'I feel, like, 110 percent of everything in life," Katy Perry proclaimed on Sunday night during her sold-out show at the Theater of Living Arts. That declaration came by way of introducing "Mannequin," a song from her 2008 hit album One of the Boys that she described as being about "wanting to strangle a boy out of a coma."
Indeed, the Hello Katy tour that brought Perry to the Philadelphia area for the third time, but her first as a headliner, backed up her mathematical claim with a performance that was determinedly over the top.
"I keep coming back, and it's not because of that damn bell," she told her audience of mostly teens, 'tweens and their moms. "It's because of you."
The TLA is a far smaller venue than Perry presumably could have played. The 24-year-old pastor's daughter's debut album went double platinum and spawned a string of slightly naughty Top 10 radio and ringtone hits, including "Ur So Gay," "Hot N Cold" and the ubiquitous "I Kissed a Girl." And at the TLA, everything was a little outsized.
That went for the giant blue-eyed kitten - "Kitty Purry," named after the singer's cat - that loomed to Perry's left, and the bigger-than-beach-balls blow-up fruit that cluttered the stage. A forlorn inflatable banana lay on the ground in front of the drum kit, looking more like a banana slug.
The ginormous prop in the shape of a tube of lipstick did get put to use, however, in the titillating "cherry ChapStick" product-placement line in "I Kissed a Girl." Perry accurately described her hit as "the most overplayed song of 2008" as she closed out the efficiently paced 75-minute show with the most ardently sung audience sing-along in a night full of them.
Unfortunately, Perry's preference for the grand gesture also extends to her music. She doesn't sing so much as shout, bouncing up and down in a skin-tight leopard skin minidress (before changing into a low-cut feline catsuit, complete with tail and pussy-cat ears). She and her white-suited four-piece band, looking like wannabe Tom Wolfes, bashed out her hits with an unfailingly heavy hand, amping up the rock-guitar quotient of her snappy pop tunes.
Even when she dismissed the band for an acoustic "Thinking of You," she did a poor job of modulating her voice or diminishing the volume of her delivery for emotional effect. The show was in a small venue, but there was nothing intimate about it.
Some of Perry's hits are simply too catchy to resist - well, "Hot N Cold" is, anyway. But while she's sometimes witty, she's never subtle - "I hope you hang yourself with your H&M scarf" is how "Ur So Gay" kicks off, with a follow-up rhyme that can't be printed in these demure pages.
It came as no surprise, then, when she announced that her favorite band in the world was the always-melodramatic Queen. Perry doesn't have a smidgen of Freddy Mercury's style, however, not to mention his vocal chops. But for her first encore she energetically covered "Don't Stop Me Now" as if she had no intention of letting anything stand in her way, before finally playing the overplayed song that the guy next to me - screaming out "I kissed a girl and I liked it and I wished it was you, Katy!" - so desperately wanted to hear.
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