There’s a trifecta of women doing great things in pop music right now: Charli XCX, with that Brat Summer of hers you may have heard of or experienced; Chappell Roan’s meteoric rise beyond any music festival’s capacity; and Sabrina Carpenter, achieving ubiquity six albums deep into her career.
Sunday night, Sabrina Carpenter graced a sold out Toyota center with a seasoned performance in support of her latest studio album Short n Sweet. Carpenter was charismatic, colorful, and in fine form. Short story sweet — she was everything a classic pop star should be.
The Short n’ Sweet Tour displays Carpenter’s foundation for a long lasting touring career, honing in on a timeless presentation, embodying, sometimes parodying, nostalgic tropes of ‘70s Playboy Mansion dreams. Something she could probably do a few more times on future outings and still grow into.
The production is expertly designed to capture intimacy and scope, both visually stunning in person and on camera. The stage, which Carpenter calls The Penthouse, came complete with all the trappings of a standard pop concert: staircases, balconies, bedroom, bathroom, arched hallways, city views, four piece band, high ceilings with curtains at scale, chiminea, heart shaped B-stage that both lowered into a sunken living room (mid-set “Coincidence”) and elevated for the nosebleeds (crowd favorite “Juno”). Architectural Digest needs to see this place.
Like many a great pop star before her, Carpenter misses no opportunity to deploy dichotomies and poke at form. She understated her grand entrance, running onstage wrapped in a towel — late from her bubble bath — revealing bedazzled lingerie, struggling to reach her own descending microphone to start the show (“Taste”). She encouraged enabled her dedicated fans, standing all the way to the rafters, to sing a near shoe-gazing ballad as loud as they could (“Slim Pickins”) — and they did.
Throughout the night, she vacillated between the hyper scripted pop show fashion and off the cuff, sincerely funny, conversations with at the crowd about not learning to tie her shoes until the age of nine. (“So there’s hope for everybody in here. And late bloomers, like — it’s okay. Dream big. That’s what I always say.”)
When singing a situationship ballad seated on a toilet seat (“Sharpest Tool”), Carpenter subverts the bit with a sublime vocal, delicate and soaring. On ballads about lying to her therapist (“Tornado Warnings”), she sounds clear as she does on record. She sells her sex appeal as clear as Britney and Madonna (set standout “Bed Chem”), and her tightly choreographed numbers (“Good Graces,” the inescapable “Espresso”) nod to that same lineage.
In a set list where nearly every song played out as it does on record, three minutes or so apiece, Carpenter did “Please Please Please,” the ABBA-leaning evergreen in her catalog, a solid by extending its intro and treating it like a million bucks. She paraded the song, through its key changes, its weird bliss, from stage right to stage left, down the runway and back. She changed a note, maybe two, from the record, handed over just enough lyrics, and just the right ones, to the audience to sing (“I beg you don’t embarrass me, motherf*cker”). Those million bucks reincarnate as a smile on the jumbotron and you’re reminded why you came to the show in the first place.
Random Notebook Dump:
Has this crowd even seen Juno?
Overheard in the Crowd:
“We’re giving.”
Set List:
Taste
Good Graces
Slim Pickins
Tornado Warnings
Lie to Girls
decode
Bed Chem
Feather
Fast Times
Read Your Mind
Sharpest Tool
opposite
because i liked a boy
Coincidence
Busy Woman
Nonsense
Dumb & Poetic
Juno
Please Please Please
Don’t Smile
Espresso
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024.
