In late 2022, Sabrina Carpenter was a hard-working Disney Channel journeyman just getting out from beneath the pop-culture ignominy of having been cast as the bad-guy “blond girl” in Olivia Rodrigo’s instant smash of a Gen Z heartbreak ballad, “Drivers License.”
Two years later, Carpenter arrived at Crypto.com Arena on Friday night with one of 2024’s biggest albums (the chart-topping “Short n’ Sweet”), two of its biggest singles (the perky “Espresso” and the quirky “Please Please Please”) and half a dozen fresh Grammy nominations, including nods for album, record and song of the year as well as best new artist.
If you were tempted to say that Carpenter was on top of the world, you needn’t have bothered: Set in an imagined Midcentury bachelorette pad high above a city — a penthouse on the 69th floor, she told us with a wink — Friday’s fun and frisky concert made the point on its own.
As with this year’s other long-toiling pop breakouts, Chappell Roan and Charli XCX, part of what finally brought 25-year-old Carpenter to stardom was a sense of play and pageantry that’s clearly connected with audiences after a lengthy period defined by the gloomier likes of Lorde and Billie Eilish. “Short n’ Sweet” is brimming with hooks and jokes and vocal exaggerations; this show, the first of three sold-out dates in Los Angeles to wrap Carpenter’s North American tour, left virtually no surface un-bedazzled.
There were costume changes, each get-up sparklier than the last, and there was a troupe of male and female dancers executing athletic choreography. About halfway through the 90-minute gig, Christina Aguilera — one of several earlier icons in pop’s blond-bombshell lineage — appeared onstage without warning for flamboyant renditions of her late-’90s/early-’00s hits “Ain’t No Other Man” and “What a Girl Wants.”
“So, that just happened,” Carpenter said with mock (or perhaps genuine) disbelief after Aguilera’s exit. “And somehow the show continues.”
Yet for all the glitz and throwback glamour in Carpenter’s presentation, there’s a modern edge to her music — an emotional honesty and an unabashed interest in sex — that helps explain her success in an era of social-media oversharing.
As a songwriter, she delights in saying the quiet part out loud, as in “Lie to Girls” — crummy men shouldn’t bother, she sings, because “if they like you, they’ll just lie to themselves” — and “Juno,” an extended bedroom fantasy that climaxes with what might be the year’s most candid lyric: “I’m so f—ing horny!”
At Crypto, that line went off like a battle cry in a crowd filled with girls and young women: a nightmare, no doubt, to some of the parents in the house but certainly not to the fans who value the rawness of Carpenter’s confessions. Indeed, one of her skills is subverting the very razzle-dazzle on which her show is built: For “Sharpest Tool,” a finely detailed acoustic number about a failing relationship, she dashed into the penthouse’s bathroom (as someone might during a party they regretted coming to) and sang while perched on a toilet, of all things; she did her next song, “Opposite,” as she stared into a prop mirror that fed an uncomfortably intimate close-up to the giant video screens flanking the stage.
Toward the end of the show, she performed “Please Please Please,” which is about a celebrity begging her boyfriend not to embarrass her in public, before closing with “Espresso,” which is about how embarrassing it is to be wanted in the first place.
“I can’t relate to desperation,” she sang — a lie, of course, but a perfect rhyme for “My give-a-f—s are on vacation.”