Reception
"It was originally supposed to be one effect on the Britney Spears tour. From what people have told us, it is the premier effect, the signature effect. I've read reviews that compared it to the candelabra in Phantom or the helicopter in Miss Saigon. We're very happy to think that it is being compared to things that have been known through the years as stellar effects. We're hoping that Broadway and theatre will take a look at it and will see the validity and allow us to show them some of the things it's capable of."
— John Markham, president of Chameleon Productions, talking about the water screen in August 2002.Larry Nager of The National Enquirer commented that " packed more technical wizardry than Harry Potter, but almost no actual singing". He summarized his review saying "If it wasn't quite a real concert, it was a great show." Ann Powers of The New York Times said the show was "dazzling" and commented that the performance did not suffer from music being its least important element, adding "This dream extravaganza perhaps unwittingly suggested that the Britney we know is herself a dream, an artist whose genius is not for singing but for teasing out the cravings and fears that haunt the modern world. Ms. Spears now wants to awaken to an adult persona, but she may find that the netherworld of desire is her natural home." Jim Farber of the Daily News compared it to tours of other teenage artists, saying "her latest 90-minute extravaganza had to be the costliest, most elaborate and, to be honest, least tacky to date". He was also impressed with the stage, calling it "the largest proscenium I've ever seen at a pop show." Camille Lamb of The Daily Collegian named the show "an elaborate, highly homogenized display of capitalism at its finest". She also said the show fulfilled its expectations, saying " a teenage fantasy to a tangible reality."
Neva Chonin of the San Francisco Chronicle believed the show "was pure Britney excess, hugely entertaining" and added that "while it's all too easy to deride Spears' contrivances from a distance, in person there's no denying her charisma or her archetypal appeal. She's like a refugee from David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, a gleaming dream cipher waiting to be filled with an audience's fantasies. And she works that role with flawless professionalism, punctuating her choreographed moves with an amiable accessibility that drew fans into her airtight world even as it kept them at a safe distance. In short, she connected—through smiles, giggles and what seemed to be genuine pleasure in performing." While reviewing the Femme Fatale Tour in 2011, Jim Harrington of the Oakland Tribune deemed the show as "one of the best pop music productions I’ve ever witnessed." The tour was a commercial success. According to Spears's booking agent David Zedeck, the 2001 leg was largely sold out, with the concerts attended by over 400,000 people. It grossed $43.7 million, the second highest grossing tour of the year by a female artist behind Cher's Farewell Tour.
Read more about this topic: Dream Within A Dream Tour
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)