In late 2022, Sabrina Carpenter was a hard-working Disney Channel journeyman just getting out from beneath the pop-culture ignominy of having been cast as the bad-guy “blond girl” in Olivia Rodrigo’s instant smash of a Gen Z heartbreak ballad, “Drivers License.” Two years later, Carpenter arrived at Crypto.com Arena on Friday night with one of 2024’s biggest albums (the chart-topping “Short n’ Sweet”), two of its biggest singles (the perky “Espresso” and the quirky “Please Please Please”) and half a dozen fresh Grammy nominations including nods for album, record and song of the year as well as best new artist.
If you were tempted to say that Carpenter was on top of the world, you needn’t have bothered: Set in an imagined midcentury bachelorette pad high above a city — a penthouse on the 69th floor, she told us with a wink — Friday’s fun and frisky concert made the point on its own. As with this year’s other long-toiling pop breakouts, Chappell Roan and Charli XCX , part of what finally brought 25-year-old Carpenter to stardom was a sense of play and pageantry that’s clearly connected with audiences after a lengthy period defined by the gloomier likes of Lorde and Billie Eilish. “Short n’ Sweet” is brimming with hooks and jokes and vocal exaggerations; this show, the first of three sold-out dates in Los Angeles to wrap Carpenter’s North American tour, left virtually no surface un-bedazzled.
There were costume changes, each get-up s.
