There’s something deeply counterintuitive about the idea that we would go to a pop concert — the most communal-seeming of all gathering places, outside of a football game or church — in order to stop cheering, forget about everyone around us and just go deep into someone’s personal headspace. That is the stuff of live theater, at its best, and not so much Live Nation. But of course Lily Allen is out to blur those lines with her tour of “West End Girl,” the narrative concept record she put out last year. As every fan learned pretty quickly into the run, she is doing the album, the whole album and nothing but the album, adding plenty of acting out and visualization but nothing so much as a “Hello, Cleveland!” to break the fourth wall. It could not be any more of a theater piece if she’d booked the Walter Kerr for six weeks.

And… it works. Those were the two words every Allen fan was waiting to hear, whether they were in suspense looking to hear how opening night went in London in March or, like me, attending one of the last shows in “West End Girl’s” west coast engagements this past week. With this initial tour of theaters completed, she will give it a rest before returning in September to do a limited run in U.S. arenas, and we will see how that works. But so far, so unassailable.

That Allen pulls this gambit off so well is anything but a complete surprise to some of us. My belief that “West End Girl” is one of the best albums of the 2020s has only grown through re-listens across the six months since it came out. I did say in my initial review that “listening to the album one fell swoop at a time is like immersing yourself in a terrific one-woman show, where she’s running through the demise of a dream marriage in something that feels like real time.” Having said that, though, even I wouldn’t have guessed that she would tour a show in which she doesn’t include any prior material, sings to tracks for 55 minutes and acknowledges the audience only with a curtsy. I had a slight lapse of faith about how that would go over, even leading up to seeing the show at L.A.’s Orpheum last weekend, after hearing so many pond-crossing raves. I needn’t have: The live show is to 2026 what the album was to 2025 — a captivating, even thrilling, exercise in emotional world-building.

Fans could spend a lot of time debating whether Allen would have been well-served to add an encore segment revisiting at least a couple of her golden oldies. I myself might have argued for that, as a crowd-pleasing bonus. But after actually seeing the show, I appreciated the integrity of sticking to the promised arc, and leaving the stage upon the close of the album’s final number, “Fruityloop.” A story is a story, and I like how Allen ended the “West End Album” with the very barest of epiphanies, rather than trying to contrive a more patronizingly triumphant exit song for the album — which is effectively what an older tune like “Fuck You” would have felt like, if she’d pasted in on for a curtain-call finish, without any real relation to the previous hour. Allen trusted her audience at these shows to feel that the telling of her breakdown of her marriage would be its own catharsis, without a rah-rah exit line. It feels good, upon leaving, to have been handed that trust.

But the “opening act” is where she really ingeniously solved the problem of the audience not feeling like it got enough of her career as well as the new album. As fans learned quickly enough, the support act is a female cello threesome, dubbed the Dallas Minor Trio (a takeoff on “Dallas Major,” a nom de plume that is one of the song titles on “West End Girl”). Over the course of about 40 minutes, these string players ripped though a veritable Allen greatest-hits set — “The Fear,” “Smile,” “Fuck You,” “LDN” and five more — with the lyrics popping up on an overhead screen, in the style of “sing along with Mitch” or taking us out to the ballgame. On the first night at the Orpheum in L.A., it seemed as if the audience had not gotten the memo that this would be a singalong, and there was a lot of tentativeness and holding back before the braver voices in the crowd started piping up. (That, or this really was just a crowd full of newbies who didn’t know “Alfie” very well.) When I first heard about the gambit of having a string section provide the only oldies of the evening, the idea sounded more clever than it did fulfilling. But the arrangements were so strong, and the effect of having the words on screen so powerful, that it actually like… well, is there such a thing as a purgative apertif?

The proper headlining set began with Allen under a neon sign bearing the album title and a proscenium of lights, underscoring the obvious theatricality about to follow. In a canary-yellow jacket, perky skirt to match and black bow, Allen looked like the very picture of sophisticated schoolgirl charm, starting the show off with the only two cheerful minutes in it — the bossa nova first half of the title track. Two minutes in, she took a landline call, replicating the passage in the opening where the bomb is dropped as we hear only her end of a convo in which the husband on the other end gives new meaning to the phrase stranger things. He wants an open marriage, and/or permission to have affairs, and the rest of the narrative has Allen trying to convince herself that’s OK until finally it isn’t.

The biggest question across this song cycle is Why She Didn’t Leave Sooner. One answer is that, if she did, we wouldn’t have 12 or 13 of these 14 great tunes. But the real answer as to why Avid Shmarbour is indulged for so very long is that, as we’re reminded in always-surprising regular intervals, she’s in love with the boy. And while grappling with the propriety of an open marriage is not an everyday situation for most of those in the audience, what it all comes down to is the jolting realization that Lily Allen, known tart and cynic, is as much a sap for love as any of us. That’s a big reason why “West End Girl” is as constantly heartbreaking as it is dryly hilarious. The joke is on anybody who’s lived for fairy-tale romance in the face of a partner who can’t stop confessing he did it for the nookie.

When “West End Girl” came out, I couldn’t stop trying to imagine how a sequential run-through of the album would work live, if she were to try it. Part of the Blue May-produced record’s brilliance is how wildly different the music is from track to track, while never losing the plot thread or feeling instrumentally inconsistent. Some of the tracks evoke anxious EDM or dubstep; some feel like traditional ’50s-style romantic balladry; there’s a totally rocking ska number. No band could possibly pull off these changes without some kind of subterfuge. It didn’t occur to me that the solution would be no band at all. People sometimes feel like they’re getting less value for money if there aren’t players on-stage, and it’s a slippery slope toward musician-lessness in modern pop. But in the telling of “West End Girl,” at least, you don’t want the distractions of other humans on stage. (I did think of Justin Bieber at Coachella, as one does, and this is a different, more justified animal, although I enjoyed his just-knockin-around intimacy too.) The only time anyone saw live people during Allen’s performances on this tour were when a shadowy crew came out to transport the bed from her boudoir across the stage to serve as a prop in her wayward spouse’s “pussy palace.” It makes sense, in this milieu, that the only men worth a damn, or worth even catching a glimpse of, would be the damn movers.

A few props go a long way in this trip to the bottom of Allen’s post-romantic psyche. She puts on her reading glasses for “Tennis,” the song that is about taking too good a look at the phone her husband was overly eager to snatch back from her. A bejeweled arm pops out from under her bed; a pair of legs emerge from the refrigerator and have to be shoved back. There is her purse, full of outdated pharmaceuticals that she empties out onto the floor and considers taking up again in “Relapse.” The most legendary prop, as many fans will know from videos even if they can’t catch the show, is a long sheet of receipts from dalliances that she stretches across the stage and wraps herself up in. (An $11,000 Chanel receipt? Now we know how the cheating 1% live, if we’re eagle-eyed enough.) Of course the most important prop of all is the Duane Reade bag made famous in “Pussy Palace” as the bearer of her husband’s sex toys. (Imagine being the guy who makes dozens of trips to the drugstore just for bags and finally has to tell the clerk he is the Lily Allen tour’s propmaster.)

All of these visuals are used sparingly because it’s clear the audience wants to see Allen’s face more than they want to see her interface with the artifacts of an affair. When she takes this show to arenas, it’ll be interesting to see how it works out with big screens conveying her acting job, presumably. But it was a pleasure to see it sans screens in the size of theater that Allen has actually worked in as a stage actress in London. Her most affecting moments come in “Relapse,” a song that uses the refrain “I want a drink / I want a Valium” as a sort of talisman to try to ward off those temptations. The number ends with her sitting in her slip and undergarments on a lonesome bed, tears on her forlorn face. Whether she does the actual crying or has a cheat to get moist isn’t the issue. It’s seeing a pop star get that honestly bereft before our eyes, with the suggestion that wrecking her recovery really could be a matter of life and death, however cheeky other parts of the show are.

It is a show that also gives good comedic moments, although the winking rarely gets very broad. The high point in this regard, as anyone might guess just from the title, is “Nonmonogamummy,” the return to her pop-ska roots, in which Allen dips her toes back into the dating world, at her husband’s own behest, and finds it less than satisfying. There is a whole arm-movement dance she does to the chorus that is sort of like the older woman’s version of Chappell Roan’s “Hot 2 Go” routine; Allen makes a baby-rocking motion when she is articulating the “mummy” part of the title, then spreads her legs a little when she pleads, “I’m just trying to be open.” Comic relief feels good in a place like this.

But maybe the most memorable image to take away from a night at the theater with Allen isn’t any of those especially dramatic or funny moments. It is the sight of her near the end of the show, poured into what looks like a shiny maroon-chocolate dress, leaning against a post in her faux home, looking sultry until she gradually starts sinking down into a resigned squat. The temptation to just give up couldn’t be visualized any more subtly or any better.

There are some paradoxes in a show like this. How does a concert this admittedly compact feel like such a full meal, for starters? How is it we can be so sated we’re glad there’s not an encore? The fact is, “West End Girl” is such a rich experience, on record or live, that hearing “Smile” afterward wouldn’t just be gilding the lily; it’d be a comedown. Perhaps when Allen comes back this fall and is playing Madison Square Garden or the Kia Forum, she’ll be compelled to pad things out a bit for the larger audience that may bring a different set of expectations. But I hope she continues to treat it as the singular musical tragicomedy that it is. Her head is a nice place to visit and you kind of want to live there — and there alone — for every minute she can convince us we’ve entered her disillusioned inner sanctum. “I hate it here,” she keeps reiterating in “Dallas Major,” her salute to the banality of nightclub life… and the more she laments how much she’s not enjoying what she’s being put through, the more we can’t help but love it.

Lily Allen’s U.S. shows resume Sept. 3 at Madison Square Garden in New York. See the itinerary here.