"The Beyoncé Experience," the show 25-year-old dynamo Beyoncé Knowles is due to bring to Staples Center tonight near the end of her summer-long world tour, is one of those modern superstar spectacles that casts the artist's reality onto the level of myth.
As with Madonna, who recently crucified herself (minus nails) onstage, or U2, which announced the death of the band's own innocence with the hucksterism of the 1992 "Zoo TV" tour, Beyoncé's "Experience" plays off the performer's well-known struggles and triumphs to build a story that will make fans both gawk and relate. The maddening thing about this dazzling entertainment, though, is that the tale it tells is partly the wrong one.
This doesn't stop the show from being a blast. Beyoncé's hits, with their tricky rhythms and rapid-fire vocal lines, are fascinating contributions to hip-hop-era R&B. The girl can dance better than Bono and act better than Madge, and her commitment to showbiz flash is unrelenting. A visit to the show when it hit San Diego's Cox Arena last Sunday revealed a performer totally in command. Yet the production kept steering away from what makes Beyoncé so important to pop, even as it pleased her adoring audience.
As a pop queen, Beyoncé is almost too perfect. A tumble down the stairs onstage in Orlando and a subsequent "wardrobe malfunction" in Toronto garnered far more attention than was warranted partly because these mistakes contradicted her fiercely athletic style. She projects a fearsome level of proficiency when performing -- the camouflage outfits her male dancers sometimes wore in San Diego felt right for a show that sometimes seemed like a military operation, expertly executed.
As she vamped and belted her way through club favorites such as "Crazy in Love" and massive ballads including "Dangerously in Love," her superhuman-seeming body moving in thrusts and waves, Beyoncé hit every daunting bit of choreography, every careening vocal cue. She was a wonder -- until it came time to emote.
In films, Beyoncé is a competent if not wildly charismatic actress, relaxed and fairly natural on camera. Pop spectacle, however, requires something different: intensified intimacy.
A performer's ability to seem like a regular person while surrounded by undulating dancers or perched on a giant acrobatic bar (both scenarios Beyoncé has tackled during "Experience") makes sense of the sensory overload that dominates most major concerts now. The star grounds the show, not with her musical performance, but through her personal charisma; she's like a magician showing the secret of a few tricks so that his willing victims feel thrilled, not fooled, when the big illusion overtakes them.
