At Rogers Arena on Monday, August 23

How totally strange that Lady Gaga’s Monday night mega-spectacle at Rogers Arena wasn’t really about the New York City subway cars, flaming pianos, or broken-down cabs that all showed up on-stage. And while the fire-spewing religious statues, Central Park mini-set, and demonic-looking oversized Anglerfish got plenty of applause, the evening wasn’t about them either.

In fact, there was a very good argument to be made that the artist known to her accountant as Stefani Germanotta didn’t need her endless parade of toys. Despite the shitloads of eye candy on display during a two-hour show that never flagged, it was what came out of Lady Gaga’s mouth between songs that made the night memorable.

The most famous New Jersey girl this side of Snooki got the crowd on her side early when she announced, a couple of songs in, “All the freaks are outside and I locked the fucking doors.”

On the surface, that statement made little sense considering Rogers Arena looked like Halloween had come two months early. The stands were a hot mess of white-trash mommas using empty Pabst tallboys for hair curlers, drag queens who last shaved when Mel Gibson was a breaking news story on TMZ, and Surrey chicks with strategically placed yellow “Caution” tape. On the floor, the most creative award of the night went to the dude in the front row who had a broken disco ball surgically attached to the side of his head.

And on-stage, the cavalcade of out-there entertainers included Mohawked dancers, greased-and-shirtless guitarists, and fantastically effeminate black hype-men in the finest thigh-high black boots money can buy. Gaga’s message to the faithful was simple, namely that everyone in the room owed it to themselves to be proud of who they are. The true weirdos? Those would be the masses outside who don’t have the balls to let their freak flags fly.

Gaga certainly flew hers with a show that was a weird mixture of Vegas-style theatrics and rock ’n’ roll grit. On the one hand, you had a stage that morphed into something new and shiny every 20 minutes or so. Kicking off with the house-whomper “Dance in the Dark”, act one saw the singer tearing around a New York tenement-style set studded with neon signs advertising implants, bling, gold teeth, liquor, and sedation. (The best of these might have been the one for the Hotel Hass, namely because the “el” and the second “H” were cleverly burned out.)

No less eye-popping was the candy-studded, soul-pop shaker “Teeth”, which had her prowling a stage that looked like Central Park as spookily reimagined by Tim Burton. Hell, even the piano ballads had something to keep the ADHD-afflicted interested, with the top of her Steinway catching fire for “Speechless” and then later becoming a towering cyclone of burning petrol for “You and I”.

Through all of this, Lady Gaga tore through costume changes, sporting a red-devil outfit while playing a standup-bass-cum-keytar during “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich”, gearing down into see-through nun’s getup for “LoveGame”, and bleeding profusely from the neck while wearing a black-vinyl fetishwear combo during “Alejandro”.

And, somehow, during the insanity, Lady Gaga pulled off her greatest stunt of all: coming off as a real person, as opposed as just another prefabbed, plasticized pop star. Forget blowing the bank on FX, the best way to connect with your crowd is to talk to them, and the singer did plenty of that, admitting at one point that she wasn’t popular in high school and pretty much got made fun of every day.

Her greatest sermon, though, came early on, when she dedicated the night to anyone who’s ever been told that they aren’t beautiful enough, aren’t charismatic enough, can’t sing, can’t dance, and basically don’t have what it takes to realize their dreams. What Lady Gaga was doing, of course, was reeling off a long list of criticisms that she’s heard over the course of her career. Her brilliance is recognizing that everyone in the audience has heard similar putdowns over the course of their lives.

This message was drilled home by the loudest cheer of the night.

Except for, admittedly, the moment when Lady Gaga popped out of the stage wearing a contraption that shot showers of sparks out of her hooters and her cooter. Yes, sometimes, no matter how good one’s intentions, the toys win.