COTTONWOOD —Britney Spears’ tour bus passed through the north state on Interstate 5 this morning, and even just passing through, the pop star’s presence caused a stir with her fans.
So much so, that a motorist called 911 around 9:40 a.m. to report her entourage was being harassed by three people in a car, said Kurt Heuer, a spokesman for the California Highway Patrol.
The tour bus reportedly was heading southbound near Bowman Road in the Cottonwood area, when it was approached by three young women or girls who tried to get the 27-year-old singer’s attention.
“Apparently it was just some people who wanted to say hi to Britney, if it was even her,” Heuer said.
The tour bus didn’t stop, so it’s unknown if Spears was even on the bus, Heuer said.
Spears performed on Wednesday in Vancouver, Canada and has a performance scheduled at ARCO Arena in Sacramento on Saturday night, according to her Web site publicizing her current tour called “The Circus.”
Heuer said Spears’ fans weren’t cited, but officers warned them to leave her alone.
Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, Nicole Richie and even Elvis Presley are fair game in Dr. Drew Pinsky’s latest book, The Mirror Effect: How Celebrity Narcissism is Seducing America.
Dr. Pinsky tells “Extra,” “Narcissists in reality want to think they’re great and grandiose when in fact inside they feel very empty and small.”
Not afraid to name names of today’s hottest starlets, Dr. Pinsky says, “I think Lindsay is one of my peeps. She’s a straight up addict.”
He continues, “I’ve been saying for awhile she’s going to have a major blow out. Major torch out before she becomes motivated to capitulate treatment.”
As for Britney Spears, Dr. Pinsky comments, “Britney had severe mental illness…I thought she was going to die…Britney is only alive because of the actions of her parents.”
According to Dr. Pinsky, former wild child Nicole Richie’s salvation was becoming a parent, saying, “In my opinion, motherhood has a very positive impact on addiction…Nicole is actually somewhat of an inspirational story.”
When asked, “why was Elvis so self destructive?” Dr Pinsky responds, “Elvis was a straight up drug addict and no one know how to deal with that problem at that time.”
“Extra’s” interview with Dr. Drew Pinsky airs tonight.
People afraid of clowns should avoid Britney Spears’ Circus Tour on Tuesday at EnergySolutions Arena.
Menacing “sado-clowns,” inspired by sadomasochism, are just some of the dancers/characters who will take the stage alongside Spears in a circus that definitely isn’t Barnum & Bailey-issue.
Responsible for costuming the unique characters, as well as Spears, are the Canadian identical twins Dean and Dan Caten. Their design company, DSQUARED, has previously dressed Madonna, Christina Aguilera, Rihanna, Beyoncé and Justin Timberlake for concert tours. “We’ve been hoping to work with [Spears] for some time,” said Dan Caten in a Salt Lake Tribune interview.
Designing the costumes for Spears’ tour is
Britney Spears performs in a ringmaster costume designed by DSQUARED.
right up the Catens’ back alley. The brothers have been known for their provocative ideas since their Milan debut in 1995, and said they were intrigued by the tour’s concept of a circus. That theme is drawn from Spears’ latest album, titled “Circus.” The title track includes such lines as:
All eyes on me in the center of the ring just like a circus
When I crack that whip, everybody gonna trip just like a circus
Don’t stand there watching me, follow me, show me what you can do
Everybody let go, we can make a dance floor just like a circus
“It is a sexualized modern circus,” Caten said of the show. “We love contrast. It’s taking a new light on a familiar thing.”
Perhaps an expected strategy for the controversial singer, now 27, whose latest single, “If You Seek Amy,” sounds like an expressionchise that can’t be printed in a family newspaper. Setting aside tabloid escapades, that blurring of the line between innocence and decadence has been part of the singer’s performing persona since her first video, “… Baby One More Time,” was released in 1999. In the infamous video, the then-17-year-old bared her cleavage, midriff and pigtails in a schoolgirl’s uniform.
To design costumes for the tour, the Catens collected ideas from Spears, then added their own brainstorms and sketches to the mix. The first costume designed by DSQUARED is inspired by the idea of a seductive lion-tamer.
Caten said he wanted the costume to make Spears appear as the beast and the ringmaster simultaneously, so the brothers designed a red jacket with royal blue cuffs and gold braided details. They added flowing animal hair to the jacket’s shoulders and topped everything off with a replica cheetah head adorned with black tulle and ostrich feathers.
When the outfit is completed with fishnets, lace-up boots and a whip, ringmaster Spears will be an antithesis of family-friendly Bello Nock, the head clown of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. The sexual allure of the costume is important because it equates to showmanship, according to Caten.
Spears’ second costume lies underneath her first and further transforms the singer. After peeling off her ringmaster costume, she reveals herself to be a sexy dominatrix. In a three-piece vixen corset and panty set enriched with Swarovski crystals and draped chiffon, she is thrown into a cage with muzzled, leather-clad sex slaves, a tableau that Caten labeled “erotic.”
Those are just the first two costumes. Other characters through the show include the aforementioned “sado-clowns,” Parisian balancing acts, “salacious centaurs” and “chiseled and chained Houdini men,” according to the Catens.
One thing the designers had to keep in mind is that they were designing a stage show, not a runway show. The outfits Spears and her dancers wear use stretch fabric such as Lycra so that even in the most elaborate costumes, movement isn’t hindered.
The overall effect, the designer said, is to take the audience out of the real world and catapult them into an alternate reality that’s edgy and sensual. “We want people in the 200th row to get some impact,” Caten said.
“I’m truly impressed at the spectacle,” said Nicole Sherzinger, leader of the opening act, the Pussycat Dolls, who for once won’t provide the most revealing eye candy in the arena.
Last night on American Idol, the remaining eight idols performed Britney Spears’ ‘Circus’ as a group music video!
Okay, so the sound and the video aren’t really in sync, but it’s still entertaining.
As we all probably know by now, Britney walked off of the stage in her Vancouver performance because some people in the audience were smoking, which clouded the stage and made it hard to perform.
Well at the end of the performance, Britney added “Don’t smoke weed” to her little good-bye speech. Check out the video below (She says, “Drive safe, don’t smoke weed, and rock out with your cocks out. Peace motherfuckers!”):
Also, if you’re interested, here’s the video of her “Radar” performance when the weed got to her. Around 2:45, you can she that she definitely loses a lot of her energy.
Some came for the thrills, some for the spills, but in the end it wasn’t really Britney Spears that proved to be the center of attention when she brought her three-ring circus to town.
For those that wanted thrills, there was plenty. For those that wanted spills, there was none, really.
However, Britney Spears’ circus often felt like it was happening in spite of Miss Spears herself, and for the 18,000-plus fans that were in attendance Monday night at Rexall Place, hoping to get a little closer to their idol, it must have felt as if they were very far away.
Fair enough, Spears’ spectacle was meant to be larger than life — a grandiose mix of dance numbers, acrobatics and flashing lights.
All that was really missing to complete the star’s carnivalesque fresco was the overwhelming smell of cotton candy, the trampling and braying of elephants, and a dozen goofy clowns squeezing themselves into a puttering Mini Cooper while blowing up balloon animals.
The concert itself was a dazzling spectacle replete with jugglers, dancers, kung-fu masters and trapeze artists, and yes, somewhere within all the camera flashes, the glitter, the exotic costumes and the vinyl boots stood a forlorn Britney Spears, doing her thing amidst a spectacle that seemed focused on everything but her own performance.
It was clear from the opening moments of the concert, Spears descending onto the stage on a golden platform to deliver Circus and affirm her control over the proceedings, that Spears was really only a puppet amongst so many others on the massive three-ring stage.
If it was easy to lose track of where she went when she was traipsing around with her 14 backup dancers, it was easier to focus on Spears when she was trapped in a cage (Piece of Me) or quite literally boxed-in for a Houdini-inspired number with magician Ed Alonzo.
Without proper video to follow her around the stage or even show a close-up of her, it didn’t really matter if Spears was pumping some random tune from 2007’s Blackout, an infectious If U Seek Amy, a knockout like Toxic or a re-working of …Baby One More Time, the audience was always forced to focus on the massive stage interplay presentation rather than try and individually connect with the pop star.
It’s a bit sad, really, because it also made painfully obvious the fact that, minus a few instruments played live from within the pit, everything was pretty much pre-recorded.
The only time we heard Spears’ voice proper, it could be argued, was when she took a few seconds to say, “Hello, Edmonton” between two songs a good 40 minutes in.
And that’s probably the irony of Spears’ performance.
Tour director Jamie King (famous for designing Madonna’s concerts) has created an impressive metaphorical re-working of Spears’ off-stage trials and tribulations, a gargantuan tip of the hat to the real-life insanity the pop princess has been going through for the past couple of years — from her umbrella-swinging, shaven-head tantrum lashing back at the paparazzi, to the “caged animal” episodes when she was either strapped to a gurney and wheeled off to the hospital or trapped in a long custody battle with former leading man K-Fed.
However, if the staging played on these themes quite well, transforming key items into props along the way, it only served to reinforce how lonely Spears must be feeling in spite of the sold-out crowds and the “comeback” hype.
In the end, it’s just too bad that the circus that currently surrounds her had to once again — and just like in her real life — steal the spotlight from Spears herself.
“The Top 20 Concert Tours ranks artists by average box office gross per city and includes the average ticket price for shows in North America in U.S. dollars. The previous week’s ranking is in parentheses. The list is based on data provided to the trade publication Pollstar by concert promoters and venue managers.
“Vancouver — Britney Spears walked off stage at Vancouver’s GM Place tonight after just 15 minutes. After another 10 minutes of confusion, punctuated by jeers and boos, an announcement was made. “The building is awfully smoky,” a female voice informed the crowd. “It is uncomfortable for everyone on stage, including Ms. Spears. Please extinguish all cigarettes – this is a non-smoking building and the show will resume when the smoke on the stage is cleared.”
Considering that by only the second track of the night – Piece of Me – she was being wheeled from one end of the three concentric circles that made up the stage to the other, only getting up to step across the stage with the aid of another dancer’s hand, the claim seemed more than a little convenient. Britney didn’t even pretend to hit the dance moves at times, just standing and jiggling a bit while the lithe, fit troupe tried valiantly to inject some energy into the inertia.
Thirty-five minutes after she left the stage, the concert resumed.”
A statement has also been released on BritneySpears.com, saying:
“We want to apologize to all the fans who attended our Vancouver show tonight for the brief pause in Britney’s set. Crew members above the stage became ill due to a ventilation issue.”
After Monday’s show in Edmonton, Alberta Canada, Britney made a quick trip home to Los Angeles. We spotted her at Van Nuys Airport on Wednesday boarding her private jet headed to the next concert stop in Vancouver.
With Britney’s super-hot Circus Tour heading into the west coast, we should be seeing more of Brit back in LA between shows.
Eminem set a record for music video streams on MTV.com with 785,000 streams of the clip occurring within the first 24 hours.
Eminem breaks the record set previously by Britney Spears (who is lampooned in “We Made You”) and her clip or “Womanizer,” which earned 661,000 streams its first day in October.
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