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Sabrina Carpenter performs at the Governors Ball music festival at Corona Park in New York City in June, 2024.Cheney Orr/Reuters
Last weekend in Manhattan, Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter were photographed side by side on their showgirls night out. The already statuesque Swift wore six-inch-high shoes on the dinner date with her petite pop star counterpart.
Was it a fashion choice, or was it a power move against the itty-bitty It girl by an older artist whose every public appearance is as calculated as an Einstein equation? Carpenter didn’t appear bothered. Spicy nonchalance is a big part of her appeal.
The attitude was on full display at Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena on Monday for the first of two concerts here. The Espresso singer was the picture of insouciance, whether appearing initially in a bath towel, serenading while sitting on a toilet seat or lounging on a heart-shaped bed.
Having witnessed Lady Gaga’s pop opera shenanigans and Tate McRae’s sullen aerobics in the same arena recently, Carpenter’s playful unconcern on an energizing night of dissing summery bops, nu-disco effervescence and Jack Antonoff-written melodies was a refreshing change.
Carpenter’s stage command was effortless. Her voice was clear and strong enough, but cutesy − the few ballads were not believable. The hair-tossing exhibition while crawling on the catwalk was a choice.
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The Toronto concerts are among the final shows of Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet Tour, in support of the Grammy-winning 2024 album of the same name. The 26-year-old Pennsylvanian already played Scotiabank on this tour more than a year ago. In the time it took her to return, she’s released another album, Man’s Best Friend.
That record made an initial splash for its controversial album cover. The star’s satirically submissive pose was misconstrued as an endorsement of misogyny. The singer subsequently put out an alternative cover which she described as “approved by God.” Well played, Carpenter.
Both Toronto shows sold out long ago. On night one, mostly female fans milled around taking selfies and buying merchandise as taped music played in the background before the main attraction was set to appear.
Selections included Girls on Film by Duran Duran and More, More, More by porn actress-turned-disco diva Andrea True. We also heard the Beatles at their most male gaze (“She was just 17″).
What stood out was Sugar, Sugar, the 1969 bubblegum hit by the Archies, co-written by Canada’s Andy Kim: “You are my candy girl, and you got me wanting you.”
Sex and pop confection is what Carpenter, a bottle-blonde Betty Boop with Instagram, is all about. Dropping her bath towel, she sang her first group of songs in a blue, bedazzled corseted bodysuit with garters. The female dancers wore nighties.
Carpenter clearly throws the sexiest sleepovers around.
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Sabrina Carpenter performs at the 2025 MTV Video Music Awards in New York in September.Brendan McDermid/Reuters
The concert was conceptual, with the stage transformed into an all-white penthouse and girlie dream pad with a nostalgic vibe. TV cameras flanked the stage, as if the performance was part of an old-timey network show, complete with narration and retro commercials.
One spot, for the fictional product Manchild Spray, preceded a shiny anthem about immature men, sang with microphone made up to look like a hairbrush:
Why so sexy if so dumb?
And how survive the Earth so long?
If I’m not there, it won’t get done
I choose to blame your mom
Subtle country music stylings were occasionally at work. Carpenter cooed Slim Pickins in front of a fireplace. During these Nashvillian moments, Carpenter was the Madonna of Barbara Mandrells. Boomers will get that reference; the rest of you, do the Google.
Speaking of generation gaps, at one point a clip played of future governor-general Adrienne Clarkson interviewing Leonard Cohen for the CBC in 1966. The gist of it was Cohen’s contention that the emotion evoked from a performance of reading a poem could also be achieved from reciting instructions on how to polish one’s shoes, if done correctly.
“What’s the point of writing poetry then?” Clarkson fired back. To which Cohen replied: “If you want people to have shiny shoes, you want to write those kind of very good instructions. And if you want to polish other parts of yourself, you do it with poetry.”
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Sabrina Carpenter on stage during the MTV Video Music Awards in New York in September.ANGELA WEISS/AFP/Getty Images
The exchange set up Dumb & Poetic, a saucy takedown of a pretentious man whose quoting of Cohen is described as “highbrow manipulation.” Carpenter’s female fans are undoubtedly united, thinking “hallelujah to that.”
However, if a man is chi-chi for dropping Cohenisms, what do we make of Carpenter inserting Cohen and Clarkson’s dance of the eggheads into the night’s simple pop-music affair?
But then, one person’s “But you don’t really care for music, do you?” is someone else’s “I Mountain Dew it for ya,” as Carpenter punned on the concert encore, Espresso. She knows, as Cohen knew, and maybe Swift doesn’t know, it’s not about the shoes.
It’s about the polish.
