Rewriting Reggaeton’s Rules: Karol G tour report

IQ looks behind the scenes of Karol G’s record-breaking, year-long Mañana Será Bonito tour to find out how her crew and advisors cope with the ever-growing fanbase and the demands they make on Latin America’s newest megastar.

Is there any doubt that Karol G – the Latin superstar who recently tore through Europe – is truly a bichota? That term – a riff on the Puerto Rican slang for a big boss and adopted as a rallying cry by her legions of fans – perfectly encapsulates the singer’s take-no-shit persona and current dominance as reggaeton’s numero uno global star. With a rise as rapid as it has been stratospheric, it’s no surprise she’s been described in glossy magazine profiles as “blowing up reggaeton’s boys’ club.”

The proof? There’s her signature hit, Tusa, recorded with Nicki Minaj, that’s blown past a billion streams. In 2022, she became the highest-grossing Latin female artist in North America. She was named Billboard’s 2024 Woman of the Year. And then there’s most recent album Mañana Será Bonito (Tomorrow Will Be Beautiful). The first Spanish-language album by a female artist to hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts, it also spawned a tour that shattered records and sold over a million tickets in Latin America – a tour that’s now doing likewise this side of the pond. “She has been building towards this moment for years,” her worldwide agent Jbeau Lewis tells IQ. “And the success of Mañana Será Bonito provided the perfect moment.”

To say that Karol G’s (real name Carolina Giraldo Navarro) ascent has been unprecedented is something of an understatement. As recently as autumn 2021, she was playing theatres in the US – her last UK appearance was in 2018, headlining the 1,500-cap Electric Brixton – but with her streaming numbers constantly exceeding expectations, alongside wave after wave of critical acclaim, her team knew that something special was brewing.

La Bichota
In 2022, on the Bichota tour, Karol G’s Costa Rica show set a record for the highest attendance ever in the history of the Coca-Cola Amphitheater at Parque Viva. “This experience allowed us to do it again for this year’s Mañana Será Bonito tour,” says promoter Andrés Guanipa of Move Concerts. Indeed, far from the usual challenge of selling enough tickets, Guanipa notes they had precisely the opposite problem.

“The issue for the first show at the National Stadium was to strengthen the sales system to prevent it from collapsing,” he says. “This was achieved, and in less than three hours, we sold 52,500 tickets. For the second show, we sold 32,000 tickets on the first day of sales, and the remaining 20,000 were sold over the sales period, for which we did some promotional work.”

“There was this electric energy from the fans there that I could feel. It gave me goosebumps!”

In total, an absolute record was set, with 104,686 fans – breaking Coldplay’s record – attending her two Costa Rican dates, a figure that represents a staggering 2% of the country’s entire population (“An extremely unusual statistic,” notes Guanipa. “And she now holds the attendance record for the two most important venues in Costa Rica.”) But this is merely one example of the Karol G mania currently sweeping all before it in the live market.

Following a triumphant 15-date North American leg during August and September, the Mañana Será Bonito tour switched to Latin America, beginning with two massive homecoming shows at Estadio Atanasio Girardot stadium (45,900) in the artist’s hometown of Medellin, Colombia, in December 2023. “There was this electric energy from the fans there that I could feel,” recalls Anthony ‘Looch’ Ciampa of PRG, the company responsible for the tour’s lighting. “It gave me goosebumps!”

That level of excitement – and the accompanying commercial success – kept growing as the tour rolled through 27 dates across 12 countries in early 2024. Breaking records at nearly every stop, Karol G became the first female artist to sell out two nights at the Dominican Republic’s Olympic Stadium (60,000) and three shows at Chile’s Estadio Nacional (60,000). She’s the only artist to sell out two nights at Venezuela’s Estadio Monumental (84,567) and became the fastest Latin female artist to sell out two stadium shows in Argentina with her two Estadio Vélez Sarsfield (49,540) performances.

¡Ay, Dios Mío!
These are mind-boggling numbers, especially when you consider that the actual stage show – a gloriously maximalist production that includes lasers, lashings of pyro, rising platforms, a huge semi-circular video screen, and a massive mermaid – was never meant to hit the road in the first place. “It was never designed to tour!” says tour director Roly Garbalosa. “It was designed as a one-off for a series of concerts in Puerto Rico. So, when the artist and her management decided they wanted it to tour, there were many challenges.”

The biggest of these turned out to be the giant arch – there was currently no option on the market with the specifications to handle the required loads. “We worked closely with Adrian from Stage FX to modify and re-engineer an arch that he currently had, to get it to work.”

“Mañana Será Bonito is Karol’s first arena and stadium tour in Europe,” says Jessica Giraldo, from the star’s management team. “This tour took us eight to ten months of planning, but we’ve been preparing for it for years – ever since Karol first started doing arenas and theaters in the US back in 2021.”

“One of our biggest challenges during this tour was to deliver the same show in every city, country, and venue”

She continues, “The decision to tour in Europe was thoroughly analysed by the management team, Karol’s label, Interscope, and our booking agent, UTA. We studied the data from these countries, as well as the analytics of some of the latest PR events Karol had attended in Europe, such as the TV show El Hormiguero where she broke the rating record.”

Giraldo notes, “One of our biggest challenges during this tour was to deliver the same show in every city, country, and venue. No matter where in the world, Karol wanted all of her fans to experience the same show in the same quality, and we are proud to say that we were able to achieve it.

“The production we had for the US shows was replicated for the Latin American tour, and now it’s being adapted for the European tour, keeping in mind that a smaller stage is required for arenas. We’ve needed two cargo airplanes, a fleet of
trucks, and a crew of 120+ people to move the infrastructure between countries and reach fans.”

One major technical challenge was related to weight. “Basically, the stadium show weighs 40 tons, and we are spanning these 40 tons in an area 120 feet across and 10 feet deep,” reveals Garbalosa. “The integration of the rigging and all the structural elements had not been done before on this arch.” Across the Latin American leg, this also meant that a lot of the local infrastructure is not set up to handle a show of this magnitude.

To solve it, they employed two advance teams with six trucks of advance equipment. “We had three advance arches with their custom lattice beams; three sets of motors in each package; a thrust and sub deck advance; a power package; and a flooring advance to skin the decks because the video door was too heavy – it ate through the local stages if we did not reinforce,” says Garbalosa.

Other issues related to locality also arose. “In South America, we had to use local steel vendors, [whereas in] the US leg, we travelled with our own steel stage structures,” says Ciampa, while John Fletcher of Five Points Production Services, who supplied rigging, notes that “the requirements for compliance regarding rigging equipment are more stringent in the EU and the United Kingdom compared to the Americas. But we exclusively provide equipment that meets these stringent standards.”

“Basically, she wanted her touring video show, with screens integral to the overall stage design and build, to look like a music video – but done live”

Pyrotechnics was another area where regulatory requirements, and perhaps local attitudes to safety, differ greatly between continents. “ImageSFX complies with all safety regulations given the differences in each country, and our compliance team works to make sure all permits and regulations are followed,” says Emma Heath, the company’s project manager. “Even in areas such as South America, where there is less regulation, the ImageSFX team follows the same protocol that we would in the United States.”

A greater challenge was presented by the outdoor nature of the North and Latin American stadium shows and the need to be prepared for inclement weather. “Our biggest challenge was having to provide so many lighting fixtures that can handle being outside in settings where weather is a huge factor,” says Ciampa. “We had to get creative with utilising our strobes and figure out where to put them so they were protected from rain, but there weren’t a lot of options as there were exposed delay towers.”

Moving from a one-off show to a tour configuration proved challenging for the live camera set up, too. Video director Kenny Stoff of wide + close, who first worked with Karol G at Coachella in 2022, had been called in to bring cinema cameras and their specific approach called ‘Live Cinema,’ to the tour.

“The idea was to create epic cinematic screens for both the side iMAG screens as well as the giant centre LED wall,” says Stoff. “Karol G wanted the same level of quality and our live cinema approach that we delivered at Coachella for the Mañana Será Bonito tour. Basically, she wanted her touring video show, with screens integral to the overall stage design and build, to look like a music video – but done live.”

“Our biggest challenge was converting from a one-off or festival type of cam plus engineering build to a touring configuration,” he adds. “So we had to get faster, nimbler, and transportable. It took a few shows to get dialled-in – there was definitely an adjustment period that required a fast learning curve, and the solution was being developed and built in real-time as the first shows began – but other than that, it was a seamless transition. Karol G allowed us some space to learn quickly and adapt to her ideas and collaboratively build the show together.”

The result is groundbreaking.

“The creative process for Mañana Será Bonito started in Karol’s mind,” artist manager Giraldo tells IQ. “She had a huge role in its creation, coming up with a vision and then communicating it to our incredible team of professionals that turned her ideas into a reality: production designer, creative director, choreographer, lighting designer, wardrobe stylists, the production team, among others.

“Karol had a clear vision: the show would tell the story of the different moments of her life. The interludes, narrated in English by Morgan Freeman, tell the story of Carolina, a beautiful mermaid who after having her world turned upside down, finds her inner bichota and is ready to overcome anything. Throughout the show, we are able to perceive each era as a colour: blue, red and pink. Mañana Será Bonito is the combination of all of them, ending the journey in a colourful blast.”

Read the second and final part of IQ’s Karol G tour feature here.

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