In a giant sing-along, the sun goes down on Elton John at Dodger Stadium

Elton John had already worn two different bedazzled suits — the first one made him look like a lion tamer, the second a fabulous cabinet secretary — by the time he reached the encore of his concert Thursday night at Dodger Stadium. “Tonight is the 269th show on the Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour,” he told the crowd, adding that it was his 101st show in the Los Angeles area and his fifth time playing Dodger Stadium. More happily, John saw his life dramatized on the big screen in 2019’s splashy “Rocketman” biopic and hit the top 10 of Billboard’s Hot 100 for the first time since the late ’90s with his sleek Dua Lipa duet, “Cold Heart.” This past summer he charted even higher with another shrewdly conceived collaboration, “Hold Me Closer,” which has him and Britney Spears mashing up several of his oldies including the deathless “Tiny Dancer.” Taking in the sight of thousands of fans dressed Thursday in tinted specs and feather boas — not to mention an ambitious few in sparkly full-body replicas of John’s Dodgers uniform — you couldn’t help but think about the crucial groundwork he laid for peacocking pop stars such as Harry Styles and Bad Bunny. But then he’d come back in the next song and nail the high note everyone was hearing in their heads, as in a stirring take on “Levon.” Lots of heritage acts with catalogs the size of John’s — Paul McCartney, say — will shorten some of their tunes in concert to make room on the set list for more; John did the opposite, forsaking the medley approach to tack on a rowdy New Orleans-style coda to “Rocket Man” and finishing “Burn Down the Mission” with a foot-stomping gospel breakdown. As he moved from the soulful “Border Song” to the driving “Sad Songs ” to the tough and glittery “The Bitch Is Back,” you had to marvel at the intricate constructions he’d devised for Bernie Taupin’s lyrics — the elaborate structures, the false endings, the little trap doors that drop you into what feels like an entirely new song until you sense a second before he changes course that, nope, he’s still singing “Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding.” Put it this way: I can’t remember the last time I was so far inside the music at a stadium show that a confetti blast actually surprised me, as it did here at the end of that rollicking “Saturday Night.” Once John came back out in that shimmering bathrobe — the Vegas-tasteful stage set resembled nothing so much as a Cheesecake Factory, by the way — he did “Cold Heart,” then bragged for a second about its chart success before singing “Your Song,” which he pointed out had been his first hit more than 50 years earlier.