It likely wasn’t the first time Bruno Mars played his song “Billionaire” in front of an actual billionaire.
But as the pop-soul hitmaker sang about wanting to “buy all of the things I never had” not long into his concert Thursday night at Inglewood’s new Intuit Dome, you couldn’t help but scope out Steve Ballmer, who’d used his vast wealth to do just that by building a long-awaited home for his beloved Clippers basketball team.
Sitting a few rows back from the stage in his signature light-blue button-down shirt, Ballmer clapped along with Mars’ peppy tune and happily received a round of back-slaps from the pals seated around him.
Thursday’s sold-out show, the first of two at the arena by Mars, served as the grand opening of Intuit Dome, a state-of-the-art arena that cost more than $2 billion and will begin hosting the Clippers in October (after years in which the team shared downtown’s Crypto.com Arena with the Lakers).
“Y’all, we are part of California history right now,” Mars told an audience that included Jennifer Lopez, Angela Bassett, Courtney B. Vance, Ashton Kutcher and Simu Liu, among other celebrities.
As openings go, it had some bumps: Hyped in advance for its high-tech touches, the venue’s entry-by-smartphone and opt-in facial-recognition systems weren’t working as planned Thursday, which led to a giant bottleneck at the main entrance as the building’s staff struggled to inspect fans’ digital tickets one by one. The show, which had been scheduled for 8 p.m., ended up starting at 9:40; on social media, concertgoers complained about long lines and a lack of clear signage and reliable Wi-Fi — hardly a tragedy, though embarrassing enough for a tech baron like Ballmer, who made much of his estimated $120-billion fortune as the head of Microsoft.
Yet if there’s one entertainer who can smooth out a wrinkle, it’s Bruno Mars.
Performing in the Los Angeles area for the first time since 2018, the 38-year-old singer put on a two-hour display of the effortless charisma and deep musical know-how that have earned him eight No. 1 singles, 15 Grammy Awards and gigs at not one but two Super Bowl halftime shows. He wore a silky red bowling shirt and a neatly trimmed mustache with heavy ’70s-playboy vibes; he led the crack eight-piece band he calls the Hooligans like a suave combination of James Brown, Michael Jackson, Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley. (Watching Mars, you’re never far from remembering that he got his start in show business as a pint-size Elvis impersonator in his native Hawaii.)
Mars’ music is a catalog of durable styles — rock, pop, R&B, funk, reggae — and he offered up bits of each in songs like the sweaty “Calling All My Lovelies,” which featured an extended comedic bit where he pretended to call a lover on a gold-plated phone; the effervescent “Treasure,” which evoked the glory days of Earth, Wind & Fire; and the swaggering “That’s What I Like,” into which he threw a bit of salsa music just to show he could.
Near the end of the show, he brought out Lady Gaga — he called her “pop royalty” — to premiere their brand-new duet, “Die With a Smile,” with Mars wearing a cowboy hat as he strummed a guitar and Gaga in a giant beehive wig as she played an electric piano.
For Mars, who has spent much of the past couple years performing in Las Vegas both on his own and with his and Anderson .Paak’s throwback-soul duo Silk Sonic, Thursday’s show was proof that, as quickly as pop music evolves these days, Mars’ old-school skills remain valuable. When a fan on the floor needed medical help at one point, Mars had his band vamp for a few minutes as security guards found the guy and carried him out.
“This is what professionals do,” he said with a grin as he steered the players back into the show.
And what of Intuit? L.A. already has plenty of other venues this size, including Crypto, the Hollywood Bowl and the Kia Forum, which Ballmer also owns and which sits just a mile up Prairie Avenue from the new building. Yet the room sounded great Thursday: crisp and detailed with less of the boominess you usually encounter in an arena.
Mars nodded to Intuit’s location as he introduced one of his earliest hits, “Nothin’ on You,” which he said contained “the four chords that changed my life.”
“I used to live not too far from here, driving around in my Honda Accord,” he said, a little misty from the memory. “I’ll never forget the day — I was rolling around here and I heard this song on the radio.”