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Adele will welcome tens of thousands of fans tonight (2 August) to the first of her 10 concerts at a purpose-built stadium in Munich.
The show will take place after the final dress rehearsal was cancelled due a threat of thunderstorms and heavy rain in the Bavarian capital.
Organisers said they took the decision to cancel the run-through “due to safety measures”.
The temporary stadium, which spans 400,000 sq metres across the Munich fairgrounds outside the city, was put together by a 700-strong team and will accommodate up to 75,000 fans per show.
Adele, 36, will perform in a stadium that was conceived by Florian Wieder, the man behind designs for Eurovision and America’s Got Talent. The stage, meanwhile, was created by STUFISH Entertainment Architects.
The venue also includes a huge “Adele World” hospitality complete with Bavarian beer garden, a bar named after her recent single “I Drink Wine”, and a pub modelled on The Good Ship in Kilburn, north-west London, where Adele used to perform.
The “Hello” singer’s manager, Jonathan Dickins, told reporters that the atmosphere would be “cosy” but also the “total opposite” of Adele’s Las Vegas residency, The Guardian reports.
The production team said that the stage’s screen, a 220 x 30-metre backdrop that will block noise from the nearby autobahn, cost around 40m € (£34m) alone.
Total production costs are estimated to have reached hundreds of millions of euros. Local economics expert Clemens Baumgärtner estimated that Adele’s 10 shows would generate around 566m € for Munich, which did not contribute to the production costs.
Earlier this week, Adele shared a black-and-white portrait of herself looking over the stadium, captioned in German: “Can’t wait to see you on Friday!”
Two weeks ago, she shared a series of shots that showed her in a high-vis jacket as she explored the venue, as she wrote: “It’s all a bit bloody exciting.”
And yesterday (1 August), she shared a photo of her standing outside her pop-up merchandise bus, this time using a Spice Girls lyric: “Spice up your life.”
Adele told fans at a Las Vegas show earlier this year that she has been working out “like a crazy person” to ensure she is in shape for Munich, where she will end up walking around “four or five miles a night” while onstage.
“I am back at my gym grind like nobody’s business, I am doing two or three sessions a day,” she said. “My arse is getting rock solid again! I can move mountains with my bum. I have been working out like a crazy person.”
She added: “The reason that I am working out like I’m an athlete again is because that stage is f***ing enormous.”
Adele announced in July that she plans on taking a “big break” from music after her final run of shows, including her concluding Las Vegas residency dates in November.
Speaking to the German broadcaster ZDF, she said her “tank is quite empty at the minute. I don’t have any plans for new music at all.”
She continued: “I want a big break after all this and I think I want to do other creative things just for a little while.
“You know, I don’t even sing at home at all,” she said. “How strange is that.”
While she felt the size of her Las Vegas audience was “manageable”, she also said it had been an “emotional exchange”.
“I miss everything about before I was famous,” she said, “I think probably being anonymous the most.
“I like that I get to make music all the time, whenever I want to, and people are receptive to it and like it. That’s pretty unimaginable. But the fame side of it I absolutely hate.”
