Adele’s Last Minute Cancellation Leaves Vegas, Fans Wondering: What Went Wrong?

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Adele shocked fans on Thursday (Jan. 20) when she took to Instagram to explain that her Las Vegas residency — which was set to open the next day — had been postponed indefinitely due to production delays caused by COVID-19, fighting through tears as she explained, “We’ve run out time.”

The “Easy on Me” singer told fans “My show ain’t ready” to open on Friday due to “delivery delays and COVID” spreading amongst the team of people working with the artist to launch her first performance series in a half decade. Adele said she was embarrassed and “gutted” to have to make the announcement just one day before the 24-show run opened.

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Last month, Billboard predicted that the January-to-April weekend concert series would net Adele $2 million per show and help her avoid exposure to COVID that could have become a bigger threat if she were to tour North America by hunkering down inside of the Colosseum at Caesars Palace instead of going out on the road.

But sources are now telling Billboard that the decision to stay in Las Vegas and stage the Live Nation-produced concert series at the 4,200-seat theater first built for Celine Dion might have backfired. Finding an available venue to stage a 12-week concert series in the first place proved difficult, because many in the concert industry had forecast a full-scale comeback for live music in 2022 and most venues were already booked by the time Adele’s team at Endeavor-owned booking agency WME began looking for a venue for her live shows last year. An agreement to stage the concert at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace was finalized in October, with tickets going on sale in early December.

That left the promoters at Live Nation and Adele’s production team approximately two to three months to design the show; build and mount the staging and major production elements; and start rehearsing and finalizing the main performance with the cast and band. A source familiar with the Las Vegas live-entertainment business said large-scale productions can begin building and rehearsing concerts at rehearsal studios and production shops while they wait for host venues to become available, making it difficult to nail down how long Adele and her team had been working on the show. A representative for Adele did not respond to Billboard‘s request for comment.

Adele also mentioned in her Instagram video that her tour crew had been hit hard by the rapid spread of the COVID variant Omicron, which has prompted a number of competing residency shows at the new Resorts World Hotel in Las Vegas to tighten their protocols around COVID. Carrie Underwood and Katy Perry have both launched residency shows at the Resorts World Hotel and Casino without major outbreaks.

Shortly after the news broke, host hotel Caesars Palace said it would refund any guests staying at the hotel for Adele’s concerts and accommodate fans arriving today for this weekend’s show. Tickets purchased for the Adele concert series will be valid for a new, yet-to-be-scheduled date, according to Ticketmaster’s website.

“If your event is eligible for a refund or credit, those options will be visible within the Event Details of your order,” the site said.

While many fans have sent Adele messages of support and encouragement, others have expressed anger and frustration over the last-minute announcement. Many fans were already on the ground in Las Vegas and preparing for tomorrow’s opening when they heard the news. While the last-minute announcement didn’t sit well with fans who spent an average of $600 to $800 for tickets to the opening weekend on the primary market, Minneapolis Attorney Bruce Rivers told Billboard that fans have little recourse to recover additional travel-related costs based on the lengthy terms and conditions they agree to when purchasing tickets.

As for Adele’s 90-second video apologizing to fans for the show not being ready on time, Rivers says he doubts her statement exposes her to any real liabilities. “Sometimes it’s better to let a spokesperson handle these kind of statements” to minimize one’s exposure to any threat of future litigation, he notes.

Adele’s divorce album is a slyly subversive fit for a Vegas residency

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Las Vegas is a comfortable place to land for pop stars. It’s where you go to bask in the validation of a job well done, to rest on a solid legacy at a point where the future may have become less certain and any tentative steps into it may harm that legacy. It seemed, for a while, a safe harbour for Britney Spears after her troubles (until she said she was made to perform against her will); Lady Gaga and Katy Perry also set up shop in the desert after their imperial phases faded.

Adele, whose three-month Caesars Palace residency begins this weekend, has no need for this lucrative safety net – her latest, 30, was the biggest album of 2021 with just six weeks on sale. She’s playing there for practical reasons: she hates touring and wants to be close to her son at home in Los Angeles. But there is also something quietly subversive about her presence, right now, in a place synonymous with light entertainment and celebrating adult milestones. Once known for supplying comfort and artistic consistency (even complacency, perhaps), Adele made one of last year’s most confrontational albums.

Adele performing in the CBS special Adele: One Night Only. Photograph: CBS Photo Archive/CBS/Getty Images

Prior to 30, I had listened to Adele’s earlier records out of professional duty, decided they weren’t for me, and moved on; she is my age but felt completely alien from our times. Her third album, 25, made me quite uneasy – here was a young mum, apparently in a solid relationship, revisiting juvenile heartbreak again. Hearing her reanimate that corpse felt to me like another young female artist getting trapped in purgatory – anxiety, whether hers or the label’s, that the public would never let her escape the sadness that made her name. When news broke that she was divorcing, there was an unseemly glee at the album people assumed she would write – a kintsugi masterpiece, flooding her brokenness with that golden voice. Adele may have made some predictable music in the past, but she seldom moves that way in her own life. For the first time, her music followed suit.

The album 30 is neither full of recriminations for her ex-husband nor regret; instead Adele is steadfast that she had to leave her marriage because she was unhappy, and she was certain that her commitment to personal happiness would ultimately benefit the whole family – though finding fulfilment isn’t as straightforward as simple emancipation. The album follows a linear journey through her anguish at the pain and confusion it causes their son (My Little Love), and the depression and despair that accompanies her newfound solitude (Cry Your Heart Out). But her self-worth accrues with the album’s run time – and her belief in self-sufficiency.

“All you do is complain about decisions you make,” she sings on Woman Like Me. “How can I help lift you if you refuse to activate the life that you truly want?” She’s singing to a lazy new lover who hasn’t met her expectations, but it also feels like a subtle challenge to Adele’s audience to reconsider how they see her – not as a reliable remedy during their own periods of heartache, but as a woman who took a risk to redefine happiness on her terms and forge a healthier relationship to herself – as well as to truly consider their own lives and potential for change. Critics have often justified Adele’s era-defining success by her relatability, but the daring woman on 30 is a provocation; the pop equivalent of Glennon Doyle, the self-help guru whose work made Adele feel “as if I just flew into my body for the very first time”. 30 hit me in a way I would never have expected.

Adele’s album titles – 19, 21, 25, 30 – map a direct journey through adulthood with all its attendant milestones. And as New Yorker critic Carrie Battan wrote, her “contemporary take on soul, blues and gospel has been appreciated as a monument to tradition”. 30 derails that linear path of growth and defies tradition in both senses. It is her most idiosyncratic album, still respectfully in touch with those influences, but more playful with them: the wryly processed Motown girl group harmonies on Cry Your Heart Out; the use of voice notes on My Little Love that she has said nod to Tyler, the Creator and Skepta; the boozy looseness of I Drink Wine. She finds greater power in the subtleties of vocal expressiveness than she did in sheer volume – the coy head-in-the-clouds flirtatiousness of All Night Parking, the embarrassed neediness of Can I Get It – though she makes her unparalleled vocal power into a weapon on To Be Loved, making the listener feel the weight of her decision: “Let it be known that I tried,” she bellows, strafing her vocal chords.

Adele: Oh My God – video

You wonder whether her quest for greater self-knowledge and fulfilment opened up this potential for experimentation, to venture beyond the bounds of her once-fixed musical identity as she did her roles as a wife and mother. The expansive pleasures of this album also stake a claim for the vitality of adult contemporary music, a once-powerful genre diminished by age-conscious segregation of radio formatting and the commercial assumption that parents and pop fans over the age of 35 have Bublé-steeped mush for brains. The realities of adult life and pop are seen to be incompatible: as I previously wrote about Robyn, the music industry is built on selling the kind of self-belief that only truly comes with age, yet few artists, particularly women, get to mature on their own terms.

Even Adele – the century’s biggest commercial success – had to field these concerns. In an interview with Zane Lowe, she recalled a meeting where someone at her label highlighted the importance of making sure 14-year-olds knew who she was. “I’m like, but they’ve all got mums!” Adele said. “If everyone’s making music for the TikTok, who’s making music for my generation, for my peers? I’ll do that job gladly. I’d rather cater to people that are on my level in terms of the time we’ve spent on Earth.” She rejected the idea that 12-year-olds should even listen to 30. “It’s too deep! Thirty- and 40-year-olds are all committing to themselves and doing therapy. That’s my vibe. That’s what I was doing.”

Maybe, then, Vegas is the perfect place for Adele to debut this album to the public. In front of the nearly weds and newly divorced merrymakers, here is someone who gambled on her future and won herself back.

Tearful Adele announces Las Vegas residency has been postponed due to COVID-19

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Tearful Adele announces Las Vegas residency has been postponed due to COVID-19

Adele has been forced to delay the start of her Las Vegas residency after COVID-19 cases in her team delayed her preparations.

Adele Postpones Las Vegas Residency: ‘It’s Been Impossible to Finish the Show’ | Billboard News

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Adele broke the news Thursday (Jan. 20) that she is rescheduling her 2022 Las Vegas residency due to delivery delays and her team members having COVID.

Adele postpones Las Vegas residency, citing pandemic impact

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LONDON (AP) — Adele has postponed a 24-date Las Vegas residency hours before it was to start, citing delivery delays and coronavirus illness in her crew.

The chart-topping British singer said she was “gutted” and promised to reschedule the shows.

In a video message posted on social media, a tearful Adele said: “I’m so sorry but my show ain’t ready.”

“We’ve tried absolutely everything that we can to pull it together in time and for it to be good enough for you but we’ve been absolutely destroyed by delivery delays and COVID,” she said, adding that “half my team are down with” the virus.

Adele had been due to perform 24 shows at Caesars Palace Hotel starting Friday following the release of her fourth album, “30.”

In a tweet, Caesars Palace said it understood fans’ disappointment but added: “Creating a show of this magnitude is incredibly complex. We fully support Adele and are confident the show she unveils at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace will be extraordinary.”