Orange County Register

Please forgive the name-dropping –- I wouldn’t mention it if he hadn’t made his presence so obvious –- but it was fitting that Adam Lambert sat directly in front of me Friday night to see Pink wow a capacity crowd at Staples Center.

After all, the eye-grabbing sensation Ms. Moore finally brought home after hugely successful tours of Europe and Australia is precisely the sort of gender-bending extravaganza to which the American Idol star aspires. His nationwide splash was such a cannonball that he has no choice but to return with over-the-top excitement, wild grandeur, plenty of daring –- all the elements that make Pink’s current Funhouse fantasia so marvelous.

So it was heartening that Friday night, when he wasn’t nuzzling up to and making out with his boyfriend, an obviously impressed Lambert -– who was often the first in my section to leap up and cheer –- got schooled in the ways of the Big Show, just as Pink has clearly learned her tricks by studying Madonna and Janet Jackson over the years.

What’s remarkable, however, is just how accomplished and thoroughly engaging Pink came across during her nearly two-hour dazzler.

After five albums and a decade of scene-stealing moments at awards shows, you expect she’d be a seasoned performer able to easily enchant tens of thousands of fans. Yet, until this quasi-coming-out at Staples, the largest venue Pink had headlined in Southern California was the 2,000-capacity Wiltern Theatre seven years ago. Even her previous tour of 2006-07, which packed arenas everywhere else in the world, only produced a small-scale warm-up gig at the Avalon in Hollywood.

Her biggest exposure beyond MTV’s Video Music Awards, then, has come by setting the stage for others, although her fearless aerial work opening for Justin Timberlake two years ago, which brought her to both Staples and Honda Center, merely hinted at her capabilities.

Which is perhaps why it was so stunning to see Pink not just join the ranks of her arena-filling peers at last but, with this phenomenal show, instantly rise toward the top of the class, leaping over Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera and Mariah Carey -– and puny-by-comparison upstarts like Katy Perry and Lady Gaga –- to stand alongside the fiercest performer in the game right now, Beyonce.

Pink’s tremendously appealing production, a costumed and choreographed knockout that nevertheless rarely stops rocking, is not only one of the best shows I’ve seen all year, it’s among the most invigorating spectacles this decade, close behind the enormity of JT’s 2007 tour, any number of U2 and Coldplay outings, and various encounters with Madonna.

Of course, no one tops Madge, partly because she stays ahead of the curve, but mostly because everyone is so busy cribbing ideas from her. Pink is no exception. Her second, heavily sexual sequence of the show, for instance, owes virtually everything to the grande dame of poptopia.

After initially emerging in acrobatic fashion, wearing a court jester’s bodice with an immense train of blood-orange feathers flowing away from her (below), she reappeared in revealing garb like only Cher used to dare — nothing but high heels, a black lace bra and leggings to match, and a G-string underneath. (Uninhibited yet never blatantly raunchy, she has the thick-thighed, amazingly toned physique of a gymnast yet struts like a stripper on a shooting spree. From 50 feet away, it was hard not to become intimately aware of the curves of her derriere.)

As her five-piece band and two backing vocalists eased into a darkened recasting of the Divinyls’ hit “I Touch Myself,” evoking the moodiest moments of Massive Attack, Pink began to slowly writhe on a red-leather curved couch. First straddling the top of it and gently grinding like the Prince of yore, then delicately tumbling onto her back with her legs propped up on the edge, she was soon surrounded by male hands reaching up through holes in the back and seat of the couch to caress her. Fondle and feel her up, really.

That may read crassly, but it was actually alluring and suggestive –- a masturbatory fantasy brought to life with just the right amount of tasteful titillation. Yet it also instantly reminded of Madonna’s torrid “Like a Virgin” sequence from her Blonde Ambition Tour, not to mention Janet’s Velvet Rope gropes.

Another appropriation: the increasingly racy sequence for “Leave Me Alone (I’m Lonely),” during which Pink rolled around on a circular, leopard-print bed tilted toward the audience, much like the one Madge she-bopped on years ago. Her bedroom romp also ends similarly, with dancers first bashing male acrobat Sebastian with feather pillows, then stripping him to his underwear and restraining him … so that by the time the segment slides into “So What,” Pink can end the song by crouching over his torso to stare him down menacingly.

Not to make it seem like the whole shebang was stylized sex play. Following that segment was a downsized portion, with Pink barefoot and in jeans, standing at a grand piano to movingly convey the broken-home tale “Family Portrait.”

After that: the heartache of “I Don’t Believe You” … the seething anger of “Dear Mr. President,” one of the most poignant and pointed of protest songs from the Bush era (and Pink recalled that the only time she’s ever been booed for singing it was in Anaheim, so “I sang it louder”) … a rollicking acoustic run through “Trouble” that is arguably better than the studio version … and, most impressively, a torrential reading of Led Zeppelin’s “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You,” another well-chosen cover.

That’s surefire formula, to throw an unplugged batch into the center of your show. Yet, in Pink’s case, the selections only kept enthusiasm growing. Unlike so many other events of this nature, which peak with each costume change yet lag until the next is revealed, Pink’s performance continually crested, every set piece equaled or topped by another magnificent move.

Her own material, from chrome-polished, turbo-charged blasts like “Just Like a Pill” and “U + Ur Hand” to more atmospheric excursions like “Sober” and “Funhouse,” were consistently rousing. But covering Zeppelin, then tackling Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” with all the colorful, cocksure swagger of Freddie Mercury and closing her main set with Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” while giant inflatable evil clowns rose behind her –- those are gutsy strokes that really could have fallen flat.

Instead, they were highlights, thanks to the life experience with which Pink infused them: as with “Family Portrait,” you could sense in her powerful vocals that she has felt the pain of Robert Plant’s anguished cry, can still relate to Mercury’s line about sometimes wishing (s)he’d never been born at all.

She seems more like one of us than any other pop star of today — that’s a large part of her appeal. She’ll laugh off having feathers in her mouth while singing one of her most sorrowful songs; she’ll leap into the crowd to sign an Australian fan’s arm so she can get it tattooed. (“I can get the Aussies to come to L.A.,” she quipped, “but I can’t get my best friend to come from Silverlake.”)

She’s an up-from-the-streets, down-to-earth diva, larger-than-life yet completely relatable. And the fact that she pulled off this masterful performance –- only her third U.S. show this tour –- just four days after separating her shoulder made it even more jaw-dropping.

No way would that injury stop her: “I waited my whole life for tonight … the more love I get, the less pain I feel.” All it meant in terms of altering her routine is that she stayed on the ground for “Sober” and “Get the Party Started,” her supporting players doing the acrobatics for her. And still she concluded by wrapping herself in ropes and cloth to be lifted high overhead, then dipped low into a pool of water, so she could spin beads of it off her body and onto the crowd.

Adam Lambert, by the way, lost his mind a little watching that, just as he did during the opening a cappella notes of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” just as he did when she nailed the wailing bits in the Zep cover. I sure hope he was taking mental notes. He’s got a long way to go to measure up to P!nk’s pitch-perfect performance here. Finally, she deserves that exclamation point in her name.

The propulsive dance-rock of English duo the Ting Tings was once more body-moving, their mix of gaudy ’80s fashion and the nerviness of the B-52’s and Yeah Yeah Yeahs positively infectious -– though the pair didn’t do themselves any favors by holding out a good 20 minutes or so to play the first of its two stateside hits, “Shut Up and Let Me Go.”

Until then, I suspect a good third if not half of the crowd hadn’t a clue who they were –- though by the time they closed with the deliriously fun “That’s Not My Name,” one of the catchiest singles of the year, seemingly everyone in Staples was on board, and the energy that coursed through the Sahara tent during the duo’s set at Coachella earlier this year began to bubble up.

I’m kinda crazy for ’em, perhaps because I get a kick out of musical primitives who arrive on the scene already producing big fun — in this case trance-dance with basic rock ’n’ roll riffs that come off like Scissor Sisters trapped in a 12-inch remix. I’m excited to see where their minimalism heads next, how it might evolve and expand –- or if they’ll wind up, over here anyway, as the next Timbuk 3. (Or have you already forgotten “The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades”?)

Photos by Kelly A. Swift, for the Register.

Set list: Pink at Staples Center, Los Angeles, Sept. 18, 2009
Main set: Highway to Hell (video introduction) / Bad Influence / Just Like a Pill / Who Knew / Don’t Let Me Get Me / I Touch Myself (Divinyls cover) / Please Don’t Leave Me / U + Ur Hand / Leave Me Alone (I’m Lonely) / So What / piano interlude / Family Portrait (piano and violin only) / I Don’t Believe You (acoustic) / Dear Mr. President (acoustic, of course) / Trouble (acoustic) / Babe I’m Gonna Leave You (Led Zeppelin) / Sober / Bohemian Rhapsody (Queen) / Funhouse / Crazy (Gnarls Barkley)
First encore: Get the Party Started
Second encore: Glitter in the Air

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