The seemingly one-off engagement has McCartney mostly reprising his 2025 arena-tour setlist in a grandly confined space.

Playing the first of two nights at the Fonda Theatre in Hollywood Friday night, Paul McCartney acknowledged the tiered arrangement that had VIPs up in the balcony and the hoi polloi down on the floor. “Hello, you people upstairs, in the posh seats,” he said early in the show. “You poor people down here have gotta stand up.” It almost seemed as if he might be alluding to a similar, famous speech given when the Beatles played for British royalty in 1963 — “The people in the cheaper seats, clap your hands, and the rest of you, if you’d just rattle your jewelry.” That was John’s thing, back then, but leave it to both Beatles to have a bemused sense of class consciousness.

Of course, when the world’s most celebrated living musician is playing at a 1,200-capacity venue, everyone in attendance is feeling like a VIP. Maybe most of all those on the floor, who, perhaps more to the point, had reason to feel like lottery winners. While there were some guest-listers at ground level as well, most of those in attendance had made it through a system in which they pre-registered with AXS and were selected for the opportunity to purchase $200 tickets (or a more expensive tier with exclusive merch bags). Everyone on hand certain understood their high level of privilege for a night, given the envious remarks of all their friends on social media who’d been posting their “sorry” notices for sympathy. The presumed hundreds of thousands of Beatles buffs who did not make it through this lottery had to keep consoling themselves with the mantra: It’s not a meritocracy…

What the attending 1,200 got with the 102-minute performance — besides eternal bragging rights — was a condensed version of the setlist McCartney did on his arena tour last fall in a much more intimate setting, plus a pair of rarer bonus tracks that usually show up only in occasional soundchecks (“Every Night” and “Flaming Pie”). Although they also got the chance to buy freshly minted merch with the logo of his forthcoming album, “The Boys of Dungeon Lane,” he did not premiere anything from that impending set, nor even play “Days We Left Behind,” which was just released Thursday as his first new single in five and a half years.

McCartney did mention “Days We Left Behind,” which led to the expectation he was about to play the nostalgic ballad, before he set the crowd straight. “We’re in the process of learning it, so don’t ask us to do it” he said, going on to explain what was giving him a little trouble in getting it down for live purposes. “And it’s in B, but I wrote it in C, but for some reason it’s in B.. I said, no, too much for me!” he quipped, apparently writing the disparity off as an Andrew Watt thing. Nonetheless, there were appreciative shouts about the new song, and McCartney replied, “I’m glad you love it.”

He was in good humor (and when has he ever not been in good humor in public?). McCartney responded to a fellow near the front who was bearing a sign. “This guy has been to 146 of our shows. And it’s a little obsessive, but we love it.” The very next song was the acoustic Beatles classic “Blackbird,” which he suddenly stopped, having muffed a lyric, although most of the crowd probably didn’t notice. “You can’t fly with sunken eyes,” McCartney said, in pointing out his confluence of accidentally mixed metaphors. He blamed it on the guy with the 146 sign throwing him off his game. “Let’s start that again. Oh God. I had the worst experience (once). We were playing the show and I goofed it about three times.” The song took flight on the second attempt.

The setlist may have been largely familiar to anyone who saw his SoCal shows at the Acrisure Arena or Santa Barbara Bowl last fall, but he did not repeat the same anecdotes that he typically shared on last fall’s tour. Instead, he remarked on the relative intimacy of the venue, although this was not quite as confined a space as New York’s Bowery Ballroom, where he did three shows in February 2025, or for that matter Pappy and Harriet’s or Amoeba Records, sites of his two tiniest SoCal shows ever. “It’s great to do these little gigs,” he said, before qualifying that with, “It’s not that little.” But, he noted, “It’s lovely for us to see the whites of your eyes.”

That led to perhaps the rarest obscurity of the night: his pretty good Tony Bennett impression, seemingly impromptu. “Little gigs like this… I once saw Tony Bennett in concert. He was fantastic, you know, and he did this bit. He said, ‘You’ve got a beautiful acoustic in this room. Let me prove it to you. Mr. Sound Man, turn off the mic,'” and then McCartney did a soft impersonation of Bennett belting out a song, operatically, without amplification. “There’s no mics or anything, and it’s so great because you’re in the room with him. It went down great. I said, ‘Wow, love it.’ Then I saw him at a charity thing in the Beverly Hilton Hotel, and he said, ‘You know, you’ve got a great acoustic in this room. Let me prove it to you. Mr. Sound Man, turn off the mic…’ I said, ‘Tony!‘ I believed it, you know.”

McCartney did not go off-mic to show off to this crowd, but his ability to sing material that calls for a fair amount of howling remains a more than impressive enough stunt, at 83. Few of the hardcore fans on hand would doubt that having the greatest rock vocalist of all time around to do this as energetically and creditably as he still does almost justifies the rest of us sticking around into the late 2020s, whatever other current drags may factor onto the balance sheet. If you have never heard McCartney sing “Help!” before (and, it being a Lennon song, no one had really heard him sing it before until he added it as his set-opener last fall), it turned out to be worth sticking around for… as does the chance to again hear him perform familiar songs as funky as “1985” and “Lady Madonna” or a hard-rocking love song as silly as “Jet” or, when it’s crying time. the perennially moving “Golden Slumbers”/”Carry That Weight”/”The End” encore-ending medley. He always gives us his song-and-dance and his pillow.

McCartney is now in approximately his 1,000th year of performing with the same crackerjack band — keyboardist Paul “Wixy” Wickens (who was celebrating his birthday, McCartney mentioned), guitarist Rusty Anderson, bassist Brian Ray (who switches to guitar when McCartney is picking up the Hofner bass for ’60s classics) and thunder-bringer Abe Laboriel Jr. Their endurance as a unit is at least a tenth as impressive as Paul’s own longevity as an artist and human. As a five-man unit (not counting the frequent three-person horn section), they get just two actual “jam” moments during the show, but those are always a potent reminder of what these guys and their leader are constantly pulling off even in more regimented moments. One is the extended instrumental version of Jimi Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady” that is always appended onto “Let Me Roll It,” for no good reason other than that they don’t need a good reason; and the other is the triplets guitar solo(s) at the end of “The End,” in which Macca, Ray and Anderson strut their stuff in sequence, two bars each at a time, just like McCartney, Lennon and Harrison did on the record. The love an audience takes from that finale far exceeds whatever it’s able to give back, regardless of what the song says.

This may have been an underplay, but darn if McCartney didn’t bring his green laser show with him anyway. (He could not bring audio and visual explosive effects, however, which probably accounts for the lack of “Live and Let Die”; he is just not going to do that without the bombs bursting in air.) There was a lack of screens, which actually helped the show feel more momentous in its fashion. I appreciated getting to hear “Now and Then” without the animated Beatles footage that goes along with it out on tour, allowing the chance to reconsider how it fares just as a straightforward ballad without the weight attached of thinking about how it fits in as a Beatles song… and it fares pretty well. Likewise it was nice to hear “My Valentine” without being distracted by how good Johnny Depp and Natalie Portman are at sign language. It’s not as if those video segments will ever get dropped for the next big tour, but this was as close to McCartney visually unplugged as we’re going to get, and if ever visual accoutrements were not needed, it’s in a set like this.

“We’ve gotta go now,” McCartney said at the end. “You’ve gotta go, too.” Left unspoken was any answer to the question, why was he doing these shows? Unless the answer was: Why ask why? There is no tour immediately in the offing for which this was any kind of dry run; it’s more like we’re just loosely in the middle of a perpetual tour that is going to turn out to be McCartney’s equivalent of Bob Dylan’s unofficially dubbed Never Ending Tour. He likes to play, quite obviously — perhaps to keep the rust off till the next full-on tour, since, as another one of his contemporaries once said, it never sleeps. Ours is not to wonder what motivates him to keep rolling at spooky full speed, but to listen to what the man sings, and to hope to keep winning the lottery.

Setlist for Paul McCartney at the Fonda Theatre, Los Angeles, Calif., March 27, 2026

Help!Coming UpGot to Get You Into My LifeLet Me Roll ItGetting BetterLet ‘Em InMy ValentineNineteen Hundred and Eighty-FiveI’ve Just Seen a FaceEvery NightLove Me DoBlackbirdNow and ThenLady MadonnaFlaming PieJetOb-La-Di, Ob-La-DaGet BackLet It BeHey Jude