Eek! A Mouse House!

If there are any drawbacks to teen
talents surrendering their wonder years to the Disney Channel empire,
they surely didn’t show up at the grandstand. Like the MGM studio
players of yesteryear, Bleu and Hudgens demonstrated gifts for polished
show-biz skills far beyond their tender ages. Hudgens, who turns 20 in
December, worked off a recorded music track and was accompanied by a
gaggle of backup dancers, as she sang and hoofed away for nearly an
hour. Pushing tracks from her second CD Identified (released on
Disney’s Hollywood Records, natch), Hudgens easily finessed the hip-hop
rapping of “Sneakernight” for her opening number, followed by a dozen
or so dance-pop tracks that made for light listening on a late-summer
night. 

Hudgens’ reliance on taped rhythms was
the chief drawback, which gave co-headliner Bleu, who boogied with a
live quartet of musicians, an edge on spontaneity. Coming across as the
next threat to Usher’s reign, Bleu, 19, had megawatt energy to burn, as
he breezed through an hour of his own tracks (“Push It to the Limit”)
plus unexpected covers like his credible take on Prince’s “Let’s Go
Crazy.” During the evening’s coziest bit of business, smooth operator
Bleu was able to dial up a female concertgoer on her cell phone, then
got the willing participant to accompany him on the stage so she could
listen to the swooner crooner’s romantic serenade.   

Disney on nice: The co-stars of High School Musical: Senior Year, which opens in

theaters Oct. 24, combined for an Aug. 27 State Fair doubleheader that included lots of hoofing from Corbin Bleu (above) and sultry sounds from songbird Vanessa Hudgens (right).

(Full disclosure: The concert featured two opening acts with too-brief sets from Jordan Pruitt and Drew Seeley,
but ongoing snafus regarding Live Nation’s helter-skelter ticket policy
for reviewers squelched the coverage of these performers. In order to
see the concert accompanied by my 12-year-old daughter, I had to
purchase an additional ticket from a harried mom who, lucky for me, was
trying to unload her extra ducat.) 

The kids who bypassed the Hudgens-Bleu blowout turned up en masse two days later for their Aug. 29 date with The Jonas Brothers. For those who recall their December 2005 Syracuse appearance, when the fraternal trio warmed up for The Cheetah Girls for a yuletide gig at the Landmark Theatre,
the grandstand show was a jaw-dropping, eye-opening
concert-as-spectacle. These kids are 40-odd years away from Mick Jagger
and his AARP benefits, but they’re already doing outlandish stage set
pieces reminiscent of classic Rolling Stones concerts.

Prior to the JoBro show, opening act Demi Lovato
and her four-piece band entertained in front of a crowd estimated at
17,100. That’s about 17,000 more than her last Syracuse-area show, a
low-turnout June gig at Eastwood’s Palace Theatre that just missed capitalizing on the Disney Channel debut of her TV-movie Camp Rock, which premiered later that month. Amid the usual tween shtick of cajoling Pavlovian responses from the audience to scream really loud, Lovato’s winsome voice propelled a half-hour’s worth of flossy pop songs. 

Yet Lovato’s warm-up didn’t fully prep
the crowd for the Jonas Brothers’ socko 100-minute Vesuvian eruption.
The gargantuan stage setup was a tip-off that things would get
ambitiously impressive, while the eight-female string section seated
throughout the show seemed both pretentious and yet kinda sweet. By the
time the star trio—Kevin, who turns 21 on Nov. 5, Joe, 19, and baby JoBro Nick,
16–literally alighted on stage, thanks to a platform gizmo that had
them perched way above the stage at its highest arc, everything became
a kinetic blur of Ritalin-free elaborate staging. 

The boys reached similar heights later
in the show when each embarked upon their own separate platform, as
they climbed perhaps 40 feet into the air as they sang the night away,
in what looked like a live-action version of the barber-chair battle
between Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd in the 1950 Warner Brothers cartoon The Rabbit of Seville.
They also used a runway, which jutted out across the track to within
spitting distance of the soundboard (where fellow Disney Channel star Selena Gomez
was watching the show—until nearby concertgoers, who kept gawking at
the actress, forced her hasty exit), so the boys could get even closer
to their faithful fans. The ramp also gave them a shot at sliding
across it during a squirt-gun melee with lots of soap suds. And the
Jonas boys brought out Lovato for a tuneful team-up on the Camp Rock track “This Is Me.”

Needless to say, the youthful audience
ate it up faster than free cheese curds at the Dairy Building. They
gleefully sang along with intimate power ballads like “Gotta Find You.”
They got all choked up when keyboardist Nick (favorite color: blue)
contributed his gotcha musical moment, “A Little Bit Longer,” about his
battle with diabetes, with the song’s refrain, “But you don’t know what
you’ve got ’til it’s gone.” (No apologies necessary for Joni Mitchell’s
“Big Yellow Taxi.”) And they all laughed during the climactic rendition
of “Burning Up” when Joe donned a hot dog costume and paraded around
the stage. 

Band of brothers: The tween-age appeal of the Jonas Brothers (above, pictured during their spectacular entrance) help fill the State Fair’s Mohegan Sun Grandstand to capacity on Aug. 29, as if the Page 15 photo of the massive crowd doesn’t provide enough of a clue.  MICHAEL DAVIS PHOTOS

There was an indication that the Jonas
dynasty would continue with the on-stage introduction of 8-year-old
li’l brother Frankie (Holy Osmonds!) but for now a bigger question
awaits the central triumvirate after this tour has ended: What could
they possibly do for an encore?

—Phil D. Rapper