Source : the age
MUSIC
Katy Perry | The Lifetimes Tour ★★★★
Rod Laver Arena, until June 14
Katy Perry is pure pop. Her songs promise, and mostly deliver, a good time. And her Lifetimes concert does the same, across two and a half hours, five acts, multiple costume changes and more than 20 songs from a back catalogue stretching to 2008 (the pre-Perry Christian singer Katy Hudson gets a brief acknowledgement but no stage time).
But this big, spectacular, noisy and surprisingly intimate show also has grander ambitions, in which it has mixed success.
Katy Perry on stage at Rod Laver Arena.Credit: Martin Philbey
It’s all there in the framing device: a video game in which KP143, an “enhanced” version of Katy Perry, attempts to unseat Mainframe, the AI that has come to rule humanity rather than serve it. To do so, she must free the butterflies that have been captured to power the AI, and to do that she needs to collect love, in the form of glowing hearts that descend from the arena rafters.
The 143, of course, refers to the title of her latest and much-criticised album, and is tech speak for “I love you” (with its origins in pager messaging from the 1990s).
Phew. That’s a lot of freight to load onto the shoulders of a bunch of pop songs, even a set as hook-heavy as Perry’s. And at times, the strain shows.
Perry and her team of 10 dancers work their collective butts off.Credit: Martin Philbey
The stage is set in what looks like a figure eight, though it’s actually the infinity symbol; later on, while singing E.T., a lightsaber-wielding Perry does battle with a lengthy bit of heating duct that is meant to represent the “infinite worm” spewed out by Mainframe. It’s the weakest moment in a show that has plenty of goof and lots of camp and heaps of flying on wires, and mostly manages to deploy them to great effect.
The backdrop is a wall of screens, suggestive of the importance of video to Perry’s success, but also integral to the narrative; it’s up here, in lengthy clips, that the framing story unfolds, while Perry is offstage changing costumes.
The four-piece band – women on guitar and keys, men on bass and drums – play beneath the screen, while Perry and her 10 dancers make full use of the elongated stage. “Not a bad seat in the house,” she boasts.
If “love” is the connective tissue here – and suddenly, her bizarre proclamation upon returning to Earth after that ill-conceived Bezos-shilling space flight makes so much promotional sense – the main theme is self-actualisation.
The video screen backdrop plays a crucial role in the show’s narrative.Credit: Wolter Peeters
In the dubiously conceived segment where the audience gets to “request” songs via QR code (it sent me to a sign-up page for the tour, with no option to vote), she plucked an 11-year-old to join her onstage while she sang Thinking of You, from her 2008 album One of The Boys. Maddie from Traralgon said she’d had a dream about this moment; Katy from California says keep dreaming because as this moment proves, if you dream it you can be it.
The singer’s continual reinvention of herself is proof of that maxim. And her performance of the ballad – playing acoustic guitar, with no backing track and nowhere to hide – was proof that beneath all the razzle-dazzle she remains a serious talent. As she says towards the end, “Never forget you are the main character of your video game”.
The 143 album got a cold shoulder from critics and the charts, but its songs were loudly cheered and sounded great – Woman’s World and Lifetimes especially. Once the dust settles, these will, I suspect, come to be considered bona fide bangers to rank alongside Hot and Cold, Roar, California Girls and the rest (all of which got an airing, naturally).
Whenever she is onstage, Perry works her butt off. Running, jumping (at the end of Act One, she literally leaps into a pit and disappears), standing atop a tall pillar, dangling upside down in a spherical cage, flying high on the back of a giant butterfly. It’s spectacular, and for the most part she sings well, looks great, and appears to be having almost as much fun as her audience (a spread of ages, including many young girls, with their mums, first-wave Perry fans who’ve passed the baton of sparkly empowerment on).
Katy Perry is a consummate performer.Credit: Martin Philbey
Perry can be a little tone-deaf at times – her Blue Origin flight reeked of privilege, and working with producer Dr Luke was problematic at the least – but so much of the recent criticism of her smacks of ageism.
She knows it, too. When she finished a terrific rendition of Teenage Dream, she responded to a call from a fan. “Oh still? I can be your hall pass still? I’m 40 years old. Forty and fabulous.”
