“Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of a Showgirl” has begun unspooling in cinemas nationwide for its limited three-day engagement, and the theatrical event’s behind-the-scenes footage and personal commentary from Swift are giving fans more insight into the hit album it’s promoting.
The hour-and-a-half program (presented in theaters with no trailers or other preliminaries) begins with Swift offering a brief introduction and thanks, then goes straight into the premiere of the elaborate music video for “The Life of Ophelia,” followed by behind-the-scenes footage of the making of the Swift-directed video. Most of the rest of the 90 minutes consists of semi-static lyric videos for the other 11 tracks from the “Life of a Showgirl” album, preceded by Swift offering two or three minutes of commentary about the inspiration for the songwriting in each instance.
More BTS footage from the “Ophelia” shoot is scattered throughout the program, which ends with a reprise of the opening video — with viewers now having more insight into where to look for fun moments that will have gone overlooked on first viewing. (The repeat showing of the music video at the close is also handy for any latecomers to the theater who didn’t believe the part about there being no trailers.)
Discussing the “Ophelia” video, Swift says, “The idea I came up with for this music video was sort of a journey throughout all these different ways in which over time periods, historically, you could be a showgirl… Like, how you would be in the public eye back during the 1800s, when you’d sit for a Pre-Raphaelite painting. Or you could be a showgirl by being a cabaret burlesque club performer. You could be a theatrical actor putting on a performance. You could a Vegas showgirl. You could be one of the girls in the Busby Berkeley screen-siren era of the ‘30s and ‘40s. You could be a pop singer on the Eras Tour.”
Indeed, the time-tripping allows the star to take on several different personas, including a classic showgirl with a Marilyn-Monroe-platinum bob hairdo, a ’60s-style brunette go-go dancer in a nightclub, an Esther Williams-like bathing beauty on a movie set with a giant staircase and a cast of dozens, and a raven-haired theatrical actress. All of these different looks show up later in the lyric videos, via brief video loops that run behind the giant-sized lyric excerpts.
Serious Swifties will enjoy the music video, and especially the copious behind-the-scenes footage, for the many familiar faces that populate these scenes. One of the reasons for her excitement in sharing all this, she says, is that “is that we got everybody back together from the Eras Tour; all of the performers that you saw on that stage are back in this music video, as well as so many of the people who worked behind the scenes to create the Eras Tour.” That includes everyone from the dancers to production designer Ethan Tobman and choreographer Mandy Moore.
It’s not a big spoiler to say that the music video ends with a recreation of the album cover image of Swift mostly submerged in a tub in full glam attire. What many fans may not know is that this was all borrowed from a classic painting.
For the denouement of the “Ophelia” video, she “wanted to match the framing ideally to the album cover and kind of just frame it exactly like that, so that people are like, ‘Oh, so the cover is a reference to the Ophelia painting, and this ending is a reference to the cover.’ So, art history for pop fans!” The painting she’s referring to is a circa-1850 painting of the Shakespearian character Ophelia by British artist Sir John Everett Malais, which portrays the doomed woman floating and singing in the water before she drowns herself, as described by Gertrude but not directly portrayed in “Hamlet.”
“Ophelia drowned because Hamlet just messed with her head so much that she went crazy and she couldn’t take it anymore, and all these men were just gaslighting her until she drowned,” Swift explains. But in her version, “what if the hook is that you saved my heart from the fate of Ophelia? Like. basically you are the reason why I didn’t end up like this, tragic, poetic hero girl, who passed away in a fictional world?”
Admitting that it might sound like “a stupid thing to say,” Swift goes ahead and declares: “I love Shakespeare… It holds up. It’s actually not overhyped! And I love those tragedies so much. I fall in love with those characters so much that it hurts me that they die. … This is now the second song where I’ve gone back in and (am) like, ‘Yo, what if they got married instead of they die?’” (The other one she’s referring to is, of course, “Love Story,” which lets Romeo and Juliet off the hook.)
There’s deeper meaning to some of the other imagery in the music video than might first be intuited by viewers. For instance, that classic movie-musical scene in which she and all the dancers are wearing bathing caps and carrying life preservers… it celebrates the famously swimming movie star Esther Williams, cineastes will now, but it’s also, yes, an Ophelia reference. “Right now we are sitting on the set of what we’re kind of calling our Busby Berkeley-inspired, MGM, screen queen 1930s and ‘40s” motif, she says, “and we’ve got it looking kind of a little bit like a beach/swim/pool thing. And that’s a play on Ophelia.” The character drowned herself, as previously noted, but in that movie-musical homage, “we’ve got these lifesaving devices, which could have prevented that from happening,” she points out, with tongue firmly in cheek.
Viewers also learn, in the behind-the-scenes footage, how a certain very handsome bread came to make a cameo. “Oh, I can bake the bread… Can it be my bread? Can my bread be in the music video?” The next day, she is delighted to add her impressive part to the set design. “This is a really exciting day for me as a baker because my bread is actually a music video star as of today.”
One point that comes up as the dancers learn their choreography: “The Fate of Ophelia” was not actually played on-set, to avoid leaks. And so the dancers required extra direction because of that. “We’re in secret sauce. No one’s hearing this track. All anyone’s hearing in the room is just click. So I also have to be able to inform the dancers, ‘You need to feel this in this moment.’”
As the song explanations proceed, she brings clarity to what has quickly emerged as a fan-favorite song, “Opalite,” and explains the two color distinctions that would be lost on most listeners without her spelling it out.
“Opalite is manmade opal. I’ve always loved opal; my mom has always loved opal; it’s kind of like our thing — one of our many things,” Swift says. “And I loved the metaphor of a manmade opal (as) you had to make your own happiness in your life. You had to get yourself through some difficult times to get to the positive place you’re in now. And I really loved the idea that the manmade gemstone jewel is also a metaphor for choosing your own path to happiness… It didn’t just happen to you. You had to fight for it. You had to work for it. You had to earn it.”
Swift has been highly reluctant to discuss who her songs are about, going back at least to her second album, so she isn’t about to break form with that now and discuss the real-life figures whom Swifties believe are addressed in the diss tracks “Father Figure” and “Actually Romantic.” But she does lend context to her thinking about those tunes.
The singer says her basic love for alliteration is why she was drawn to George Michael’s “Father Figure,” which is the one interpolation on the album, in her new composition of the same name. She felt there was room to work it because “that line in the context of the George Michael song is romantic,” but “I always thought it could be cool to use the line ‘I’ll be your father figure’ as a creative writing prompt and turn it into a story about power, and a story about a young ingenue and their mentor and the way that that relationship can change over time… and betrayal and wit and cunning and cleverness and strategy. Essentially it ends up in a ‘who’s gonna win’ situation — who’s gonna gonna outfox the other?” She doesn’t fully address the change of perspective that happens midway through the lyrics, but says “I can relate to both characters in certain parts of the song.“
As for “Actually Romantic,” which is the talk of the pop-culture internet this weekend because of how it appears to be an answer song to a track Charli XCX put out last year, she describes it “as sort of a love letter to someone who hates you. Sometimes you don’t know that you are a part of someone else’s story, but you are. And then kind of there can be this moment where it’s unveiled to you through things that they do that are very overt.” As she’s gotten older, she adds, “I’ve just started to be like, ‘Oh my God… you did so much with this… it’s flattering. I don’t hate you and I don’t think about this, but thank you for all the effort, honestly. Wow. That is very sweet of you to think about me this much, even if it’s negative. Like, in my industry, attention is affection, and you’ve given me a whole lot of it, so…” She then blows the camera a kiss.
She also gets into the impetus for “Cancelled!,” saying she “wanted to write a song about how you can become wiser for it and how you can become sharper … I definitely judge people a lot less now that I’ve been under the microscope for so long. I just judge people based on who I know to be their actions, not some sort of general consensus where people are like, ‘Step away, they’re radioactive.’ I’m just like: not gonna do that. I’m gonna do that if somebody proves that they’re not a good person.”
Sabrina Carpenter does not appear anywhere in this theatrical program, except for a film clip of a duet during the Eras Tour. But Swift has plenty to say about bringing her on for the album’s sole duet, on the title track.
“We finished writing it and I was like, ‘I want Sabrina to sing on this so bad’ … She’s well-equipped for this career. She is so good at moving through backlash or criticism or people being unfair to her or picking her apart. She has the temperament to pivot and use it as fuel. … I really feel like she’s got the same mentality as what this song (is) about: having a love for the game that overrides how hard this can be. And she was like, ‘Are you kidding? I’m dead. Yes, of course.’ …. And then when she was on tour in Sweden, she took her days off and went and recorded it, and that is a showgirl for you.”
Those producing the “release party” and distributing it have pointedly avoided calling it a “film” — but it is certainly being counted as one for the purposes of box office receipts. “Showgirl” is expected without question to come out on top of the weekend’s grosses, even as the album itself is poised to break records for streaming and sales in 2025, based on first-day results.
