Award show performances have always been a place for theatrical flare. Broad audiences and impressive budgets allow for bigger production, bigger sets, and bigger stories—spectacles that stay with us after the midnight reruns come on.
Lady Gaga hunched over as fake blood seeps from her abdomen and she gets trampled by her backup dancers? Thrilling. A live exorcism being performed on Nicki Minaj in a sacrilegious staging of a Lil’ Kim diss track? Dazzling. Olivia Rodrigo’s set combusting and collapsing mid-performance as an illusive song transition? The stuff audiences live for.
The 67th Grammy Awards did not let up on the trend. The evening offered more Tony Awards–flare from start to finish than any year prior.
But the 2025 ceremony didn’t merely mark an increase in showmanship and red velvet curtains—rather, the merging of the popstar and the playhouse speaks numbers to what we expect out of performers today.
Sunday night confirmed that it is not enough to park and bark behind a microphone, no matter how pretty the voice or beautiful the song. People want to see their favorite performers take on a persona as large as the one that precedes them on stan Twitter.
Take Doechii, for example. A newcomer to the scene, Doechii commanded the stage with an army of Thom Browne–dripped dancers, delivering dips, flips, splits, and everything in between without missing a beat on her rapid-fire lyrics.
Audiences love to feverishly inflate the skills, talent, and potential of new, unscathed artists, and Doechii’s performance rightly capitalized on this. Transcendent of taste and genre, there is almost no way to watch an act like that and not be left breathless by her expressionism, her deftness, and the sheer stage presence she emanated.
Doechii sold herself, quite successfully, as the do-it-all showgirl with an agility and wit that lives up to the caricature her music has drawn for her.
Let’s turn to Sabrina Carpenter’s sales pitch. After sampling different gimmicks and personas for the past decade, Carpenter finally found a comfortable and believable home as the sexy, silly, Marilyn-esque ingénue. Her Grammy’s performance affirmed this identity.
On a flight of cascading stairs fit for the set of Sunset Boulevard, she and a comedically fumbling chorus line of dancers offered a charming mix of vaudeville circuit, unsullied aesthetic, and blushing “who, me?” faux-naïf that continues to make Carpenter the darling of audiences everywhere.
Even Charli XCX’s comparably unembellished medley performance of Brat, though by no means a Rodgers and Hammerstein classic, was a fanfare of theatrical self-mythology.
Storming into the Crypto.com Arena with a posse of coked-up, lingerie-clad club kids, she confirmed with each hair flip and head bang that she can be just as messy, reckless, and party-girl as her music sounds.
Of course, not every artist brought Broadway bells and whistles to their performances on Sunday night … but have you been talking about them? How many clips have you seen of Billie Eilish’s tranquil performance of “BIRDS OF A FEATHER”? Did you even know that Teddy Swims sang his hit “Lose Control” with some of the most chillingly rich vocals of the night?
In 2025, a musical performer is not, and cannot afford to be, simply a performer of music. They have to be an actor, a comedian, an influencer, a muse, a sex symbol, a scandal, a triumph, an underdog, a shaker, a mover, and a goddamn American treasure—making music is just an entry requirement.
