Taylor Swift stood on stage at State Farm Stadium, lights bouncing off her bedazzled leotard, and absorbed the sound of the 70,000 or so fans in front of her.

“I don’t know how to process all of this and the way it’s making me feel right now,” she said. “I can’t even go into how much I missed you because there’s no way to verbalize it.”

What Swift could put into words Friday night as she kicked off the Eras tour — her first road show since 2018, since the beginning of the pandemic, since the release of four separate studio albums (and rerecorded versions of two older LPs) — was how this whole thing would go. “Tonight we’re gonna be going on an adventure,” she told the audience. “We’re gonna be exploring the last 17 years of music that I’ve been lucky enough to make and you’ve been kind enough to care about.”

Which, OK, sure — that’s how tours by famous and beloved pop acts work. And yet this show did actually feel like a novel experience, with a whopping 44 songs from all 10 of Swift’s studio albums parceled out in distinct chapters over three hours and 15 minutes. Each section had its own costumes and color scheme: that sparkly pink leotard (and matching boots) for 2019’s “Lover,” for instance, and a flouncy ballgown for 2010’s fairy-tale-obsessed “Speak Now.” For the portion of the concert dedicated to “Red,” the breakthrough 2012 smash that set her on the path toward superstardom, Swift, 33, wore a version of her T-shirt from her “22” music video, only instead of reading “NOT A LOT GOING ON AT THE MOMENT,” this one read, “A LOT GOING ON AT THE MOMENT” — a subtle yet meaningful tweak meant to flatter the attentiveness of the many eagle-eyed Swifties in the house.

Indeed, Friday’s production rolled out like fan service of the most thorough and elaborate kind. “We have a lot of time for me to try to sum up how I’m feeling about how much I’ve missed you and how happy I am to see you,” Swift told the crowd at one point, doing what she could to repay a sense of demand so intense that Ticketmaster crashed when tickets for the 52-date tour went on sale last fall. (Swift is scheduled to wrap the tour with a five-night stand at Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium in August.)

But the concert was also a showcase of the range and versatility that have made Swift the most successful singer-songwriter in an age defined by hip-hop. She offered yearning acoustic ballads like “Lover” and “Enchanted,” her voice high and winsome; she sneered through sarcastic electro-pop tracks like “Look What You Made Me Do,” “You Need to Calm Down” and “The Man,” the last a sly commentary on restrictive gender roles that played out on a set designed to look like an office.

Accompanied by a band that included four backing vocalists, she burrowed into the intricate bedroom-folk sounds of her twin pandemic LPs, “Folklore” and “Evermore,” singing “Invisible String” from atop a mock-up of a mossy woodland cabin. Flanked by dancers, she went big and shiny for the one-two punch of “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” into “I Knew You Were Trouble,” then went even bigger and shinier for the section of the show devoted to “1989,” her most exuberant release. “Midnights,” which broke a number of sales and streaming records when it came out in October, got one of the night’s longest sequences as Swift strung together seven of its bleary R&B-adjacent cuts, including “Lavender Haze,” “Midnight Rain” and the Hot 100-topping “Anti-Hero”; in each she smeared the edges of her voice, using it for texture as much as for narrative.

Swift’s Eras tour will wrap with five shows at SoFi Stadium in August.

(John Shearer / Getty Images for TAS Rights Management)

Her photo-album approach inevitably played to the nostalgia of an audience that’s grown up with Swift. “Ready to go back to high school with me?” she asked before a sweetly strummy rendition of “You Belong With Me,” from 2008’s “Fearless” — one of the early LPs she’s lately remade in a shrewd campaign to reclaim the financial rewards of music whose ownership has changed hands a couple of times. Later, she reached even further into history for the lovesick “Tim McGraw,” her first single as a teenage country phenom, which she performed here on an upright piano painted with flowers. (The piano was on a small secondary stage at the end of a runway that jutted out onto the stadium floor, where Swift also did an unplugged-style take on “Mirrorball” in a slot she said would feature a different song every night of the tour.)

At its best, though, Friday’s show complicated the emotional unbottling involved in the performance of a great pop song. The concert’s highlight came at almost precisely the midpoint in a passionately determined run through the epic 10-minute version of Swift’s song “All Too Well” that arrived in 2021 on her rerecording of “Red.” On the album, “All Too Well” sifts carefully through the wreckage of a youthful romantic relationship with the wisdom of a few years’ worth of hindsight. Yet on stage here, slashing at an acoustic guitar while dressed in a glittering floor-length robe that gave her an almost wizardly vibe, she made the song into a kind of treatise on youth itself — on the illusions one allows oneself to buy into in the pursuit of a happiness that never lasts.

Talk about a lot going on at the moment: She’d promised a trip back through her past and delivered a dismantling of it instead.

“Succession” star Brian Cox gushed about wife Nicole Ansari-Cox at Series Mania, after she expressed solidarity with women of Iran at the fest’s opening, demonstrating the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” to the photographers.  

“My wife is half Iranian and she was one of the first people to cut her hair as part of the protest. We are living in such a difficult, dangerous time, particularly for women. In Afghanistan, in Iran. It’s unacceptable. I am very proud of my wife: She is a very strong woman with very strong opinions, and she taught me so much,” Cox told Variety during a roundtable interview.  

“For me, the patriarchy has failed. Miserably. It’s time for the matriarchy and I really mean it. It’s time for men to step down and get the f**k out of the way. It has become ridiculous, with what we are seeing in Ukraine, too.” 

“It’s all about men exercising their power because they don’t understand the mystery of women. Also, women don’t understand when men go into their ‘nothing box.’ It’s when men are just sitting and women ask: ‘What are you thinking?’ ‘Nothing.’ They can’t accept that, because they are constantly thinking. Men are dull and they have been allowed free reign for far too long.”

In town to tease the last season of “Succession,” premiering worldwide on March 26, Cox also opened up about his upcoming feature directorial debut “Glenrothan.”

“I am still very nervous when I am talking about it, because we still have to cast it,” he says. “But if I don’t do [the film] now, I will be gaga. I don’t like directors, at all. They are nuisances, most of the time. I call them pests. I want to see if I am as bad as they are.”

In 2000, Cox directed an episode of “Oz.”

“It’s so sad, because Lance Reddick, who was on the show, just passed away. He was a lovely, sweet man,” he recalls.

“Glenrothan,” about a family distillery and two brothers, will be shot in Scotland in June, July and August, says Cox, with him playing the “boring one.” 

“I do boring rather well, actually. There is the one who stayed behind, who ended up holding the baby, so to speak, and the one who left. But he was the natural distiller. He had the gift. My character is not well so he asks his brother to go back, but he ignores him. Then his daughter sort of kidnaps him and brings him back to Scotland. And the adventure begins.”

The adventure is also about to begin for the veteran actor, catapulted to superstardom thanks to his role as Logan Roy. But he is more than ready for it.

“I felt nothing when I played the last scene [on ‘Succession’]. Nothing! It was the last scene, finito. Logan absolutely gets what he needs. That’s the great thing about the show. He gets peace, which is good,” he says. 

“American series live well past their sellout date: This one won’t do that. HBO would love us to go for as long as ‘Game of Thrones,’ but thank God it won’t happen. I would find it hard-going to be saying ‘f**k off’ to people for the next 10 years, although it’s the nicest thing to say to someone. You can actually say how you feel.”

As for Cox, he simply feels excited for his new chapter.

“I have been doing this for 60 years, I played lots of roles and I move onto other stuff, while I still can. I am going back to the theatre, which I can now afford to do: I will play Bach and then I will do a revival of Eugene O’Neil’s ‘Long Day’s Journey into the Night.’ You can’t live off past glories.”

He also shot a documentary, “How the Other Half Live.” about poverty and the wealth gap.

“It’s from my point of view, because I experienced true poverty as a child after my father died. It was a massive irony that I was playing one of the richest men in the world. I am a socialist, unashamedly, and the cautionary aspect of ‘Succession’ is important to me,” he notes. 

“I believe in practice. Logan Roy was a wonderful role, but it’s only a stop along the way. It’s not the final destination. It’s going to be hard, though. Not for me, I am quite happy to leave him, but for other people. I will have to work extra hard to persuade them that I am actually an actor.”