GOOD REVIEWS ARE POURING! USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Associated Press.
OMG! IT'S DEFITINELY A HIT AMONGST THE PRESS!
USA TODAY:
The event: Resurgent and rehabbed pop idol Britney Spears launches a 45-date world tour 90 miles from where she grew up, in support of her Circus album.
The venue: New Orleans Arena, with 16,000 in attendance.
The merchandise: Black velvet jumpsuits are going for $150, but the most sizzling item is the $40 black T-shirt depicting a provocatively posed Spears beside the red-glitter wording "You want a piece of me." (It's a declarative statement, not a question.) Family-oriented gear includes a $20 toddler onesie branded in gold: "Oops I did it again."
Early start: Fans clutching tickets priced $95 to $250 begin lining up in the chill at 4:30 p.m. for an 8 o'clock showtime.
We're inseparable: "I feel closer to Britney wearing these," says Jenny O'Leary, 18, of Buffalo, after plunking down $20 for a pair of black Britney panties outside the arena. "This is her comeback from the chaotic life she's been living — her midlife crisis. I think she'll pull it off."
The crowd: Heavily female, mostly late teens to mid-20s. Super-short babydoll frocks are the uniform du jour.
Already jaded: "I've seen Miley Cyrus, but I'm more excited about Britney because of her comeback," says Isabella Healy, 13, of New Orleans. "Everyone's expecting really good things from her, and if she doesn't do a good job, it might affect her negatively. But I don't think she cares."
Opening act: The Pussycat Dolls prowl a round stage arranged with metallic platforms and pound out a 35-minute set of shriek-inducing pop, including their hits Don't Cha, Stickwitu and When I Grow Up.
Big-top tease: A three-ring circus arrangement dominates the center of the arena. As a thunderous pre-recorded track blares, a bare-chested male juggler appears on one of the two rotating side stages and does macho tricks with a giant metal cage. Then there's five jugglers tossing bowling pins; three black-clad martial arts performers doing a kung-fu routine; clowns on unicycles; more jugglers; a woman performing an incredibly athletic routine on a balance beam; and still more dancing clowns (including a dwarf). Finally, lights dimming, the red scrim shrouding the center stage lifts to reveal a 360-degree screen showing a video featuring celeb blogger Perez Hilton in Queen Victorian drag.
It's showtime: The screens rise, and Britney, attired in a red ringmaster's jacket, short-shorts and black spike-heeled boots and wielding a whip, descends from the ceiling in a small cage and launches into the title track of Circus. A dozen or more acrobats spin on giant rings in mid-air as jets of smoke burst from the stage floor.
Is it live?: Amid the spectacle, it's impossible to tell how much of the singing is real, but the crowd couldn't have cared.
Breather: The show is divided into segments with fast-paced intermezzos featuring martial arts performers, acrobats and magicians. During the Ooh Ooh Baby/Hot as Ice medley, Britney climbs into a magician's box and appears to be cut in half, then re-appears across the stage in another box that explodes in a shower of sparks. Looking trim and showing lots of midriff and cleavage, she commands attention amid the chaos surrounding her.
Bag of tricks: After the first few eye-popping numbers, the action becomes somewhat routine, as Spears prances center stage surrounded by a pair of bicyclists and a dozen strutting dancers. Current single If U Seek Amy draws a huge roar and sing-along from the crowd as Spears shakes her long blond mane and plays Whack-a-Mole with dancers popping up from the stage floor.
Ready for her close-up: Fans who couldn't see when she storms the side stages could immerse themselves in the dazzling videos projected in the round "ceiling" above the stage. Me Against the Music features a harem/Bollywood theme (love her turquoise I Dream of Jeannie get-up), and for the slower Everytime/I'm Scared segment, she grabs a giant parasol with a hook for a seat and sings while suspended far above the stage.
Hot mama: Spears, a 27-year-old mother of two, sexed it up during the Freakshow/Peepshow segment of the show, sending the black tassels attached to her silver-and-black bustier flying here and there as she led her dancers around a weird gauntlet of oversized furniture and picture frames. For Breathe On Me/Touch of My Hand, Spears shed more cloth, down to panties and a barely-there sheer top with strategically placed cones, and sang while suspended inside a giant picture frame that slowly spun around center stage. Landing on a couch adorned with men, she donned a blindfold and ascended halfway to the rafters again. Finally, it was just her grinding away with a muscleman. And there was music involved as well.
Singe-inducing: Given the massive size of the center stage (painted to look like a target — we get it, Brit) and the non-stop visual and sonic bombast, the pop princess sometimes got swallowed up. Spark-shooting guns and rings of actual fire couldn't save one-note songs like Do Something and Slave. Fan-favorite Toxic, however, staged mostly with sci-fi-green lighting effects and a minimalist jungle-gym contraption, succeeded because the focus was solely on the star. And her biggest early hit, …Baby One More Time, stripped away all spectacle, with just her and the dancers stalking the bare stage, and was better for it.
Fold up the tent: The Circus show packs 17 song segments and every under-the-big-top cliché except Siegfried & Roy's white tigers into a crowd-pleasing hour and 45 minutes. A comeback, certainly, and a solid one at that. But all the sex, fire and stomp-and-slither choreography can't disguise the fact that the production needs a bigger, purely musical core (a few more songs from the current album would have helped) — and some spontaneity. It wasn't until Spears finally called out "Thank you, New Orleans" after finishing her Womanizer encore that the crowd got a glimpse into the heart of their homegirl from Kentwood.
Next stops: Continuing her warm-up in the South, Britney plays Atlanta on Thursday, Miami on Saturday and Tampa on Sunday.
LOS ANGELES TIMES:
Reporting from New Orleans -- Her singing was dominated by a backing track. Her moves were nothing special -- defined by much strutting and stripper-like shimmying, with the minimum amount of acrobatics to prove her mettle as a dance-pop queen. Her physical form, still beautiful, didn't take one's breath away the way it did when she was 17.
But on Tuesday's opening night of her "Circus" tour at the New Orleans Arena, Britney Spears, the mighty Aphrodite with the troublesome tawdry streak, nonetheless renewed her claim as one of the world's most adept manipulators of the public interest. Powering through a 90-minute show that integrated her impetuous teen hits with the more perverse material from the albums she released after a very public breakdown that made her a constant in the tabloids, the Louisiana native flashed her famous good ol' girl smile at the fans, mostly female, who still find her a worthy patron saint of the erotic arts.
The intensely bespangled show -- which sticks closely to the big-top theme that also defines her latest album -- featured a huge array of tricks and extra players, including jugglers, clowns, magicians, martial artists, acrobats and rings of fire. Somewhere in there was Spears herself, looking hearteningly happy as she took on the role of ring mistress, clearly relishing the chance to prove herself healthy and in control.
The evening began with a performance by the Big Apple Circus that included a female acrobat who stumbled once on the beam but got right up and performed a stunning back flip. The faux pas wasn't staged, but might have been; Spears has similarly stumbled, nearly losing her children in a custody battle, and then losing control of her own affairs after her father was declared her legal guardian last year. This tour is her all-important comeback; if it fails, her career will effectively be over.
It will not fail. She is back up on the beam. The director, Jamie King, has made sure of that. If your star is a bit unstable, the best solution is to surround her with a backing troupe that can step in when she fumbles. Much like her music, the "Circus" tour is all about added value. Instead of purchasing the coolest new beats and synth-pop augmentations, King and Spears signed up those experienced carny stars to not only fill in the gaps between numbers but enhance -- distract from? -- her own time onstage.
One constant challenge for Spears and her collaborators is how to adapt the soft-core erotica at the heart of her self-expression to the family audience that's somehow stuck with her since she left "The All New Mickey Mouse Club." The circus motif proved ideal. Circuses are magical and creepy, home to pink-tutu-wearing high-wire princesses and creepy bearded ladies, loved by children but famously run by flim-flam artists and freaks.
In the circus, Spears finds her perfect metaphor for her own life as the world's favorite fallen angel. This particular iteration of a theme that Madonna and Christina Aguilera have also explored neatly balanced the wholesome with the downright nasty; though its scenarios were obvious, they still worked well under Spears' command.
Most daring was a sequence that began with a video that showed masked interlopers borrowed from the Stanley Kubrick film "Eyes Wide Shut," who writhed about on divans as Spears mouthed the Marilyn Manson version of the Eurythmics song "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This"). Spears then emerged to reenact the scene wearing two versions of a white-gold gymnast's leotard with her erogenous zones highlighted in black. She gave a lap dance to a clown; she was lifted aloft by a pair of acrobats and did some simulated heavy petting. In truth, nothing matched the raciest moments of Janet Jackson's last tour, but as mainstream erotica, it was effective.
This sequence wasn't quite as much fun, however, as the Bollywood version of "Me Against the Music," based around some well-choreographed group dancing, complete with Spears making mudras with her hands in a gorgeous green and gold harem pants ensemble. The night's take on "Hot As Ice" was especially playful, with Spears serving as an assistant to "the Misfit of Magic," Edward Alonzo. He even made her disappear.
One moment during the night did seem like a mistake. Spears disappeared several times during the set, to change costumes or allow her fellow performers a chance to show their skills. At one point, however, she didn't seem to resurface. Her backing singers awkwardly stood center stage as her voice drifted forth, as if from beneath the stage. Maybe I just couldn't see her from her my vantage point -- the show is in the round, playing further on the image of the three-ring circus. But she seemed to miss her cue.
Despite that first-night stumble and several numbers in which her dancing was no more than adequate, Spears can safely call this performance a success. She apparently has no interest in proving herself as a vocalist; Pink is a better acrobat and her friend Justin Timberlake is a far better dancer.
But anyone who thinks her lackluster would do well to remember what she really is: a burlesque performer, a carny's dream born a century or so too late to be fated to ply her art upon the midway, but able to fulfill the spectacle of blond ambition now.
--Ann Powers
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS:
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Dressed as a sexy ringmaster and directing a colorful cast that included jugglers, acrobats and martial arts dancers, Britney Spears delivered a tightly choreographed, if perfunctory performance Tuesday night as she kicked off her first concert tour in five years.
The 27-year-old pop superstar's "Circus" tour kicked off in her home state of Louisiana at the New Orleans Arena before a nearly sold-out crowd that cheered on their idol as she gyrated and slithered across the stage while singing some of her biggest hits, from the recent "Womanizer" to her first and now classic song, "Baby One More Time."
The wild applause has been largely absent from Spears' life since the last time she went on tour in 2004, as the singer endured a devastating downward spiral: Due largely to personal troubles, she went from one of pop music's most profitable, in-demand entertainers to an out-of-control tabloid persona who seemed to be on a path to destruction.
But over the last year, that path has been reversed, as she's embarked on a successful comeback that has seen her image, as well as her career, rehabilitated.
The "Circus" tour was another strong step in the right direction. Spears didn't interact much with the crowd — the only thing she uttered to the audience was "Thank you, New Orleans" at the end of the nearly two-hour show — and appeared at times to be lip-synching. But fans didn't seem to care, screaming wildly at the first sight of Spears, who descended from the ceiling on hoops suspended by wires, wearing a short red and black ringmaster ensemble.
Spears started the show with the title track to her new CD, "Circus," then went right into "Piece of Me," which she performed largely from a cage, part of the elaborate, grandiose stage backdrops.
Acrobats twirled from suspended fabric as Spears sang and danced, showing off her toned body with flirty, seductive moves. She got frisky with two male dancers as she performed "Touch of My Hand" while sporting a blindfold.
When Spears slowed down the show for "Everytime," the audience could be heard singing the lyrics — "everytime I try to fly I fall, without my wings I feel so small" — along with her.
"We're so happy she's back," said 16-year-old Justin Scarbrough of New Orleans, wearing a T-shirt he designed himself that bears Spears' image and the words "I Support Britney Spears."
In the past five years, Spears has gone through more tumult than many endure in a lifetime: She's been married and divorced, had two kids, gone to rehab, gone through a custody battle, found herself briefly committed, and been so out of control that her father, Jamie Spears, was appointed by a court to oversee his daughters' personal and professional affairs indefinitely.
But over the past year, Spears' life and career has rebounded. Her "Circus" CD, released in December, has already sold more than 1.3 million copies, and she's had two hits off the CD, the No. 1 "Womanizer" and the top five "Circus."
Tuesday's "Circus" tour, which takes Spears to 27 cities in the United States before heading to Europe in June, is the pop star's biggest opportunity to connect with her still formidable fan base.
"That was awesome," said 21-year-old Lauren Baudoin of Lafayette, La., after the show. Baudoin's sister, 18-year-old Lindsey Baudoin, said she liked that there were entertainers between the songs.
"It kept going," Lindsey Baudoin said. "It was nonstop."
yeah, ok... that's Britney's worst show and you all know it, but you know "defend your fav artist to death" ... still Funhouse >>> Circus
I'm with you.
This show isn't a big deal... she WALKED all the time, what are you talking about!?? don't lie!, you're too excited about it, but it was BAD, NO PASSION! that's it.
Great dancers, great numbers... but the STAR was bad BRITNEY WAS STIFF.
This show isn't a big deal... she WALKED all the time, what are you talking about!?? don't lie!, you're too excited about it, but it was BAD, NO PASSION! that's it.
Great dancers, great numbers... but the STAR was bad BRITNEY WAS STIFF.
Not like yesterday when she used to D-A-N-C-E!!
this post sums up the concert lol agree on everything.
BRITNEY Spears proved she’s still the princess of pop last night, as she kicked off her comeback tour with a stunt-filled extravaganza.
The 27-year-old singer wowed fans in New Orleans with her Circus-themed gig, belting out her biggest hits after descending from the ceiling on a circular trapeze.
Britney showed off her super-toned body with more than 25 spectacular costume changes from ringmaster to policewoman - all by celebrity designers DSquared.
Her ultra-revealing body suits and Swarovski-crystal embellished corsets were teamed with killer knee-high boots, top hats, feather bowers and suspender belts.
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Fans in the sold-out arena were treated to a line-up of her biggest hits – including singles from her top-selling new album Circus.
Old favourites also featured - with Slave and a Baby One More Time remix on the set list.
Britney straddled a stripper’s pole to sing Radar while her 2007 hit Gimme More was given a martial arts theme, with the star performing alongside a troupe of dancing ninjas.
The crowd also watched the singer perform an illusion as she was placed in a box and 'cut in half' during her rendition of Ooh Ooh Baby.
During the gig Britney paid tribute to her screaming fans, telling the crowd: "Thank you New Orleans for coming out tonight - I love you."
The show marks a return to form for the troubled star and mother-of-two who recently suffered a high-profile meltdown.
Only Circus was PRE-RECORDED, Which obviously means NOT LIVE AT ALL.
I'm waiting for the EXCUSES bitches... come on! "she was great", "she's the queen", "tour of the decade", BLA BLA BLA! NOT TRUE!....
Eat me alive, but I'm so freaking RIGHT, this tour is most OVERRATED thing I ever SAW.
Britney is just... I don't know, WALKING... this is Just a show with a lot of good dancers and a good stage. That's all.
this is right.. i used to love britney, but now seriously, she's losing her confidence, look at the rehearsal video, she's so much alive there than the tour.. she can't handle all this fans.. she is uncomfortable with her body yet..
this tour isn't good.. i'm not Hating in this case, it seriously amazing if you look at her outfits, stage, tracks, but come on, she did nothing there, just moving her lips..
this is right.. i used to love britney, but now seriously, she's losing her confidence, look at the rehearsal video, she's so much alive there than the tour.. she can't handle all this fans.. she is uncomfortable with her body yet..
this tour isn't good.. i'm not Hating in this case, it seriously amazing if you look at her outfits, stage, tracks, but come on, she did nothing there, just moving her lips..
I'd have to agree on some points! At those rehearsal videos,the energy was FIRE! I guess she is not sued to performing in front of an audience..
But give her some time, you know? Its been 5 years..Im sure date by date, she'll get there...
