Reception
Teri VanHorn of MTV said that with "Her body newly toned and her smile beaming, she looked every bit like a woman who had emerged from her quarter-life crisis stronger than yesterday." She also said Spears performed with "a naughty, free-spirited attitude", as though she "had invited 900 friends to her dirty little dance party, and too bad for you if you couldn't roll with the fun." SuChin Pak, also from MTV stated the show was "no huge revelation", explaining, "It was not the kind of show that says: 'She's back. She's going to come out with the biggest album of her career.' Nor did it say that she's lost forever and we'll never see the old Britney back again. These are all really tiny baby steps." Thomas K. Arnold of USA Today said the show "turned out to be more rehearsal than comeback", although "all those post-rehab workouts were worth the effort." On May 2, 2007, scalpers outside the House of Blues in San Diego were selling tickets with a face value of $35 for prices between $200 and $500. Chris Lee of the Los Angeles Times wrote that "her 'comeback' – if you want to call it that – cemented Spears' place as pop music's reigning drama queen, capable of capturing worldwide tabloid headlines with a bare minimum of creative expenditure."
Most of the shows sold out, although there were some empty seats for the Las Vegas one despite tickets being available cheaply on the secondary market. Fan reaction to the show was generally divided. Some fans attending the show were dissatisfied with its short length, with one quoted afterward as saying, "That was so disappointing." Some fans were also disappointed by the performance quality, with one quoted as saying, "It looked like she lip-synched her way through the whole thing." Other fans were more accommodating, pleased to be seeing her in good health and appearance and with one quoted as saying, "Whatever, we love her. She's amazing." One group of female fans wore matching pink tops that said "Bald Ambition" on one side and "The Comeback 2007" on the other. Jim Abbott of the Orlando Sentinel summed up some of the reaction by writing that fans at the tail end of the tour "knew that the show would be short. ... They also knew that she would be lip-synching, but this wasn't about music as much as it was about celebrity, loyalty and beating adversity."
Read more about this topic: The M+M's Tour
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“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)
“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)