Pint-sized pop sensation Sabrina Carpenter caffeinated Little Caesars Arena Thursday night during her super-duper sold-out stop on her Short n’ Sweet Tour, a frothy affair that traded on retro kitsch and Carpenter’s playful personality as much as it did on catchy pop tunes and full-crowd singalongs.
Fans, overwhelmingly female and largely middle- and high school-aged, screamed along to the familiar hits and basked in the presence of Carpenter, who is almost doll-like in her presentation. If it was their first concert — which for many of the approximately 15,000 fans in attendance, it surely was — they picked a good one, featuring a pop star who is very of-the-moment and an accessible evening of fun, danceable, sugar-coated candy pop.
The 19-song, 90-minute show focused on material from Carpenter’s “Short n’ Sweet” album, her recent chart-topper, which has made her one of today’s most popular pop stars. It’s a role she was born to play, and the actress and former child star relished in the rush of it all.
She performed on a stage that looked like a whited-out version of Barbie’s Dream House, featuring a long runway with a heart-shaped stage at the end. The concert itself, meanwhile, unfolded as some sort-of cracked version of a variety show with aesthetics cherry picked from the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s.
Pre-filmed video introduced Carpenter relaxing in a bathtub, getting called to the stage, not knowing she was ready to go on — all part of the show, of course. She emerged in a white towel, opening it up to reveal a sparkling pink outfit as a microphone lowered to her from the ceiling, just out of reach of the 5-foot-nothing star.
As her current single “Taste” kicked in, she gently motioned for the mic to come closer to her — all part of the show, of course — a tiny gesture to let the crowd know she’s willing to have fun at her own expense. Carpenter’s self-awareness, and her utter inability to take herself seriously, are all part of her knowing charm.
She’s a performer who sang one of the evening’s songs, “Sharpest Tool,” while seated on a toilet. She also pretended to have technical difficulties on her microphone and on the stage’s video screens during her outro to “Nonsense,” her way of getting out of performing a different, innuendo-laden, city specific closing to the song each night, as she did on her previous outing, which became her signature bit at each show. But we’re in a new era now.
Thursday’s concert was just the third stop on the 25-year-old’s Short n’ Sweet Tour, launched in the wake of last month’s “Short n’ Sweet” album, which marked her first No. 1 hit on the Billboard 200.
It’s been a stratospheric year for the pop singer, who has been kicking around since her debut album “Eyes Wide Open” was released in 2015; that same year she sang the National Anthem before the Detroit Lions’ Thanksgiving Day game. The following year she performed a small concert upstairs at the Pike Room at Pontiac’s Crofoot, which she alluded to on stage Thursday, relaying a story about trying to use the bathroom at a 24-hour hour diner after the show, only to find out it was closed. “Pontiac, Michigan really humbled me,” she said with a laugh.
Carpenter’s profile didn’t really come into focus until she was identified as the other girl in Olivia Rodrigo’s “Driver’s License” drama in 2021, and she became a pop villain in Rodrigo’s storyline. But 2022 brought “Emails I Can’t Send,” Carpenter’s first grown-up pop album, and she shifted the narrative around her by creating a smart, funny, bubbly persona, full of playful come-ons and winking jokes, and she sold out Detroit’s Masonic Temple in 2023 on her tour behind the album.
Her profile continued to grow — opening a run of “Eras Tour” dates for Taylor Swift certainly didn’t hurt — and it exploded with the April release of “Espresso,” her crossover smash single, which coincided with her Coachella debut and the launch of summer festival season. Since then it’s been all Carpenter, all the time, and her 2024 breakthrough is a classic example of a 10-years-in-the-making overnight pop success story.
Carpenter was joined on stage Thursday by a team of dancers — six female, four male — and she performed light choreography with the group. Her focus was on bringing out the personality in her songs, which is her personality, and almost every song on “Short n’ Sweet” has some sort of punchline or zinger that is designed to become a shared moment with the audience.
On “Taste” it’s the “just know I was already there!” shout-along bit, on “Bed Chem” it’s the Shakespeare-like phrasing of “where art thou, why not uponeth me?” and on “Please Please Please” it’s the 12-letter curse word in the chorus. These are built into the framework of the songs, making them perfect for TikTok and for crowd participation, and fans knew when to join in and make their voices heard.
“Because I Liked a Boy,” Carpenter’s side of the “Driver’s License” saga and her reckoning with the fallout from it, was another major crowd moment, and showed that those who got on board the Carpenter train recently at least went back and did their homework on her last album. A faithful version of Sixpence None the Richer’s “Kiss Me” came late in the show in a slot that’s held for a cover song; the 1998 single was released one year before Carpenter was born.
While the video screens invoked telephone party line infomercials and late night TV talk shows, there was at one point an extended video clip of the late Leonard Cohen, perhaps to make up for the perceived slight he takes in “Dumb & Poetic.” “Juno,” which is perhaps “Short n’ Sweet’s” most soaring pop moment (and which uses the 2007 teen pregnancy comedy as a winking come-on), was given the night’s biggest production element, with Carpenter dropping to her knees on top of the heart-shaped stage as it was lifted by hydraulics into the air above the crowd.
“Espresso” capped off the night, but even after she left the stage, Carpenter had more up her sleeve. In pre-taped video that ran on the stage’s big screens, she bid fans farewell as they filed out of the arena in a series of awkward, goofy goodbyes. It showed once again how far she’s willing to go to make herself the joke, but also that she’s always going to have the last laugh.
agraham@detroitnews.com
