make Me Like You” and “The Sweet Escape.” One of the best musical and emotional transitions in the show is Stefani digging in with semi-bitter, but brutally honest “Ex-Girlfriend” right into the dancy tune, “Hella Good.”
“Life just goes by so fast,” Stefani said. “You have this career where it doesn’t feel like work, but you work hard and the passion is driving you and it’s what you want to be doing, but once you add kids into the mix in your life and you’re a constant artist … it’s difficult. It’s weird to say, ‘artist,’ because I don’t know what I am. I just write music and I don’t know how I do it. It’s more like I was chosen by God and he said ‘This is your purpose, it’s what you’re good at, people seem to like it, so this is what you’re going to do.’ So, it’s hard for me to say ‘no’ to things and while doing this, there’s a sort of sadness about it. It feels very ‘end’ for me in a lot of ways, like chapter wise. Just to know how hard this is body-wise, but I still have all of this information to share with people, a lifetime’s worth, so there’s something kind of nostalgic about it in a sad way for me, but at the same time I feel super proud of what I’ve achieved.”
The show, which takes place in the same venue where Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez and Backstreet Boys have all done their residency runs, gives Stefani a more intimate space in which to connect with fans. In the 4,600-seat theater, with its towering LED walls and high-definition projectors, Stefani can walk out onto the catwalk and actually see the majority of her fans in the crowd.
“It feels very Vegas in that way because it’s smaller and there’s a lot of interaction and connection with the audience and that ability feels quite loungy,” she said. “When you get to be older, you start to really understand how much time is gone and you start to go, ‘OK, I really have to feel this and enjoy it.’ There’s something exhausting about that, but I am so grateful that people showed up. It feels good and I know it’s good. You know when something is good and you’ve done good because at the end of the night there’s a connection where it’s like, OK, they knew me, now they know me even better and I’ve gotten to know them better, too.”
Part of the fun, she said, is getting to do one-on-one meet-and-greets with fans backstage before the show. Patrons who purchase the meet-and-greet packages get a photo with Stefani and the chance to talk to her face to face.
“I’ve met some incredible people already,” she said. “That’s where the reality of the impact of music I’ve done shows and I can see my effect on people, which is something I still can’t understand. The fact that I got chosen to do that is amazing. I mean, I met a grandma, who was really glamorous and beautiful, and she brought her granddaughter to the meet-and-greet and the granddaughter was like 12 and she said ‘My grandma turned me on to your music’ and she just burst into tears. I said, ‘Oh my Gosh, why are you crying?’ and she said, ‘Because I loved you my whole life.’ That is incredible. It’s incredible to watch everybody else’s journey.”
The show’s namesake and first big hit for No Doubt, “Just A Girl,” was originally written by Stefani and No Doubt guitarist Tom Dumont and released in 1995. It’s a song-turned-anthem that has aged well and seems especially poignant in the dawn of the current #MeToo movement and women fighting for equal pay and rights. The song was never meant to be political, it was just a teenage Stefani wondering why she was being treated so much differently than the boys.
“As women, I feel like we all have our own position of having our own reality of how we fit into society,” she said. “When I wrote that song, I had my perspective, which was based on where I came from and the way it felt to be me and I was so naive when I wrote it. I didn’t have any power or any impact. I was nothing. I was literally just my parents’ daughter in this house and I walked back and forth across the street to Loara High School in Anaheim and one day this guy whistled at me and I was like ‘What? What does that mean?’ My dad won’t let me drive after 10:30 p.m.? What?
“That was me coming to terms with reality. It came down to me having my morals and my faith and I was being clear about who I was and being truthful with my words. Everything in that song was the truth and I am this average, normal person, whatever that means, and a lot of people just related to it. It’s interesting that it has stood the test of time and we’re having movements now and it’s weird to get old enough to see movement and I’m watching the news and going, ‘Oh my Gosh, this is happening right now?’”