Katy Perry Roars, Soars During Super Bowl XLIX Halftime Show

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.