Pop diva Britney Spears kicked off the Australian leg of her Circus world tour at Burswood Dome last night, lip-syncing her way through nearly two hours of high camp in front of a sold-out audience of 17,000.
The fans could not have cared less that she was not singing live, screaming as the comeback queen minced through her hits accompanied on stage by 15 circus performers.
YouTube footage from the concert here
And it was the real Spears, not a decoy, strutting around amongst acrobats, clowns and latex-clad dancers in the middle of the Dome.
The 27-year-old mother-of-two's first ever Australian concert was visually spectacular but the sound was woeful - an ear-splitting bombardment that made objections to her miming a concern secondary to worries that your head might explode.
While the crowd of mostly young fans went wild for remixed versions of favourites such as Toxic, Slave 4 U and her 1998 debut single …Baby One More Time, the first half stuck to recent songs off 2007's Blackout and last year's comeback album, Circus.
The show veered close to soft-porn on several occasions, and Spears may have fallen out of one of her skimpy costumes during Toxic.
One can only assume that the combination of Spears' train-wreck off-stage life, epochal pop songs and the stadium-sized concert spectacular drove Circus to be the highest grossing international tour of 2009.
Frankly, it's not much chop - 16 songs not even sung by the star, with plenty of filler and Spears barely engaging with her fans. She may as well have sent the decoy out in a blonde wig.
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