Concert Reviews

At Xfinity Center, Stewart occasionally came across as the frontman of the world’s largest wedding band.

Rod Stewart, with Cheap Trick, at Xfinity Center, Mansfield, Saturday, July 26.

If there was one word that summed up the whole Rod Stewart experience at the Xfinity Center on Saturday, it was “gaudy.”

The stage, all white and brightly lit from the stair-step risers that made up the entire back line to the shiny floor, and resembling an antiseptic disco wonderland repurposed from “Solid Gold”: gaudy. The six backup singers, whose short cheetah-print skirts and volume-enhanced long blonde hair (save for one lonely brunette) made them look like a phalanx of Sabrina Carpenters: gaudy. The setlist, which treated frictionless, trend-hopping ’80s pop as indistinguishable from the openhearted acoustic-based rock and roll with which he became a superstar in the first half of the 1970s: gaudy.

It wasn’t always this way. Time was, Stewart could imbue even a song as raucous and blunt as the Faces’ “Stay With Me” with a degree of sincerity, unearthing mixed emotions and unadorned need from a relatively straightforward morning-after plea. But the singer’s days as an unusually sensitive gutter-poet throat-shredder are long gone, replaced by a performer whose overarching drive, and message, was nothing more than “showbiz,” with all the glitz and hollowness that implies.

It came through in countless little flourishes Stewart couldn’t help but add to his performance. “The First Cut Is The Deepest” should be a song with an ache in it, but not the way Stewart sang it. He danced a little twist, made silly little arm wiggles, did a little softshoe and made an “Are you drinking?” hand signal to someone in the front row even as he sang, all indications that he was thinking not one whit about the song coming out of his mouth.

That was Stewart’s fundamental problem all night (and for the past several decades): He showed up and simply banged out the notes with zero nuance, constantly adding a little wink to let the audience know that he didn’t mean any of it. For an 80-year-old singer who never appeared to treat his instrument with particular care, his voice remained remarkably intact, both in tone and range, and he might have gone the Tony Bennett route of leaning into what imperfections had come with age to access new depths of vulnerability.

Instead, he hammed it up shamelessly, with no attempt to sell any kind of emotion or story in his material. That’s one thing in the ingratiating disco sleaze of “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” (where his backups kicked soccer balls out into the crowd), and another entirely in the ostensibly tender “Tonight’s The Night (Gonna Be Alright),” where Stewart illustrated the line “Don’t deny your man’s desire” with a full-body shimmy and a goofy expression.

The effect was that Stewart occasionally came across as the frontman of the world’s largest wedding band, from the supper-club sweet nothings of “Have I Told You Lately” to the smoothed-out Motown of “It Takes Two.” That one was presented as a salute to Tina Turner, and there was a low-grade theme of the freshly-minted octogenarian paying tribute to friends and colleagues he’s lost recently, with tips of the hat to Christine McVie with the Sam Cooke-style soul of “I’d Rather Go Blind” and Ozzy Osbourne with “Forever Young.”

“Rhythm Of My Heart,” on the other hand, was dedicated to Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian people, its anthemic surge playing somewhat incongruously under photos of the war.

For one song, though, Stewart the artist clawed his way out of Stewart the entertainer. With one hand in the pocket of his silver lamé jacket, he sang “Mandolin Wind” with no ceremony, nodding his head to the music when he wasn’t closing his eyes and listening. He did almost nothing but be present with his material, and it was unabashedly lovely. In that moment, it was possible to see and hear the Rod Stewart who became a legend, rather than the Rod Stewart who was one.

Openers Cheap Trick occasionally suffered from a few of the same pitfalls that dogged Stewart, with some notable stiffness and Rick Nielsen so focused on tricksy guitar that he sometimes got sloppy when it came to playing the songs themselves. But songs like “Dream Police,” “Surrender,” “On Top Of The World,” and “I Want You To Want Me” were all functionally constructed to blow past such problems, and a weakened Cheap Trick still packed plenty of firepower. Better still was “If You Want My Love,” partly because its slower tempo and a creamy vocal by a still-on-point Robin Zander left less room for pantsing around.

Setlist for Rod Stewart at Xfinity Center, July 26, 2025

• Infatuation
• Tonight I’m Yours (Don’t Hurt Me)
• It’s A Heartache (Bonnie Tyler cover)
• Having A Party (Sam Cooke cover)
• It Takes Two (Marvin Gaye and Kim Weston cover)
• The First Cut Is The Deepest (Cat Stevens cover)
• Tonight’s The Night (Gonna Be Alright)
• Forever Young
• Ooh La La (Faces cover)
• Young Turks
• Rhythm Of My Heart (René Shuman cover)
• Maggie May
• I’d Rather Go Blind (Etta James cover)
• Stay With Me (Faces cover)
• Lady Marmalade (Labelle cover)
• Mandolin Wind
• You’re In My Heart (The Final Acclaim)
• Have I Told You Lately (Van Morrison cover)
• Proud Mary (Creedence Clearwater Revival cover)
• Love Train (The O’Jays cover)
• Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?
• Hot Legs

ENCORE:

• Some Guys Have All The Luck (The Persuaders cover)

Marc Hirsh can be reached at [email protected] or on Bluesky @spacecitymarc.bsky.social.

Marc Hirsh

Music Critic

Marc Hirsh is a music critic who covers a wide variety of genres, including pop, rock, hip-hop, country and jazz.

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