IT starts at the SeaBus terminal at Lonsdale Quay: teams of girls tottering around in high heels sporting lightning bolts across one eye.

On the other side, things get even more serious with some fans sporting corsets, bows made out of hair, beer cans as hair rollers, fishnets, some wrapped in industrial chains. They are not visions of the apocalypse — they are Lady Gaga’s “Little Monsters.”

Inside Rogers Arena, glow sticks and sunglasses abound. Women and men, young and old, mimic the avant-garde artist’s discarded trends such as sunglasses covered in cigarettes. Other Vancouverites rock out to the opening act, Semi Precious Weapons, in homemade wearable art, like disco ball hats, caution tape and oversize neon collars.

At first, the stage is covered by a purple velvet curtain. It rises to reveal Gaga posing against a shadow screen, singing while remaining perfectly still. The shadow screen disappears during the second song unveiling a metal dancing framework and a broken-down car that turns in to a piano for the favourite, “Just Dance.”

The entire night focuses on Gaga and her “friends,” including a leather-clad cross-dresser by the name of Posh, a longtime friend of the diva’s. They make their way to the Monster Ball through New York cityscapes with sets constantly changing.

Gaga’s tour is staged as a party for all of her fans whom she refers to as her Little Monsters. The message is that her fans should feel beautiful and confident about themselves. She screams to the crowd, “All the freaks are outside, and I locked the doors!”

Much like Madonna, Gaga’s music is only rivaled by her larger-than-life performances and costumes. Over the course of the evening, she transforms from a see-through plastic dress, to a stringy lampshade-like head covering the size of a tractor wheel, to a white “good fairy”-type mechanical outfit whose white fibers move on their own. Some of the ensembles seemed as if they could have come straight from an haute-couture runway.

The show was high energy, and unlike some of her peers who also perform high-energy dance routines on stage, Gaga was — gasp — actually singing. Her out-of-breath pants were amplified to the audience while she improvised lyrics overtop of the music.

Surprisingly Gaga emphasizes real experiences in her Monster Ball material. She played a heart-wrenching song about her father’s alcoholism on the piano (during which the instrument erupted in to a flaming tornado), sneezed in to the microphone, spat on stage to clear her throat, and spoke openly about lesbian, gay, transgender and transsexual rights.

Gaga also spoke out against plastic surgery and showed visceral, sometimes disturbing, videos during set-changes that featured in-your-face blood and gore imagery.

All of this drove the audience further into Gaga-fever, as they cheered on her subversion of cultural norms, erupting in to cheers when the Lady announced that she would be raising $20,000 a night on tour for lesbian, gay, transgender and transsexual homelessness.

The empathy with her audience is clear when Gaga calls out to an audience member and her friends in the nosebleeds and invites them to come closer to the stage, offering to meet them afterwards.

She says that her Little Monsters are her religion, and talks to audience members while examining their costumes with a glowing crystal scepter.

Once the sweet string melody of “Alejandro” fires up, Gaga dramatically declares, “Tonight, my religion is Vancouver,” running up the stage in patent stiletto boots, then bathing in a bleeding Christian relic — which, of course, is on fire.

After strutting around in her well-known flame-shooting underwear, Gaga finishes the night with “Bad Romance.” She stoops at the end of the catwalk-like stage and rustles through the low fog with her diamond-like chunky heels to pick up a bra that a fan has thrown on stage.

Stretching it out for all to see, she whirls the bra, which reads “Free Bitch,” a Gaga mantra for personal freedom, over her head and freezes for one final pose with her dancers.

Vancouver’s free spirited, tolerant, and fun-loving crowd got through to Gaga, an iconic performer and a real artist. We, in turn, were Gaga-fied.

jluther@nsnews.com