Ebullient to the zillionth degree and doubly theatrical, Mika started the show dressed as an astronaut before stripping down to his undies, then changing into a wildly striped suit. That came after a fake-news video with "anchorman" Sir Ian McKellen announced that a rocket had exploded and its passenger had disappeared. That there was no logic to all this mattered not.
Mika and his crack band snapped to the piano-plinking "Stuck in the Middle" and the disco-licious "Big Girl (You Are Beautiful)," with corseted plus-size models dancing behind the ensemble. With barely a breath between songs, Mika followed with the finger-snapping "Dr. John," the precociously hammy "Happy Ending," and the irredeemably chipper "Blame It on the Girls," the last off his new album The Boy Who Knew Too Much.
There were staged sequences done in black light. The mood was upbeat. The songs were manically contagious, and Mika's bubbly stage presence was as elastic as his voice. Yet for all his frenetic flamboyance, the cool precision of it all made things seem rote. His perfection even seemed a bit tedious.
Not opening act Gary Go. The bespectacled geek-chic Brit with the big open voice was like a two-man Coldplay, grand, distant, yet more intimate than Chris Martin's ensemble. Go's warm, high vocals and tinkling keyboards combined with oddly dreary atmospheric sequencers to make spacey anthems out of the self-penned tracks "Heart and Soul" and "Speak," to which the kid-crowd responded with a sea of waving hands.
