Features
How Adele’s Stadium Pop-Up Paradigm Changes The Game
MUNICH, GERMANY — With the level of show production and fan expectation exceedingly high in 2024, it takes something truly remarkable to make an impression. Right now, in Munich, Germany, there is something outstanding happening. Something so novel, innovative and grand, it can only be called an artistic and engineering marvel. While the event’s not done, it’s already redefined what is possible in live entertainment. Don’t believe it? Take the Munich’s underground to Messestadt Ost, the city’s trade fair grounds, and check it out for yourself. Adele is in town, and she’s brought her A-game and a temporary pop-up venue that can hold 80,000.
Artist residencies usually consist of an act setting up shop at a venue, not the venue setting up shop for the artist. The latter is what happened in Munich, where Adele is currently giving ten concerts across five weekends for her fans, who’ve been waiting eight years to see her return to mainland Europe.
It’s not easy to wholly describe what Marek Lieberberg, CEO of Live Nation GSA, and Klaus Leutgeb, CEO of Leutgeb Entertainment, have created in the Bavarian capital. In brief, it’s a bespoke, stadium-capacity amphitheater, embedded in a festival-sized adventure park tailored for a singular transformative artist named Adele. When the residency ends, the entire structure will be taken down leaving behind nothing but a vast empty space.
Walking onto the site is overwhelming: gigantic black walls, doubling as the back side of the stands, enclose the concert arena. That’s surrounded by Adele World – a festival/adventure park in its own right, complete with a wide food and beverage offering, different bars, merch stands, performers on stilts, a Ferris wheel, and a carousel.
Thanks to the absence of branding, there’s only one prominent name written anywhere, and that is Adele’s. Coupled with the elegant black design of all the temporary structures, there’s a high-end quality feel to it all. Fans will recognize some hidden and not so hidden gems strewn around Adele World, like a bar that’s been modeled after the Good Ship in Kilburn, London, where she performed her earliest gigs.
The concert venue, meanwhile, mimics the layout of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, where Adele closed her 100-date residency in June. The big difference being it holds about 20 times the amount of people. But compared to a stadium, the furthest seats are much closer. Calling it intimate would be saying too much – 80,000 people isn’t intimate – but it feels compact.
“The proportions between size of the venue, stage and number of people just works perfectly,” explains creative producer and production designer Florian Wieder, who was responsible for the design of large parts of the concert venue and surrounding Adele World. “We wanted to build Adele’s perfect scenario, a venue that’s basically hers,” he says.
There are many aspects that make this concert experience so special. Adele hasn’t toured mainland Europe since 2016. Back then, Munich wasn’t on her itinerary. The last box office report submitted to Pollstar for an Adele show in the Bavarian capital is from 2011. Back then, she played to a sold-out crowd of 1,620 at the Kesselhaus, grossing $52,172. On her 2016 tour in support of her third album 25, she sold-out Germany’s main arenas in Berlin, Hamburg and Cologne, twice, selling a total of 76,184 tickets ($7,397,369 grossed). The box office reports for her Munich residency aren’t in yet, but by the time she wraps things up on Saturday, Aug. 31, she’ll have sold at least ten times that amount in hard tickets.
Another unique aspect of this show is Adele’s catalog, which mostly consists of piano ballads. To captivate close to 80,000 people for almost two hours with a mostly downbeat set speaks volumes about the quality of Adele’s songwriting, impeccable vocal delivery, creative compositions, fan engagement and the stellar performance of all the musicians on stage and in the orchestra pit.
The set is dominated by a more than 200-meter wide, curved LED wall. It is by all accounts the largest screen ever deployed at a concert. However, according to Ray Winkler, CEO and design director at entertainment architecs Stufish, it would be remiss to focus on just the size of the screen. “It’s not what it is because we wanted to create the world’s largest video screen,” he says, “it’s a result of the need to achieve the proximity Adele wants to have with her audience. She wanted to embrace her audience, and the screen’s curvaceous form does that very nicely.”
The flowy screen resembles a giant paper scroll, with both ends 220 meters apart. During “When We Were Young” a vintage roll of film is displayed on it, showing photographs of Adele’s childhood and youth. All footage was created for this show specifically, a process led by creative director Matt Askem, and produced by Treatment Studio. It’s a mix of Adele performance shots, digital visuals and original footage, like the panoramic aerial shots of London for the song “Hometown Glory” – one many moments when sound, visuals and the special natural light around dusk create the perfect atmosphere. During “Set Fire To The Rain,” a thunderstorm erupts across the entire screen, and Adele performs on top of a rising waterfall platform. Cinematic theater on a grand scale.
There are quiet, intimate moments like, for example, when Adele sits down next to pianist Eric Wortham II to perform “Chasing Pavements” – a song she’d abandoned for a while because she couldn’t identify with the version recorded by her 19-year-old self anymore. She brought it back for her German fans in particular, who’ve always loved the song.
While the arena in Munich is much larger than The Colosseum, the dimensions within the proscenium, the very heart of the stage, are the same. “Her relationship with the band has been kept intact, she knows where everybody is,” Winkler explains, “once you have that as your home base, everything else becomes a satellite to that performance. She can travel 100 meters to the B stage, and do a performance there, go along the passerelle, and then come back to the comfort of her band in an environment she’s familiar with. It helps to embrace the enormity of the venue itself.”
Adele engages with this 80,000-strong crowd no different than she did with the 4,000-plus at The Colosseum: as if she’s know you forever on a first-name basis; cracking jokes, sharing stories, getting personal; even pulling a funny face during the opening song, which is obviously “Hello.” Winkler says, “We are only a minor support act in what is two-and-a-half hours of pure, emotive, beautiful music set in the most stunning setting. All credit goes to her for being able to carry that, her ability to present herself amongst 80,000 people with the notion that she’s embracing every single one of them.”
The acoustic matches the visual experience. Crisp and clean, there’s a punch and an opulence to the sound you’d expect in a soundproofed club, not at an open-air stadium-sized amphitheater. Audio system engineer Johnny Keirle explains how this feat was achieved.
“Compared to most shows,” he says, “I did request more delay towers than what is typically deployed in a setup of this size. In total, I have 14 delay towers – six custom-fabricated mini ‘lamppost’ towers, and eight traditional large delay towers.” Each of them is equipped with the finest speakers L-Acoustics has to offer.
Remarkably, one hardly notices these towers. They neither obstruct the massive LED screen, nor the spider cam that captures the performance from all angles. “The need to maintain clean sightlines also influenced the design of the custom mini-lamppost delay towers. They are practically invisible and have created very few seat kills. I designed the delay systems to each be powered from a single amplifier which lives under the delay platform, giving a clean and tidy footprint,” Keirle explains.
It’s a unique setup, not seen anywhere before. Says Keirle, “everything from an audio perspective is tailored specifically to this show. We incorporated several bespoke elements, including specially designed delay towers and custom-engineered wind bracing, as well as targeting unique design criteria that were specific to both the venue and the creative/performance requirements.”
Walking from the concert arena through Adele World takes a while. It feels like a festival that magically appeared on a patch of land that is usually barren. The selection of food and beverages is above the standard and variety usually found at events of this magnitude. This is just an estimate from wandering around the site for hours, but it felt like at least 50,000 to 60,000 people spent most their day around this concert city, and stayed on long after the show to celebrate. That’s not even touching on the VIP hospitality, a gala dinner setting, with a personal server bringing out food supplied by some of Munich’s finest chefs.
It’s hard to wrap one’s brain around the effort it must have taken to bring it all together – apart from a nine-figure investment, as Pollstar was reliably informed, to build it all. Production designer Wieder says, “It wouldn’t have been possible without a collaborative effort of thousands of people, led by Adele’s outstanding management/agent, Live Nation, their production team, stage designer Stufish, and so many other creative forces.”
They also include artistic director Kim Gavin, creative director Matt Askem, production manager Paul English, lighting designers Cory FitzGerald (show) and Raphael Demonthy (Adele World), FOH engineer Dave Bracey, and many more.
Stufish’s Winkler thinks, “it’s the absolute A team. Coming together, and putting together this Gesamtkunstwerk, as you say in German, is one of the most joyful aspects of having worked on this project. I’m very happy with the result, because it came from a collective, bottom-up approach, rather than somebody going, ‘okay, this is what it has to be, and that’s what it’s going to be. Now, make it work!’ That usually doesn’t lead to very good results.”
It’s hard to believe that, after next weekend, Aug. 30-31, it will all be taken down again. The entire venue was constructed from stock material that’ll be shipped back to the warehouse. To make sure people would sit on dry ground in the event of rainfall, a special porous tar was poured around the site, allowing water to flow through. It will eventually be mixed with other tar and probably reused for some future road.
All of this for ten shows, one might ask? But Wieder loves the transiency of it all. “It’s great from a design perspective because you can influence the venue. On a tour, you have to keep the entire setup flexible enough to fit different-sized buildings. None of these questions were relevant for this, because everything was built from scratch,” he says.
The idea to build a venue for Adele came from Klaus Leutgeb, who said seeing this “Gesamtkunstwerk” come to life “touches me deeply and fills me with humility and gratitude,” while emphasizing, “all this was only possible because Live Nation got on board.”
Live Nation GSA CEO Marek Lieberberg brought the idea and vision to life. He took an enormous risk, but one that set a new global standard for what a mass-scale concert experience can look and sound like in 2024, setting the bar high, as he’s done so many times in his career. He sums it up perfectly, when he says, “`Adelepolis´ is a meeting of many brilliant minds, united by the determination of Live Nation to explore unknown territory, inspired by a charismatic artist!”
Adele’s input can be seen in all parts of the show and venue’s design. It is her spirit that breathes live into Adele World. Her entire team, including manager Jonathan Dickins, agent Lucy Dickins, co-manager and personal assistant Rose Moon, deserves credit for taking a chance on this project, which, as Lieberberg concludes, “has become a historical, epic event that made showbusiness history.”