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6 hours ago
10
Way back in the good old days of spring 2024, the pop singer Sabrina Carpenter ended her first Coachella set with a bold promise: “He’s drinking my bath water like it’s red wine / Coachella, see you back here when I headline,” she trilled as part of the ever-rotating, always naughty outro lines for her song Nonsense. Carpenter is a famously cheeky performer – her music, chock-full of double entendres and witty punchlines, is as much musical comedy as pop – but it seems, for once, that she was dead serious. Just two years later, she returned to the desert as the calling card for this year’s opening night, tongue still firmly in cheek. “I can’t believe I’m headlining Coachella!” she exclaimed to cheers that, true to form, she immediately melted to laughs – “Actually, I can … but it’s nicer to say that, right?”
Carpenter has reason to boast; the days when she chased virality with bawdy Nonsense outros now seem long gone. Her Coachella debut also marked the release of a daffy ditty called Espresso that soon turned everyone into “that’s that me” caffeine addicts, and catapulted the diminutive pop star (“oh I make quite an impression / five feet, to be exact,” she purrs in the delectable hit Taste) into pop’s big leagues. Near-constant touring and two albums – the no-skips Short n’ Sweet and the comparatively B-side Man’s Best Friend – cemented her status as one of pop’s consummate entertainers, churning out finely crafted, relentlessly horny hits at a pace not seen since perhaps Rihanna in the early 2010s. Nonsense, that 2022 song that first got my attention, didn’t even make the 20-plus song set list at Carpenter’s wildly ambitious headlining set, an audacious flex of ability and budget that declared her intentions for A-list permanence.
She had no choice, really. Carpenter took the stage on Friday a year after Lady Gaga opened the festival with one of the best sets the desert has ever seen, a high-concept pop opera that set an impossible standard even for the premier pop stars a generation below her. But Carpenter got the assignment: if you’re going to headline Coachella, you better deliver not just a show, but theater, both in terms of elaborate on-stage world-building and cinematic videography essential for everyone other than the front row to see what’s going on. You better declare the whole she-bang, with a Hollywood Hills-style set that is among the most impressive I’ve ever seen, to be SABRINAWOOD, with big block letters in 4K vision as crystal clear as Carpenter’s head voice.
Like Gagachella, Sabchella, as her fans have deemed it, is a dizzying full-scale hybrid production of undaunted vision that combines pre-filmed chapter breaks with complex costume changes and immaculate performance, if not always coherent plot. (Though it should be noted, the notion of “plot” for a concert is already a cut above.) The 26-year-old singer has been working in entertainment since before she was a teenager, and gamely plays the ultimate showgirl in a peripatetic production avidly concerned with many a showgirl past. From the second she emerges from a vintage car, resplendent in a red sequin dress, to her own Hollywood walk of fame, she does not miss a beat. Petite, perky and always in on the bit, Carpenter slips easily into character: the wide-eyed classic starlet reinventing herself in La La Land (a glittering version of House Tour that borrows heavily from Damien Chazelle’s movie); the lovelorn 70s star overseen by a male producer in a studio (highlight Please Please Please, her sultry vocals as lush as a bubble bath); the overlooked dancer (the country-fried Go Go Juice, but make it Chicago); the burlesque star (an especially seductive, chair-dance edition of fantasy anthem Bed Chem).
It’s enough full-set changes and full-entourage choreo to both dazzle and confound, often at once. Like her friend and Eras tour colleague Taylor Swift, Carpenter does not seem to have a clear thesis on the life of a showgirl beyond living it, though I believe her when she says she spent seven months of dedicated work on Sabrinawood. Does the more is more mindset tip into overkill? Perhaps. While a deliriously over-stuffed stage for Espresso was delightful, I worry for the fans soaked by the car seat that is also a rising chair that is also a fountain for the final number, Tears. Does the 90-minute set demonstrate the thematic limitations of Carpenter’s body of work? Yes, though it’s only been two years! And do the interludes, separately starring Will Ferrell, Susan Sarandon and, in voiceover, Samuel L Jackson, add anything other than time for costume and set changes? Unfortunately no, though Sarandon’s six-minute (!) monologue on … something … was drowned out by mic issues and desert wind.
I could’ve done with one less set change to avoid that buzzkill, but it also doesn’t matter; the madcap production – Sam Elliott playing a cop in the intro, Feathers mixed with Barry Manilow’s Copacabana, that Broadway worthy set! – is more than most pop stars could dream of, let alone execute, however imperfectly. It helps that Carpenter, often heralded more for her writing than her vocals, sounded phenomenal, her live voice more bodied and enveloping than her bluebird recordings, though no less pristine. She ended the set, soaked and triumphant, back in that car, driving toward the on-screen credits as if closing the loop on her own movie stardom. No big promises made with this outro, just promises gloriously kept.
