Wednesday, August 23, 2000

She does it again

Britney Spears keeps it sexy

TORONTO -- Britney Spears knows how to stun a crowd.

 For the 16,000 (mostly) young girls who filled the Molson Amphitheatre to see her last night, all she had to do was show up.

 In fact, Spears was a good 25 minutes late for her scheduled set time of 8:45 when she took the stage and launched into hit tune (You Drive Me) Crazy to a wild-eyed response from the sell-out crowd.

 However, there are two kinds of wild responses in the complicated world of teen pop:

 a) Sheer shrieking madness;

 b) a state resembling stunned silence.

 Spears was greeted by the latter last night.

 There was noise, sure, but like a teen heartthrob in reverse, the singer didn't generate puppy-loving screams so much as rapture. It was as if the kids were watching her moves like experts, waiting to see if her performance panned out to match her videos or their own imaginations.

 It took a version of Stronger, from recent smash album Oops! ... I Did It Again, to break the ice.

 Given the multitude of productions for each of her songs in the 90-minute show, the music quickly took a back seat.

 Backed by an unintrusive, studio-polished band who were tucked into the backdrop, Spears poured bucketloads of sweat and energy into her dance routines.

 So much so, you could hear her voice heaving and cracking as she spoke between songs. Sure must've been hard to deliver those tunes without lip-synching.

 She shared the stage with female and male dancers dressed in a Crusader-style outfits, and led an all-guy number that mirrored the stage routines of her music-biz cousins the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC.

 Spears' selection included catchy songs amid the flashpots and concussion bombs, beefed up with inescapable hits like Baby One More Time and a stab at (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction.

 The scene changes incorporated a glamourous, Sunset Boulevard-style motif, a catsuit straight out of The Avengers, a sort of psychedelic Mikado thing to go along with her version of The Beat Goes On, and a teeny-pop pyjama party set-up complete with teddy bears.

 Then there was the kilted schoolgirl routine for Baby One More Time.

 Which brings up one unavoidable observation: It was impossible to ignore the contrast between these latter pictures of faux-innocence and, say, the pole she swung around during an earlier number.

 Like her boy-band counterparts, so many blueprints in her set seem torn out of the stripper guidebook that it can't be a coincidence.

 Things had steamed up so much by her encore, which featured Oops! ... I Did It Again, that, well -- jumpin' jailbait!

 Don't get me wrong. Spears is 18, a legal sexual being and all that, and she's free to control that sexuality any way she wants to on stage.

 But it definitely works on two levels.

 And for most of her paying fans, that meant listening carefully to the favourites for places to sing along.

 Check out our new Britney in Toronto photo gallery

		Concert rating