Katy Perry, pixie-haired and ever ebullient, roared through her second appearance in Bangkok on Tuesday night with professionalism, humour and ease. This pop-spectacle is as much a visual experience as it is an aural one -- in fact, the visual overwhelmed our attention for the most parts of the 120-minute gig. The stage -- and wardrobe -- dripped with red at one point, shimmered with silver at another, and Perry's team deployed a full arsenal of wacky props, girlish delight and zany sight gags. We even had a fart joke at one point, perhaps the first I ever heard live on the stage from Impact Arena. Perry's appeal cuts a broad swathe across the demographic, and we had a rainbow of humanity thronging the hall: office types, teenagers, party animals, hipsters, Cosplay queens, the LGBT camp, celebrities, people who think they're celebrities, girls in candy-coloured wigs, parents and children -- I mean, first-graders and stuff, lots of them in fact, arriving in cheerful anticipation and looking tired when the proceedings advanced past 11pm. In all, it looked like a cross section between the crowd at a Madonna gig and Disney On Ice. Such is the strange pull of Perry.
The stage had a jutting runway, at the tip of which emerged Perry in an all-red outfit, somewhere between a desert princess and chic extraterrestrial. The first set rolled out: Witness, Roulette, Dark Horse, Chained To The Rhythm. Every song was accompanied by an elaborate video graphics, a kaleidoscope of bright colours, and a pageantry of eight dancers in cutely outlandish costumes. "I've had too much pad Thai in my belly," she announced. Then came the second set, featuring Perry's biggest hits here, brought out the loudest cheers, Teenage Dreams, Hot And Cold (plus a bit of TGIF), and California Girls. At this point, the much-awaited dancing blue shark appeared on stage (to the roar of first graders in particular).
Then for about 10 minutes, the show became a brief comedic sketch when the singer invited a fan on stage where a bantering and Thai language session took place, witnessed by the fluffy shark. As minutely choreographed as this kind of world tour can be, Perry's charm was in the way she came across as unselfconscious, and she seemed to be genuinely enjoying the session with this fan -- a chubby, peroxide-haired cross-dresser who eventually had to teach the singer to say the word "fart" in Thai.
After that came I Kissed A Girl, and the show transitioned into a sultry act with slower numbers such as Deja Vu, Tsunami and Et. This was a section where Perry could show her vocal talent, which was impressive when she wanted to be and which was often drowned out, or distracted, by the giganticism and earnest bedazzlement of the show. The final act was a requisite roll call of more familiar radio hits: Wide Awake, Part Of Me, Swish Swish, and of course, Roar, which has become an anthem for girl power -- girls as in young women as well as literal schoolgirls (such as my seven-year-old niece, who can sing the entire chorus). Such is the spectrum of appeal the pop star has always tried to cover and along which defined her career: her persona combines the strength of modern women as well as the girlishness of a high-school prankster, she's comfortable with both when radiating female sexuality as well as the madcap energy of a popular entertainer. Aptly the encore was Firework, another empowering number that sent us home humming the refrain along the way.
