Short n’ Sweet review | Sabrina Carpenter’s musical

Sabrina Carpenter rode for the show Short n’ Sweetwhich she is presenting in North America these days, a series of numbers worthy of a musical comedy. Montreal welcomed her for the very first time on Friday evening.

All evening, the American singer was as theatrical as possible. Dancers accompanied her throughout, and the sophisticated staging, above all, gave the concert the ability to transport the Bell Center (which was sold out) into a very specific universe. That of Sabrina Carpenter, where femininity is celebrated as it should be. We are propelled into a television world where retro and modern combine, where we pay homage to pin-up and where romanticism meets the comic and the sensual.

A fun introductory video showing Sabrina in her bath, late for her show, began the first act of this concert divided into three parts, during which she performed all the pieces from her most recent album and some pieces from the previous one. .

Carpenter, in her role as a modern-day princess, shines with her ability to bring to life a character that merges with who she really is, on a scene that reproduces a television set from the 1950s. Friday evening, we were presented THE Short n’ Sweet Show.

She started with Tasteafter getting rid of her bath towel. In a shimmering gold nightie, her dancers surrounding her, she continued on Good Graces, Slim Pickins et Tornado Warningsplaying with the props of the immense immaculate three-story stage, his “penthouse”, equipped with several rooms. The scenes followed one another and each time told a different story, her actor-dancers sometimes accompanying her in the scenes that she performed while singing.

For her very first presence in Montreal, Sabrina Carpenter not only sang, but also played, for a music show that entertains because it is much more than music. She is convincing in her role as the protagonist of her own musical, punctuated to the sound of her own songs.

Ultra-femininity

She reached her current notoriety only a short time ago, but Sabrina Carpenter has been in show business for years already. And all his experience shows. At 25 years old today, she already has more than 10 years of career behind her. An actress as well as a singer, she became a young Disney star as a teenager, she played in films as well as on Broadway. If nothing says that we won’t see her in films or series very soon, everything in her career indicates that it is music, above all, which has always taken precedence for her. Seeing her on stage in Montreal, we could see that Sabrina Carpenter was made for the stage.

Nothing more to do with his Disney years. This side of her was not her real personality, she already mentioned it in an interview. Carpenter is seductive and gives a show where her charm is part of the numbers. If she likes to make amusing erotic allusions in certain songs, she does not hesitate to bring this side to her performance. It’s quite entertaining. The singer is one of the artists at the top of a pop scene currently dominated by women. If another pop star like Billie Eilish is in a certain rejection of feminine and masculine codes, Sabrina Carpenter is on her side in “empowerment” through a well-assumed ultra-femininity.

Pour Lie to Girlsshe went up one floor, accompanied herself for a moment on the acoustic guitar. Then Bed Chem concluded the first act, the singer in the penthouse bedroom, in a bed with the dancers (then with one of her dancers removing his sweater…), the sound of her (very pretty) voice somewhat swallowed up by the accompaniment instrumental from the start.

Star of the hour

The young fans, some of whom were recording TikTok videos around the Bell Center before the concert, never stopped singing and shouting. Not for a second.

During Act II (titled “Sabrina After Dark”), the singer returned more often to songs from the album Emails I Can’t Send, published in 2022, less popular. Feather (version jazz), Fast Times, Because I Liked a Boy et Nonsense have been there, just like the most recent Sharpest Tool (Carpenter installed in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet) and Coincidence.

The song gave rise to a bottle game with its dancers in the heart-shaped “living room” in the middle of the crowd: the choice of the bottle led to the resumption of the evening, each evening different. We were entitled to Kiss Meby Sixpence None the Richer. The painting this time was modeled on the aesthetic of the 1920s, with the singer dressed in a black lace jumpsuit.

Mostly made up of young teenage girls, but not only that, the crowd seems to form an army of rather recent admirers, from the wave of Please Please Please et Espresso. Much less known before, Carpenter had nevertheless already released five other albums, none having achieved the success of Short n’ Sweetwhich saw the artist reinvent himself artistically and aesthetically.

By the time Act III (titled “Don’t Touch That Dial!”) was launched, the energy of the dense crowd at the Bell Center had not dropped a notch, while the singer presented us with new intriguing chapters of his musical comedy.

Time for walks to finish. The abductor Dumb & Poetic (in a slightly more sober atmosphere, but still very sparkling) and Juno led to the supra-popular Please Please Please Then Don’t Smile.

The evening ended with Espressothe other success of the year, which took Sabrina Carpenter from very promising starlet to pop megastar. His sixth life as an artist was a good one.