'She’s Back, and Now She’s Angry'

UNIONDALE, N.Y. Eighteen months ago Britney Spears took the stage at the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards and, it surely seemed, doused her career in lighter fluid and struck a match. In her brief performance she looked fatigued, unhappy and disoriented. With Ms. Spears already in the middle of a hostile run in the tabloids, this was something worse than self-injury; it was a speeding car with no driver. Surely no good ending was possible.

That she might attempt a tour on the scale of the one that arrived at the Nassau Coliseum here on Wednesday night would have appeared laughable and worrying. That she pulled it off was nothing short of a shock.

Even though Ms. Spears is essentially operating under the auspices of her father, Jamie Spears, who last year was granted legal conservatorship over her, she is 27 now, a mother of two and finally in righteous possession of the anger and frustration that have long animated some of her best music, but never her persona.

Not that she was sneering her way through this warp-speed-quick hour-and-a-half performance. This was less a concert the vocals appeared to be recorded than a Las Vegas-style revue of intimidating complexity. Throughout, though she spoke little, Ms. Spears appeared radiant and unfettered, often smiling and never uncommitted.

There was efficient, expert use of a huge stage set in the round, featuring about a dozen backup dancers choreographed impressively by Jamie King. Ms. Spears’s dancing is half as strong as it once was, but she achieved a lot with small gestures, and with attention drawn in so many different directions, it didn’t matter. She was being accommodated, which freed her up to be natural.

The rigid execution extended to image management as well: Ms. Spears’s handlers denied access to photographers except under the strictest of usage terms.

From the tour’s title “The Circus Starring Britney Spears” on down, the night was rife with blunt-force imagery: Ms. Spears locked in a cage and working her way out, Ms. Spears suspended in a picture frame, Ms. Spears as a ringmaster wielding a whip. During many segments of the show she and her dancers wore bondage-inspired outfits reminiscent of early-’90s modes of sexual transgression.

And there was no room for reflection; the past had moved by far too quickly to dwell on it. Ms. Spears performed a version of her first hit, “ ... Baby One More Time,” and, in a video montage before the encore, flashed through scenes and images from her entire career. (Her kiss with Madonna at the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards received the biggest cheer.) But otherwise there were no references to her first two albums. Any song with even a whiff of naivete was stricken from the record no “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman,” no “Sometimes,” no “From the Bottom of My Broken Heart.”

Instead she leaned heavily on the surprisingly strong “Circus” (Jive), her sixth album, released late last year, and her previous album, “Blackout,” from 2007: songs about empowerment and disempowerment set to frantic production. Rarely varying from script, she resisted deep reading, though midshow she briefly erupted into a military shout. “I don’t know what you’ve been told,” she said. “This mama is in control.” She seemed certain of it.

Source: NYTimes.Com