Katy Perry is 29 years old.
It’s worth remembering that fact, because during her Wednesday-night show at the Garden, it was easy to think you were watching a pubescent girl in action.
The “Prismatic” tour is ostensibly where the singer’s arrested development is laid out in plain sight and, to be frank, it’s weird to see a fully grown
divorcée acting like a fourth-grader. At various points during the two-hour show, she played Egyptian dress-up, skipped with a neon rope, devoted a whole section to her love of cats, and flew around the arena while hanging from a bunch of giant balloons.
Perry seemed less like a pop star than a schoolgirl after too much soda.
If a 29-year-old male singer went on stage every night and danced around in his Superman skivvies and decorated the stage to look like a giant Thomas the Tank Engine track, there would be nowhere to hide from the ridicule. So it’s inexplicable and embarrassing to see that, six years after her breakthrough single “I Kissed A Girl,” Perry is still peddling the same grating bubble-gum act and no one seems willing to tell her that it’s time to grow the hell up.
There were brief and unconvincing moments in which she tried to put her supposed maturity on show. A mid-set acoustic interlude saw Perry address her separation from Russell Brand with “By the Grace of God,” although any sense of emotional weight was swiftly undercut by her irritating Nickelodeon presenter routine.
“I have blue hair now, kids,” she screamed at one juncture. Even the kids knew that this was not much of a reason to get excited.
If the spectacle was flimsy, then the music was practically translucent. Perry’s big individual hits such as “I Kissed A Girl” and “Teenage Dream” are hummable in their own right, but having to hear them spread thinly across a set of awful dance-pop fillers like “Walking On Air” and “International Smile” felt like a modern version of cruel and unusual punishment. By the time she rounded off the night with “Firework,” it felt like an act of mercy rather than the big celebratory finale it was meant to be.
Perry plays at the Prudential Center in Newark on Friday and Saturday before returning to the area at the end of July, when she’ll perform at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center. You have been warned.