Just past the halfway mark of her first of three Los Angeles shows last night, Sabrina Carpenter cracked a Colgate smile as she arrived at evening’s roulette moment, where she spins a bottle to determine which song she’ll cover. “Do you guys like to play games here?” she said. Recent picks at other dates on her “Short n’ Sweet” tour have been Sixpence None the Richer’s “Kiss Me” and Madonna’s “Material Girl.” “How about a little Christina?”
On cue, Christina Aguilera rose from the back of the stage, duetting with Carpenter on her hits “Ain’t No Other Man” and “What a Girl Wants,” the latter of which they just released as a collaboration on Spotify for the 25th anniversary of Aguilera’s self-titled debut. Vocal runs went flying, cloying looks at one another were shared, and decibels peaked with an arena-sized swell of teenage squeals.
It was a co-sign that made sense for Carpenter, who has been on a rocket ride to contemporary pop royalty over the past two years. Much like Aguilera, Carpenter has embraced high-femme ideals matched with knowingly sly, often not-so-coded pop (remember “Candyman?”). That ethos permeated through Carpenter’s tight, fine-point show: a musician in full command of her artistry that contends with the jagged edges of romance, from lust and love to heartbreak and regret.
At at Crypto.com Arena, there were peaks and valleys of mood and texture across Carpenter’s 90-minute set, staged like a 1970s variety show where subtitles on the adjacent screen read, “Taped in front of a live studio audience.” The set list largely constituted songs from her 2022 breakthrough album “E-Mails I Can’t Send” and her recently released sixth album “Short n’ Sweet,” the one that cemented her as one of this generation’s foremost pop stars (and just earned her six Grammy nominations including best new artist roughly a decade after her debut).
Unlike fellow du jour pop royalty Chappell Roan and Charli XCX, Carpenter doesn’t trade in bombast, at least not musically. The mood was jubilant yet demure throughout the show, where at once she trounced about the stage hitting choreography with a crew of backup dancers for “Feather” and soon sat on a toilet in a makeshift bathroom to sing “Sharpest Tool.”
Carpenter centered it all with performative fluidity, making it all look easy and, above all, fun. Part of the appeal is that Carpenter doesn’t seem to take her newfound stature (or herself, really) too seriously. She isn’t just telling the joke — she was in on it long before the world was, too. One of her greatest assets is her sense of humor, and there’s an air of lighthearted sarcasm that permeates each beat. But it’s her professionalism that focuses it all, even when it seems off-script, whether it’s taking a shot midway through “Slim Pickins” or when the audio cuts out at the end of “Nonsense,” just before she historically would deliver a custom-made verse that fans meticulously documented when she was opening on Taylor Swift’s “Eras” tour. (“Technical difficulties,” the screens beside her explain.)
Carpenter knows what it means to be in showbiz — she starred in Disney’s “Girl Meets World” from 2014 to 2017 — but she performs as if she’s enjoying it more than ever. She roused the audience during “Short n’ Sweet” standout “Coincidence,” a campfire singalong in the vein of ’70s era Fleetwood Mac, and dazzled as she serenaded her own reflection while singing “Taste.” Aguilera aside, she deviated from the script here and there, handing a pair of the same “fuzzy pink handcuffs” she sings about in “Juno” to actress Rachel Sennott, who was poised in the front row.
But for Carpenter, her Los Angeles show was more than just another stop on her tour, which concludes at Kia Forum on Monday before heading over to Europe in March 2025. It was also a homecoming, she explained, as she’s long considered the city one of her residences. “I spent so many years dreaming so much and thinking of things and being creative,” she said, “just spending so much time investing into creativity and things that make me happy and things I love and things that fill me with joy and maybe filled others with joy. And now I get to sit here in a sold-out Crypto arena because of you guys.”
To reach this point after years of starts and stops made “Espresso,” her closing number, a fitting coda. “Espresso” is the one that launched her into the pop stratosphere, a song she first performed during a set at Coachella in April that in itself felt like an epiphany. But even then, the sparkle of the evening didn’t fizzle. “Thanks for coming to my tour. I love singing. I hope you liked hearing me sing for that long,” she said in a series of parting video vignettes. “Thanks for coming to the show! Hope you had a great night… Was that sincere?”
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