Review: Britney loves the night life in Conseco appearance
The visuals of Britney Spears' current tour span the globe, but her music doesn't stray from the club.
Spears made her first Indianapolis appearance in nine years Monday at Conseco Fieldhouse, where ornate stage designs and costumes signaled the influence of Egypt and the Far East.
Closer to home, motorcycle culture of the 1950s and paparazzi decked out in retro zoot suits were American points of reference.
Musically, Spears excelled as an advocate of electronic dance music. If the Identity tour that launched earlier this month at Verizon Wireless Music Center is a breakthrough in validity for DJs, producers and synthpop architects, Spears is one of their mainstream patron saints.
She's taken pulsating bass to the masses on hits such as "Hold It Against Me" and "Till the World Ends," which served as Monday's opening and closing songs.
In between, the show barely touched on teen pop that made Spears a pop-culture sensation in the late 1990s.
Of 20 songs performed on Monday, just four were old enough to be part of Spears' repertoire when she played Conseco Fieldhouse in 2002.
And the Neptunes-produced "I'm a Slave 4 U," released in 2001, may have been the track that sparked Spears' love affair with the dance floor.
Regrettably, lip-synching has been part of her act since she appeared as an supporting act for 'N Sync at the Murat Theatre in December 1998.
But after subtracting whatever points should be taken away for the lip-synching offense, credit Spears for converting nearly every score still available to her.
(In a technical glitch, one of two ornamental wings didn't open on her flying rig during show-closing "Till the World Ends.")
The show for an estimated audience of 8,000 was fun, fast-paced and thematically linked in a nod to current album "Femme Fatale."
Spears portrayed a criminal on the run for "Hold It Against Me," which gave way to "Up n' Down's" jail cells/go-go cages.
A nemesis narrator turned up on video screens when Spears exited the stage for costume changes, and that plot line was resolved by the end of the night.
On the topic of costumes, Spears wore a white, silver and spangled outfit reminiscent of Jane Fonda's "Barbarella" and a pink suit that split the difference between circus ringmaster and magician.
By the second half of the show, the 29-year-old stuck with a bikini-top-and-denim-shorts combo for several consecutive songs.
Spears sang ballad "Don't Let Me Be the Last to Know" without the aid of recorded vocals, and "Baby One More Time" seemed to be performed the same way.
For better of worse, singing is secondary to the party and pageantry when Spears is onstage.
DJ Pauly D appeared as one of Monday's supporting acts, and the "Jersey Shore" personality represented a major downgrade from rapper Nicki Minaj -- who was part of the "Femme Fatale" tour from June 16 through Aug. 14.
Justin Bieber's "Baby" and Taio Cruz's "Dynamite" represented pedestrian song choices in Pauly D's too-long performance.
What he lacked in flow and imagination across 40 minutes (
), Pauly D compensated by adding ham-fisted scratching with grating regularity.
http://www.indystar.com/article/2011...yssey=nav|head 
