It took the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks nearly 30 minutes to make Super Bowl XLIX interesting. Katy Perry was a different story.
Perry definitely made the most of her time on the NFL’s biggest stage, burning through a bright, booming Pepsi Super Bowl Halftime Show that more than made up for a sleepy affair on the field. She took the field atop a golden lion (or was it a tiger?) and launched right into “Roar” – hope you took our advice on the prop bets – while a field of dancers swayed around her, capping the opening number with a triumphant note as her ride reared up on its hind legs.
Up next, she strutted through “Dark Horse,” the bass booming and her stage transformed into a 3-D chessboard, then whipped right into her breakout hit, “I Kissed a Girl,” which was given a glammy stomp thanks to Lenny Kravitz’s guitar, and raised the temperature with some serious pyrotechnic outbursts. Things got all kinds of campy with “Teenage Dream,” performed on a candy-colored beach complete with lip-syncing sharks, palm trees and beach balls (Katy also adopted the beach-ball look for the occasion), and “California Gurls,” unquestionably her sunniest of singles.
Then, as a rather icy counterpoint, she brought out Missy Elliott, who thrilled with a knotty version of “Work It,” which gave us our only PG-13 moment of the night with its “If you got a big trunk/let me search it” line, and a snippet of the Les Rythmes Digitales-sampling “Lose Control,” as the Super Bowl stage swirled with colors.
And finally, after sprinting through her set, Perry took a well-deserved victory lap, soaring around the University of Phoenix Stadium while straddling a shooting star, the opening strains of her uplifting anthem “Firework” filling the field. It was a natural choice for her closing number, and a fitting way to end a performance in which she inspired with both her theatricality and her endurance. Like the old football adage goes, she left it all on the field – now somebody get that girl a Gatorade.
