Latest news with #pre-Perry
The Age
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
If you dream it, you can be it: The Katy Perry ethos takes flight in Melbourne
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. 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. 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.
Sydney Morning Herald
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
If you dream it, you can be it: The Katy Perry ethos takes flight in Melbourne
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. 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. 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.
