The Guardian PRAISED Sabrina's Coachella Set For Taking Example From Gaga

[RAMROD 114,659]

 

She had no choice, really. Carpenter took the stage on Friday a year after Lady Gaga opened the festival with one of the best sets the desert has ever seen, a high-concept pop opera that set an impossible standard even for the premier pop stars a generation below her. But Carpenter got the assignment: if you’re going to headline Coachella, you better deliver not just a show, but theater, both in terms of elaborate on-stage world-building and cinematic videography essential for everyone other than the front row to see what’s going on. You better declare the whole she-bang, with a Hollywood Hills-style set that is among the most impressive I’ve ever seen, to be SABRINAWOOD, with big block letters in 4K vision as crystal clear as Carpenter’s head voice.

Like Gagachella, Sabchella, as her fans have deemed it, is a dizzying full-scale hybrid production of undaunted vision that combines pre-filmed chapter breaks with complex costume changes and immaculate performance, if not always coherent plot. (Though it should be noted, the notion of “plot” for a concert is already a cut above.) The 26-year-old singer has been working in entertainment since before she was a teenager, and gamely plays the ultimate showgirl in a peripatetic production avidly concerned with many a showgirl past. From the second she emerges from a vintage car, resplendent in a red sequin dress, to her own Hollywood walk of fame, she does not miss a beat. Petite, perky and always in on the bit.

It’s enough full-set changes and full-entourage choreo to both dazzle and confound, often at once. Like her friend and Eras tour colleague Taylor Swift, Carpenter does not seem to have a clear thesis on the life of a showgirl beyond living it, though I believe her when she says she spent seven months of dedicated work on Sabrinawood.

Does the 90-minute set demonstrate the thematic limitations of Carpenter’s body of work? Yes, though it’s only been two years! And do the interludes, separately starring Will Ferrell, Susan Sarandon and, in voiceover, Samuel L Jackson, add anything other than time for costume and set changes? Unfortunately no, though Sarandon’s six-minute (!) monologue on … something … was drowned out by mic issues and desert wind.

I could’ve done with one less set change to avoid that buzzkill, but it also doesn’t matter; the madcap production – Sam Elliott playing a cop in the intro, Feathers mixed with Barry Manilow’s Copacabana, that Broadway worthy set! – is more than most pop stars could dream of, let alone execute, however imperfectly. It helps that Carpenter, often heralded more for her writing than her vocals, sounded phenomenal, her live voice more bodied and enveloping than her bluebird recordings, though no less pristine. She ended the set, soaked and triumphant, back in that car, driving toward the on-screen credits as if closing the loop on her own movie stardom. No big promises made with this outro, just promises gloriously kept.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/apr/11/sabrina-carpenter-coachella-review-will-ferrell-susan-sarandon