Click here for a photo gallery from Britney's show.
DALLAS -- The textbook definition of a star certainly applies to the earthly Britney Spears, a literal embodiment of heat and light if ever there was one.
That description -- blinding, scorching evanescence -- could also apply to her first tour in five years, which stopped at the American Airlines Center Tuesday night. "The Circus Starring Britney Spears," according to the ticket, featured plenty of flash, flesh and pyrotechnic razzle-dazzle but precious little at its center. Not that the full house minded, necessarily, shrieking as though a deity were in its midst.
A lot has changed for the 27-year-old Spears since she last appeared in north Texas. Now a mother of two, twice divorced and a battle-scarred veteran of tabloid wars, Spears stepped into a three-ring circus of her own making Tuesday, a bruised but unbowed artist on the comeback trail.
Armed with a variety of moods (sexy, futuristic, street) and myriad costume changes, Spears spent about 90 minutes strutting, lip-synching and slinking across the stage, leaning most heavily on her pair of comeback albums, Blackout and Circus and relegating staples like ... Baby One More Time, I'm a Slave 4 U and Me Against the Music to blink-and-miss-'em remixes.
Surely no one attended expecting Spears to belt out any hits or make small talk -- matter of fact, her interaction with the paying customers was limited to "What's up, Dallas?" -- but for those who plunked down more than $125 (including those pesky service charges), the amount of time the ex-Mouseketeer spent with her adoring public was skimpy. She frequently ducked out for extended stretches of time, leaving the stage to her admittedly talented troupe of lithe, lascivious back-up dancers and the circus folk brought along for shock-'n-awe spectacle.
As high caliber eye candy goes, Spears delivered in spades: The stage allowed a full 360 degree view of the production and was split into three rings, often cluttered with acrobats, smoke or other props. LED video screens circled the main stage, projecting everything from song lyrics to bizarre video interludes (the opening clip, which features gossip blogger Perez Hilton being felled by a crossbow-wielding Brit, is a peculiar bit of grisly wish fulfillment).
Textbooks could be (and probably are being) written about the roiling sexual subject matter and hardly-concealed subtexts of Spears' work; that barely contained lust was on proud display Tuesday night. Apparently a fan of the late Stanley Kubrick, Spears swiped inspiration from Eyes Wide Shut and 2001: A Space Odyssey, mashing up a cinematic master's clammy, sterile style with her own abrasive sensuality.
As the night's final tune, Womanizer, wound down, it became clear that Spears' Circus is little more than an expensive night of voyeurism. Cell phones and cameras remain outstretched for the duration of her performance, straining to capture just one more shot of pop's most elusive and defiant stars; paradoxically trapped like a caged animal, yet finally in the warm glare of the spotlight on her own terms.
