Britney Concert: A Revenge Fantasy
There were no untoward outbursts during Britney Spears’ Los Angeles appearance the other night, but her “Circus” tour is so perverse and filled with such troubling, passive-aggressive imagery, you can’t help but walk out wondering if her therapist (or parole officer) has seen this. She’s not the first female performer to use a circus as a metaphor (Madonna, Janet Jackson, and Christina Aguilera beat her to it), but Spears’ version of the greatest show on earth is easily the most malign. Divided into four acts and an encore, the 90-minute spectacle, filled with dancers, tumblers, clowns and quite a bit of pyrotechnics, amounts to little more than a revenge fantasy against anyone who has wronged her — a list, one imagines, to be quite long.
