Review: Suzanne Vega at Regal Theatre

Suzanne Vega at Regal Theatre
Saturday, September 26, 2026 

Returning to Perth twelve years since last she visited, New York singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega graced The Regal’s stage on Saturday night, giving her audience a full-sized theatre concert that somehow equally felt intensely intimate, as if either at an underground Brooklyn jazz bar or a poetry corner somewhere in Greenwich Village. Vega recounted the high degree of excitement she and her team had felt when this Antipodean leg of her Flying with Angels tour was first constructed, over a year ago now, and how the myriad warm welcomes and authentic conversations with fans across both Australia and New Zealand had more than exceeded those already high expectations.

Forgoing the need for a support act, pyrotechnics, a flashy light show, or even a drum kit, Vega brought to the fore the music, the instruments, and her magnificent voice. Joined on stage by her longtime guitarist Gerry Leonard and newer collaborator Stephanie Winters on cello, these were three premier musicians bringing joy to the masses. Vega’s every syllable was clearly audible and perfectly enunciated—not as common as one might expect at concerts—to which the audience listened in a rapt silence, in direct and striking contrast to the often-thunderous applause between songs.

Although nominally a tour of her latest album, Vega warmed up to the evening with a selection of her older tracks, beginning with 1985’s Marlene on the Wall, her debut single which charted in the UK the following year, before she blasted through both the crunchiness of 99.9F° and the relaxed lounge stylings of Caramel.

Vega told the audience a story before the next song, Gypsy, of a sixteen-year-old Suzanne as a summer camp counsellor in the Adirondacks who met a boy, bonded over a shared passion for Leonard Cohen, and fell in love for an entire six weeks. One of Vega’s friends had said of this piece, “It was as if the boy had been living with us ever since,” which the singer related to tonight’s crowd with the wryest of grins.

The next track was introduced as old, long, sad, and with a tragic ending. Vega asked her fans tonight how they felt about that, to which hot and sustained cheers erupted. She was, of course, speaking of The Queen and the Soldier, her heartbreaking missive on the cynical abuses by those in power when challenged by those they purport to lead, as evergreen a topic now as when first released forty years ago. Vega’s voice soared as high as the parapets of the castle she described, the hard truths held within the lyrics giving a clarity akin to waters freshly melted from a glacier.

Vega then brought forward her newest material, Flying with Angels, Speakers’ Corner, and Chambermaid.  About caregiving, the First Amendment, and a Bob Dylan fever dream respectively, these pieces slipped in effortlessly amongst Vega’s wider repertoire, easily showcasing she still held fascination with the detailed minutiae of life and had lost none of her observational abilities as a songwriter.

The opening chords of Luka struck the chest with an almost physical intensity. A song from the eighties unafraid to be this blunt about family and domestic violence, it rather still astounds that this became one of Vega’s biggest successes. To hear it live, with the artist’s voice barely changed in the decades since, was uplifting and soul-affirming, even taking the underlying subject matter into consideration. Shining a light into the darkness is always far better than it being allowed to fester.

Compare and contrast with the main set closer, Tom’s Diner, the other big hit Vega had, boosted by a trip-hop beat that had not been on the original release. A series of observations during a New York coffee break would not ordinarily indicate a multi-territory top ten smash, but the eighties were an odd place, and Vega has certainly leant into the fame the remix especially has given her.

Without turntables or DJs to give the DNA dance beat treatment, guitarist Leonard drew together a throbbing, insistent, almost punk guitar riff instead, as Vega stalked the stage left to right like an angry cat, almost spitting the lyrics, before it all came together, cello included, in a near enough wall of sound at the end.

Returned to stage a couple of minutes later for the encore, Vega seemed to take a unique approach to the songs to come, asking the audience for suggestions, to which two dozen shouts immediately came up from the darkness. It would of course depend on which tracks had been practised by Leonard and Winters over the past several weeks, but Vega’s entire discography beckoned, and this idea of musical democracy gave another shared sense of authentic connection with the performers.

But first, the non-negotiable of the encore. “A New York song, written by a New Yorker, covered by another New Yorker,” was the way Vega introduced Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side. She noted she had only heard of Reed performing “the big hit” in concert once, but that Vega herself had covered it a plethora of times, and did so fantastically again tonight.

As more and more requests came from the audience for the remainder of the encore, Vega realised she had “too many bangers”, laughing with Leonard at the thought, and reminded herself to journal the phrase. Perhaps it could be the next album title, inspired all the way from Perth, Australia.

Vega ended up selecting Small Blue Thing and In Liverpool to perform, the latter an echo of the story she had told earlier in the night in Gypsy, written in a hotel in her former paramour’s hometown, wondering how he was. Then, almost as if a movie trilogy, the BBC had played that song, he had recognised himself in the lyrics, reached back out to Vega, attended a concert, and swapped email addresses. Some lives do go full circle.

Before fully departing the stage, Vega asked the audience whether she could possibly squeeze one more track in on this, her very last night in Australia. The fans all but shrieked back that she could consume their entire weekend. Vega had split the country into venues that wanted Small Blue Thing in the encore and those that preferred her upcoming suggestion. The crowd called out, telling her Perth went both ways, and before that conversation could get much spicier, Vega announced Blood Makes Noise as the final song of the evening.

A clear fan favourite from the reaction this garnered, Leonard again improvised on solo guitar what would normally have been overlaid multiple times in the studio. A grinding, gritty, circular loop is what ensued, with Vega’s lyrics at their breathiest, and, although no actual dancing was observed at this seated event, the crowd loosened up appreciably.

It was now officially over. Once Vega, Leonard and Winters had taken all their well-deserved bows, the lead-out song was Nelly’s Hot in Herre, a warm nod to an ad lib Vega had provided during the concert. It was a telling reminder that she still lived out in the real world with the rest of us, not cloistered away in a hipster palace, and it was wonderfully hilarious in its own, very small way.

It was a wonderful evening where the focus was firmly on the music, the musicians, and the songs. Vega still can write a powerful lyric even with her newest material, and the authenticity in performance and care she and the others held for their fans was absolutely palpable.

PAUL MEEK

Photos by Alan Holbrook