Lady Gaga ‘Harlequin’ Review: Mother Monster Lets Her Freak Flag Fly

Not since 2011’s Born This Way has Lady Gaga found a musical project big and brawny enough to contain her penchant for vocal bluster and over-the-top theatricality. But her role as Harley Quinn in Todd Phillips’s Joker: Folie à Deux and its companion album, Harlequin, seem to have given her all of the elbow room she needs to let her freak flag fly.

Harlequin, whose title refers to the stock pantomime figure after which Harley Quinn was named, aptly begins with an interpretation of “Good Morning,” originally sung by Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, whose agile performances captured the heady elation of a romantic all-nighter. Gaga is no Frances Gumm, but she imbues a newly written opening verse with a dewy-eyed wonder. Then, though, she quickly reverts to the kind of mannered affectations that marred her jazz albums with Tony Bennett, 2014’s Cheek to Cheek and 2021’s Love for Sale.

Several other songs on Harlequin—like “That’s Entertainment,” also famously sung by Garland—follow a similar pattern, an unfortunate bait and switch in which understated intros are followed by more bombastic bellowing. “If My Friends Could See Me Now,” from the 1966 musical Sweet Charity, opens with plaintive acoustic guitar and a tentative vocal from Gaga before exploding into a scat-and-brass-filled jive. Gaga has a similar tone as Linda Clifford, who turned the song into an epic disco bauble in 1978, and while the arrangement of this rendition is “top drawer,” one wishes she’d taken a cue from Clifford and gone full-on sequins and cocaine.

But Gaga, ostensibly inspired by her character in Joker: Folie à Deux, imbues these performances with a mania that’s as calculated as it is purposeful. She doesn’t possess the command of, say, Shirley Bassey on a rock rendition of “The Joker,” a song Bassey recorded in 1968, but she makes up for it with sheer grit and commitment. A guitar-driven variation on the jazz standard “World on a String” features a relatively restrained vocal with an almost menacing undercurrent befitting Harley Quinn and her equally deranged paramour.

On “Folie a Deux,” an orchestral waltz composed by Gaga, she slips in and out of different vocal timbres, perhaps another nod to Harley’s capriciousness. And the album’s other original song, the lovely, Joanne-esque ballad “Happy Mistake,” gets at the deeper parts of the character’s—and perhaps Gaga’s own—psyche: “How’d I get so addicted/To the love of the whole world?”

Gaga’s cover of “Close to You” lacks the longing and vulnerability of the original, to say nothing of the clarity and pureness of Karen Carpenter’s vocal. On the other hand, the soulful “Gonna Build a Mountain” boasts one of Gaga’s most powerful performances to date. If nothing else, slipping into Harley Quinn’s checkered duds has afforded Gaga the opportunity to flex her vocal prowess in ways that often feel forced in her usual contemporary pop milieu.