One of the more spectacular shows currently playing in Las Vegas is Cirque du Soleil's Love, in which a team of world-class acrobats and dancers perform amazing feats to the strains of the Beatles' music, taking decades-old recordings and making a brand-new, visceral live experience.
It's not unlike what Nashville got when Britney Spears' "Femme Fatale" tour came to town Monday night - except that Spears wasn't just being piped in through the speakers. She was there in the flesh, the calm eye of a storm of frenzied dancers, laser lights and stage machinery.
She didn't walk on stage as much as she was delivered to it, as one of her latest hits, "Hold It Against Me," thumped oppressively in Bridgestone Arena. One platform pushed her through a crack in the massive video screen backdrop. Another brought her down to the stage's lower level, where, between a few quick dance steps, she sat on a metallic throne that slid her a few feet closer to the squealing crowd.
The following tune "Up N' Down" had Spears in a mechanized cage that handled all of the rising and falling action, and a conveyor belt on the catwalk then helped her move towards the center of the arena. At a close distance, fans could see that Spears was definitely singing. Whether or not that voice was the same one we heard coming through the speakers remains up for debate.
The 2011 Britney Spears live experience is thoroughly artificial - fitting for a girl that was labeled a cookie-cutter pop product since her breakout 1999 hit "...Baby One More Time." But unlike in the ultra-glossy days of "Baby," all of Monday night's added sheen and spectacle seemed absolutely necessary.
Nearly four years ago - when Spears first began restoring order to a very turbulent personal life - she made a disastrous "comeback" appearance on the MTV Video Music Awards and was quickly ripped to shreds for her transparent lip-synching and turtle's pace choreography. Since then, the bar has been drastically lowered as far as what audiences expect from a Britney Spears performance, but she's continued to rebound.
Spears isn't catatonic on stage these days, just a lot more casual. She's more than happy to sit back - literally, some dance routines had her sitting down, shaking her hair in leiu of her hips - and watch everyone else have a good time at the party she's hosting.
That leaves a lot of work for her dancers, who not only wowed/distracted the crowd with moves worthy of an Olympic gymnast's floor routine, but acted as Spears' personal stage assistants, guiding her into position for choreographed routines and handing off pieces of clothing for onstage costume changes. The throngs of fans in the nearly full Bridgestone Arena chipped in with plenty of energy as well, many of them only standing still long enough to take a steady shot of Spears when she strutted their way.
But one member of the audience was actually encouraged to take a seat, albeit with Britney and her crew onstage. It was none other than Tennessee Titan Kenny Britt, who found himself handcuffed to a pole and draped in a pink boa with Spears sitting on his shoulders. It's a nightly ritual during Spears' performance of "Lace and Leather," though the audience participant isn't usually a public figure. Thanks to Twitter, photos of Britt and Brit were all over sports sites before the show was over.
The rest of Spears' fans had to settle for an increasingly quick-hitting trip through her catalogue - a collection that any mature, self-assured music lover will admit includes some of the most finely crafted pop songs of the last decade. A few of them - "Baby" and "Toxic," for starters - lost their original magic to pointless disco-thump updates, but others - "I'm a Slave 4 U" and "Womanizer" - sounded as saccharine and sultry as ever.
Spears' inevitable encore was capped with her latest chart-topper, "Til the World Ends," which featured an appearance from the tour's current opening act, hip-hop sensation Nicki Minaj. But Minaj didn't return to the stage she'd performed on less than two hours before - she appeared during Spears' encore via a pre-recorded video rap.
Between that and a night of dubiously "live" vocals, it might seem that Britney Spears' fans couldn't care less about the human touch in music. Still, on Monday night, they were sending some very sincere waves of adoration and gratitude towards Spears - who, through some forgivable flaws, seems more human than ever.
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Source is http://blogs.tennessean.com/tunein/2011/07/19/britney-spears-surrounds-herself-in-spectacle-at-nashville-concert/
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