Grand Prairie One would be hard pressed to muster a more fitting metaphor for Katy Perry's show than what vendors were hawking around the Verizon Theatre Thursday night: Cotton candy, served on a lighted, blinking, multicolored plastic stick.
Something sweet and appealing, wrapped around something gaudy, flashy and disposable and just a tad overpriced ($10 for cotton candy?!?) -- that was, in essence, the sum of Perry's North Texas stop on her ongoing "California Dreams" tour. Not that the shrieking, dolled up, sold-out crowd necessarily minded the two-hour glut of sonic junk food -- they roared lustily from the first glimpse of Perry through to her anemic attempts at padding out what was clearly meant to be only a 90-minute show (the run time felt closer to three hours).
That sweetness came with a serrated edge; Perry, like so many of her pop contemporaries, plays fast and loose with sexuality, uninterested or blithely unaware of her audience. The room was teeming with kids who likely fail to grasp the subtle satire of a track like Ur So Gay (sadly defanged here) or I Kissed a Girl (morphed into a weird lounge-screamo hybrid here), with its aggressively cutesy endorsement of Sapphic charms. The raunch -- such as, oh, Perry's blink-and-miss-it simulated fellatio during Peacock -- is all delivered with a demure grin and a wink, but the whole thing just feels skeevy -- and contrived.
Speaking of contrived, Perry, who has taken some knocks from critics in the past with regards to her thin, occasionally downright reedy voice in concert, appeared to be singing live, albeit not consistently. There were plainly moments where a backing track had taken over; the most amusing example would be Perry's faking a recorder solo during an acoustic cover of Jay-Z's Big Pimpin', wherein the solo continued even though her lips were nowhere near the recorder. Whoops.
But the missteps were rare: This is high-dollar, high-gloss entertainment staged to within an inch of its life. And the stage reinforced the fresh-faced, fun-loving side of Perry's cartoonish persona; giant pieces of candy and fluffy clouds that looked an awful lot like the high-dollar cotton candy making the rounds adorned various hard surfaces. Flanked by a small flock of dancers, a couple back-up singers and a quintet of musicians that often seemed like an afterthought, Perry wasted little time giving the vociferous throng what they paid for, opening with Teenage Dream, the title track to her latest album and one of a litany of recent hits.
Amid all the special effects (dancers twirling about, suspended above the stage! Laser lights! Smoke-filled bubbles! A dancing slot machine!), however, Perry provided scant reason to care. There were moments where pathos was sought (she got closest with Not Like the Movies) but it was too hard to work up genuine feeling for someone so clearly intent on providing a goofy facade.
It's easy to dazzle, but trickier to occasionally take off the false eyelashes and connect. Perry tried Thursday night, but even the "let's slow it down and get serious" moments felt like a put-on, just another sort of flirtation. There are glimpses of a smart, funny pop star evident throughout Perry's slender catalog to date. However, rather than succeed or fail on the strength of her true personality and insight, Perry simply layers on the makeup and distances herself. Everything -- the whole "California Dreams" sensory overload; her coy looks to-camera; the coquettish crudities -- is just so much sweetened air, good for a sugar high but precious little else.
Swedish electropop dynamo Robyn, relatively unknown in the States but a star in Europe, pounded out a startlingly energetic 45-minute opening set that could just as easily have been a headlining gig. The room, presumably already full because it was far too sweltering to mill about outdoors, eagerly followed her lead as one song bled into the next, creating the illusion of a continuous mix. The shockingly blonde singer-songwriter also trotted out fellow cult fave Rye Rye for a quick run through their current single Never Will Be Mine, before closing with Hang With Me (a favorite of local songstress Sarah Jaffe's). An efficient, engaging turn that turned moody, austere dance music into something resembling a real live party.
