When you go to a show by a pop singer who spells her name with a dollar symbol, you’d expect there to be things like dancing girls, flashy sets and chest-rattling beats. But when California pop sensation Ke$ha hit the stage at the Marquee Theatre Thursday night, she went above and beyond the usual expectations, turning the stage into a frantic, dance-crazed circus complete with male strippers, shredding guitar solos and plenty of glitter.
Lowlife hipster rappers Beardo and Mickey Avalon opened the show, spitting out X-rated rhymes while keeping everything nice and ironic. After the mullet-adorned Beardo warmed up the crowd with his antics, Avalon had the whole crowd cheering along through most of his short and sleazy set, which took him through crowd pleasers such as “So Rich, So Pretty,” “Jane Fonda” and “Mr. Right.”
While the openers kept their stage shows fairly simple, mostly featuring barely clothed ladies gyrating around the singers, when it was time for the main event, Ke$ha had something more complex in mind.
A lavish stage show shouldn’t have been too much of a surprise for anyone familiar with Ke$ha’s platinum debut album, 2009’s “Animal.” Against a backdrop of glimmering pop tunes, Ke$ha spends most of the album singing about her glamorous, hard-partying lifestyle. That formula has proven very successful, with the album’s lead single, “Tik Tok,” reaching No. 1 in 12 countries, including the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart.
Against a lush red curtain background and blindingly bright light displays, Ke$ha arrived onstage with a guitar around her shoulders and her fists pumping. Wearing dark sunglasses and gold- sequined hotpants, she stepped up to the mike and casually said, “Welcome to the party.”
With that, Ke$ha and her band, which included a denim-clad rock guitarist and a girl rocking the keytar, launched into a high energy rendition of “Blah Blah Blah.” As the crowd roared and sang along, two guys wearing plaid shirts and cutoff jeans danced clumsily alongside Ke$ha, doing their best awkward sexy moves.
Ke$ha hammered out the primal beat of “Party at a Rich Dude’s House” on a giant drum, pounding until her drumstick broke. As the song reached its fevered pitch, the stage show became sensory overload, with strobe lights flashing, Ke$ha doing cartwheels and the cutoff jeans guys wearing marching band outfits and pounding drums along with the punishingly loud beat.
The band kept things going in full gear during the disco-tinged “VIP,” and Ke$ha finally slowed things down with “Stephen,” playing the song alone onstage using a Christmas-light adorned keyboard.
“This next song is about taking off your clothes,” Ke$ha announced as she smiled at the rowdy crowd, before her band launched into the stripper-pole worthy “Take It Off.” Following the song’s advice, the two male dancers appeared shirtless and proceeded to squirm around the stage, effectively bookending the scantily-clad women that populated the opening acts.
The stage show was starting to look like a party scene in an expensive music video, with half naked people running around stage during “(Expletive) Him (He’s the DJ)” and the whole band donning animal hoods for ” Your Love is My Drug.”
Meanwhile the crowd has tearing it up, with nearly everyone in the theater jumping along with the beat and swinging their hands through the air.
Ke$ha went with the obvious choice for a finale, and when the bottom-heavy beat of “Tik Tok” pierced the speakers, it sent the crowd into near-hysterics. The song ended with a shower of golden glitter being shot into the crowd, making for a surreal, grandiose scene.
Although she and the members of her band had only played eight songs, they waved goodbye, leaving the crowd cheering for more. Ke$ha and her playful companions returned with a choreographed performance of “Dinosaur,” which featured one member actually wearing a rubber dinosaur mask.
Proving she still had one more trick up her sleeve, Ke$ha invited Beardo and Mickey Avalon back to the stage for a finale performance of the Beastie Boys’ classic rebel anthem, “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!).” The song was a fitting tribute to an era that provided a hefty dose of inspiration for all three performers. And when everyone onstage started gleefully demolishing a purple dinosaur piñata, sending candy flying into the crowd, it was a perfect end to a concert that felt like a lifetime of drunken, excessive parties.
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