KATY PERRY at Air Canada Centre, Thursday, June 30. Rating: NNN
On the subway ride home from Katy Perry’s concert Thursday night, a father giddily showed his elementary school-age daughter all incredible photos he’d taken of the 26-year-old pop star, whose California Dreams tour packed the Air Canada Centre for two consecutive nights this week.
Though she looked a bit weary (it was probably way past her bedtime), his daughter politely indulged him, feigning the kind of wide-eyed wonderment she’d just spent two hours gazing into.
Perry is the pop world’s equivalent to Robin Williams in an animated Disney movie. As kids marvel at the magic tricks, dangling sausages and whipped cream-shooting cannons, parents can roll their eyes (and then wag their tongues) at the innuendo.
Enjoying a Katy Perry concert depends largely on one’s ability to stomach her cutesy unctuousness. The California Dreams Tour opens with a Wizard Of Oz-meets-Alice In Wonderland prologue in which Perry, trapped in a depressing black-and-white world, enters a magical candy land in pursuit of her lost kitty and a hunky baker’s boy.
The stage resembles a sugarcoated theme park with acrobats, mimes and dancers performing magic tricks as creamsicles and ice cream cones fly by on cotton candy-rimmed LED screens above. The production values, much like her pop hooks, are cute and simple.
Unlike most of her pop peers, Perry comes from a rock-pop background. She cut her teeth as a Christian rock artist and has played The Vans Warped Tour. She sings without the aid of backing tracks and occasionally plays guitar, though unlike Rihanna and Lady Gaga, she keeps the arena rock histrionics – like an obligatory guitar solo during kiss-off anthem Ur So Gay – to a minimum in favour of girlie electro pop.
In addition to earworms like the ridiculously low brow Peacock and disco-inflected Calirfornia Gurls, she has a few earnest ballads in her catalogue. The show’s more intimate moments, like a warbly acoustic ballad Thinking Of You atop, which she performed atop a floating cotton candy cloud, weren’t interesting enough to feel like anything more than calculated breathers between party jams. She has a fine sense of camp theatricality but her angst is hardly convincing.
Toward the end of the set, Perry invited a gaggle of tweens on stage to dance along to a cover of Whitney Houston’s I Wanna Dance With Somebody. Rather than dwell on the witless masturbatory-I Kissed A Girl-fantasy side of Perry, perhaps it’s best to imagine how much fun that would be if you were 10-years-old, high on cotton candy and blissfully unaware of prurient undertones.
Or, if you’re one of those kids’ parents, keep your eyes open and lens focused on a potential shot of that amazing side boob. Either way, you’re having a good time.
