You can take the girl out of the theater, but you can’t take the theater training out of the girl — and in the case of Olivia Rodrigo‘s “GUTS World Tour,” this is a very good thing.
On Saturday, March 9th, Olivia Rodrigo touched down in Nashville, Tennessee for the latest stop in the second headlining outing of her career. It’s a major leap from her 2022 trek in support of the SOUR album, which saw her playing significantly smaller venues; her last performance in Nashville was at the Grand Ole Opry, which has a capacity of just over 4,000. But when she took the stage at Bridgestone Arena to a sold-out crowd of 20,000 people, she looked every bit the pop star.
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Olivia Rodrigo is only 21 years old, and the audience at the “GUTS World Tour” was a fascinating range of impassioned teens, 20-something superfans, parents with very young daughters who surely had every innuendo sail right over their heads, and pockets of millennials there for a good time. The bar line was practically nonexistent; the merch line wound through the entire arena atrium.
The night kicked off with CoSign alum Chappell Roan decked in blue sparkles with matching cowboy hat. The cuts off her excellent album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwestern Princess, lifted fans and newcomers alike; Roan is the perfect hype woman for this kind of tour, at one point energetically leading the crowd in cheer choreography for “HOT TO GO!”
Roan’s star is certainly rising, but the audience at this tour is, without a doubt, rabid for Rodrigo. And while the Grammy winner is keen to distance herself from the High School Musical spinoff that first launched her into the spotlight, only referring to it once as “this TV show I was on,” the traces of her theater background are woven into the fabric of this tour. From the ironic choreography in “love is embarrassing” to the array of sparkled dresses, the melodrama in a lift of the microphone, and the moments when she lets her belt loose, the “GUTS World Tour” is pop-punk through the lens of a grown-up and extremely successful theater kid, which makes it an absurd amount of fun.
Rodrigo has clearly cultivated an audience for herself primarily composed of young women looking for catharsis. That could end as music centered on rage, but other times it’s yearning, or shame, or disillusionment. That edge to her music is what separates her from many of her peers — and she also just has so much more music now that she has two full LPs out in the world, making a headlining set in this large of a space feel entirely appropriate.
