Olivia Rodrigo opens 86-date 'Unraveled' tour with rain, a dissolving dress and a birthday song for her mom

Olivia Rodrigo opened the biggest tour of her career on Friday night in Hartford, Connecticut, with a two-hour, 23-song set that ended a five-month wait since her third album debuted at No. 1 and set up more than seven months of arena shows across nine countries.

The singer played two sold-out shows at PeoplesBank Arena, the first stop on The Unraveled Tour, which will run 86 dates through May 10, 2027. The show's centerpiece came during "The Cure," when artificial rain fell as a custom Hussein Chalayan-designed white dress appeared to dissolve on stage, revealing a red satin corset underneath. It was one of five costume changes over the course of the night, styled by sisters Chloe and Chenelle Delgadillo and including a custom Dilara Findikoglu minidress paired with Dr. Martens boots for "Drop Dead," with hair and makeup by Karissa O'Hanlon.

Midway through the set, Rodrigo paused at a piano to tell the crowd it was her mother's birthday, leading the arena in singing "Happy Birthday" before adding, according to a report on the opening night, that she wouldn't be filming the moment because her mother "would kill me." The two-hour set drew from all three of her studio albums and closed without an encore, a structural choice she has used on past tours as well.

The numbers

The tour's scale reflects the commercial run behind it. "You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love," Rodrigo's third studio album, debuted atop the Billboard 200 with 485,000 equivalent album units in its first week, including 273,000 in pure sales and 164,000 vinyl LPs, according to Billboard's chart-week breakdown. One of its tracks, "What's Wrong With Me," featuring the Cure's Robert Smith, gave the 67-year-old singer his first-ever solo entry on the Hot 100, debuting at No. 17 on 15.5 million U.S. streams in its opening week, per Billboard's chart-beat column. Opening night itself ran 23 songs across a six-act structure Rodrigo built around the seasons — spring, summer, summer twilight, autumn, winter and a second spring — with no encore, drawing on all three of her albums, from "Drivers License" and "Good 4 U" to "Vampire" and "All-American Bitch."

Context: a fast rise formalized on stage

The tour follows the June 12 release of "You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love," which the Grammy Museum has paired with a companion exhibit, "Olivia Rodrigo: the cure unraveled," built around the video for "The Cure" and running through Feb. 22, 2027, according to the museum's own listing. The exhibit opened with an onstage conversation between Rodrigo and filmmaker Cameron Crowe, tying the tour's launch to a second, museum-based way for fans to engage with the same era of her career.

When the tour was first announced in April, it covered 40 U.S. shows, six in Canada and 15 in Europe; promoters added dates the following week as demand outpaced the initial run, expanding it to the current 86-show schedule spanning the United States, Canada, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, England, France, Italy and Spain. Rodrigo's team also sold a limited allotment of $20 "Silver Star Tickets" per pair for the tour, with a portion of proceeds benefiting Fund 4 Good, her initiative supporting nonprofits that work with women and girls — a pricing move that has drawn attention in an arena-touring market where secondary-market prices for comparable pop tours regularly run into the hundreds of dollars. The album underpinning the run has itself proven to have staying power: after its 485,000-unit opening week, it continued generating new chart stories months later, including Smith's crossover entry, rather than fading after an initial debut spike.

Who is watching

The opening night carries stakes beyond Rodrigo herself. Five opening acts — Wolf Alice, who played Hartford, along with Devon Again, the Last Dinner Party, Grace Ives and Die Spitz — will rotate through the run, each gaining exposure to arena-sized crowds they would not otherwise draw on their own. Smith's unexpected Hot 100 entry, at an age when most of his contemporaries have long since stopped charting as leads, has become its own storyline inside the album's commercial success; it is his first appearance on that chart as a solo artist in a recording career that stretches back to the late 1970s with the Cure.

Fans in nine countries now have a fixed date to plan around through next spring, with the tour scheduled to close at the O2 Arena in London on May 10, 2027. Venues along the route, and the local businesses around them, stand to see the kind of concentrated economic bump that arena tours of this size typically generate, while ticket brokers and resale platforms have already been tracking demand for the sold-out Hartford dates as a signal of how the rest of the run will price out. Coverage of the scramble for sold-out tickets in the weeks before the tour began described sellouts within minutes in several markets.

"This is a special night, because it's opening night. But also because it's my mom's birthday," Rodrigo told the crowd from the piano, adding that her mother was "the best mom in the world."

What happens next

The tour moves through North American arenas before crossing to Canada and then Europe next spring, with the setlist expected to evolve city to city as Rodrigo rotates in additional material from her three albums. Critics who covered the Hartford shows framed the two-hour, no-encore format and the six-season staging as a deliberate departure from a standard hits-plus-encore arena show, according to Variety's setlist recap, published within a day of the opener.

The Grammy Museum exhibit runs in parallel through the winter, giving fans who can't get tour tickets a separate way to engage with "The Cure" era. For now, the show that opened Friday — built around dissolving costumes, seasonal staging and a very public birthday toast — sets the template for the 85 dates still to come, running through next May in nine countries.