HANNAH MONTANA mania swept into Southern California over the weekend, where it will burn unchecked until Thursday. She'll be in L.A. Wednesday when the Disney Channel superstar is scheduled to reprise her Honda Center performance at Staples Center downtown.
On Saturday evening in Anaheim, the young experimental artist took the stage and spent about 90 minutes exploring the increasingly complicated relationship between television and reality.
Her performance was split into two halves: In the first she portrayed a blond-haired pop star, while in the second she appeared a typical 14-year-old girl whose double life as the blond-haired pop star is a secret to all but her closest friends.
The entire show operated at a frenzied fever pitch, but its David Cronenberg-like climax came right before the encore, when the regular girl sang a duet with her famous alter ego, who'd disappeared from the stage but now reappeared on the screen of a giant video monitor.
Which of us is more real, the artist seemed to be asking the audience, about half of which consisted of perplexed-looking adults obviously confounded by the performer's sophisticated interrogation of our current media moment.
A sea of colorfully attired 10-year-old girls, the other half of the crowd, appeared more comfortable with the presentation. They're familiar with this artist's cutting-edge oeuvre. They watch her TV show and buy her albums and visit her website daily. And, anyway, what's reality?
Shortly after going on sale (and nearly instantaneously selling out) in August, tickets to shows on Montana's 54-date "Best of Both Worlds" tour became the objects of furious Internet auctions. In some reported cases, consumers bought tickets for over 20 times their face value. At deadline, two fourth-row seats for Wednesday's show were available on StubHub, EBay's ticket-resale site, for $1,945 apiece.
Inside the Honda Center, Audrey Lamar of Temecula said she had less trouble buying tickets to see the Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney than she did attempting to purchase two Hannah Montana tickets for her and her 10-year-old daughter, Emily. "I tried to get them through Ticketmaster as soon as they went on sale, but they weren't available," Lamar said. She sent a last-ditch e-mail to Disney pleading her case and was amazed to receive a response Friday promising a pair of floor seats.
So was Hannah worth the hysteria? Depends who's answering.
