Commencing with an unsettling black-and-white video intro to her performance, Sabrina Carpenter plays the part of the road-tripping woman with a Dalmatian puppy in tow as she barrels down the open road falsely assuming that a pretty girl like herself would be immune to the long arm of the law. Except, what makes it even creepier when she’s pulled over by a cop (played by, of all people, Sam Elliott), is that he doesn’t do it for reasons related to her violating any law, per se, so much as the fact that he was “curious” about her. Again, not weird or disturbing at all.
Continuing to “make conversation,” he asks, “Where you off to?” Carpenter replies, “California.” He laughs, saying, “Course you are. You know it’s not right out there. It’s wrong. It’s the kind of place where you want to stay safe.” Naturally, this sort of warning/stereotype about California was at a peak during the era between “Hollywood Babylon” and “Old Hollywood,” with Los Angeles being the representation, to the prudes of the day, as the ultimate “heathen’s paradise.” Not to mention a place where innocent girls were eaten alive by men who were wolves that often didn’t even bother with sheep’s clothing.
So it is that Carpenter establishes the “sinister” vibe (though she doesn’t quite achieve “Lynchian status” here) she wants to evoke before then finding herself at a drive-in movie eating popcorn before taking the stage where she walks over various stars designed to evoke the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Each one lighting up when she steps on it (which, admittedly has a touch of the “Billie Jean” video to it) as the opening notes to “House Tour” start to play. After all, it’s her most recent single from Man’s Best Friend, so why not give it top billing?
Following it up with “Taste,” Carpenter offers another “Old Hollywood” transition by having a disembodied “old-timey” man’s voice ask her what her name, age and height is (a nod to screen testing practices). To which she reminds him that it’s not polite to ask a woman her height (even though everyone knows it’s her age you shouldn’t ask about). This leads in seamlessly to the opening line of “Taste,” which goes, “Oh I leave quite an impression/Five feet, to be exact.” And yes, there tends to be a “trend,” as it were, of short people wanting to overcompensate for their shortness by becoming famous (e.g., Madonna and Tom Cruise).
Continuing “down the Hollywood rabbit hole,” Carpenter then leads into “Busy Woman,” during which she goes through the doors of various “rooms” presented in a box-like structure (not unlike the one Madonna uses in the “Human Nature” video) onstage where her male dancers are costumed as half-man, half-woman (once more underlining L.A. as a city of “depravity”). And, because they’re men who are naturally taller, when Carpenter starts dancing next to them, her shortness is all the more noticeable.
However, for her next “number,” “Manchild,” Carpenter plays the tall one amid dancers dressed as dogs (specifically, Dalmatians and poodles) to emphasize not only her Man’s Best Friend album title, but also the notion that “men are dogs” (though in the accompanying music video, she was keener to reference them as pigs). A point that often rings truer in the film industry, as years of abuse toward women, both sexual and otherwise, has reigned supreme for most of its existence. Even so, Carpenter continues to pay homage to Old Hollywood by playing a snippet of dialogue from 1959’s Some Like It Hot (one of the most beloved Marilyn Monroe movies), allowing her enough time for a costume change before she reemerges to the tune of “When Did You Get Hot?” (performing it live for the first time and, thus, of course tying it in with Some Like It Hot). And, as she pops up on the stage again, this time she’s standing against giant lettering that reads, “SABRINAWOOD” (on which white noise TV static is eventually projected, as if Carpenter wants to keep the sinister vibe going that she established at the beginning). And it’s here that her level of hypocrisy in conveying this kind of “Hooray for Hollywood” imagery reaches a new apex. Particularly after her recent interview with Marc Jacobs for Perfect magazine. An interview that, for whatever reason, the two felt compelled to commence with the following exchange:
Sabrina: I’m in California right now. I live in L.A. and New York.
Marc: My husband lives in L.A. and New York.
Sabrina: We’re both bicoastal, I love that.
Marc: He’s there now. I’m not a big L.A. fan, so…
Sabrina: I’m not either—until, I guess the snowstorms are happening, and then I really like L.A. I’m from Pennsylvania originally, so I definitely prefer New York.
Marc: I can take L.A. for a couple of days at a time, then I’m done.
Sabrina: It’s a great place to leave. That’s what people say about L.A.
It’s right after that when Jacobs brings up the fact that she’s headlining Coachella, with neither one of them seeming to notice the “in bad taste” nature of shit-talking L.A. for that amount of time in an interview before discussing the fact that she’s participating in what has come to be viewed as an L.A. rite of passage (at least to a certain socioeconomic class). Worse still, Carpenter having the gall to center her entire show around a “Hollywood theme,” as if her so-called love letter is in any way genuine. And maybe the fact that she’s doing something so cliché—an Old Hollywood homage—is perhaps further proof that she doesn’t “heart” L.A. at all.
After “When Did You Get Hot?,” some “flourishes” of “Please Please Please” start to play as she says, “Welcome to Sabrinawood” (and yes, because she likes innuendo, “wood” hits different here). She then confirms it’s her next song by “going into the studio” to “record” it. Yet another set design piece to marvel at on the stage. Alas, one thing that no one should marvel at was Carpenter’s extremely cringe interaction with an audience member who let out a zaghrouta, only to be told by Carpenter, “I don’t like it” after mistaking it for “yodeling” and even being told by the audience member, “It’s my culture.” Carpenter “riposted,” “That’s your culture, yodeling?” The whole exchange served to highlight Carpenter’s unabashed “white girl”-ness. Complete with glossing over someone’s culture with such a dismissive comment. Much the same as she did for L.A.’s culture by offering this ultimately reductive presentation of it.
After badly navigating that moment, Carpenter went on to perform “We Almost Broke Up Again Last Night” for the first time live, remaining at the piano for the initial part of it before moving around onstage again to belt out the chorus. She also chose to keep some aspect of the Man’s Best Friend tracklist in order by following it with “Nobody’s Son,” as it goes on the album. For this lamenting-but-upbeat ditty, Carpenter takes to another set modeled after a dive bar, where everyone around her is merrymaking as she struggles on her own, realizing that she’s always the one to be called for a “third-wheeling.”
The motif of lament continues with what some who didn’t arrive to the “Sabrina scene” until “Espresso” might call a “deep cut.” Though, of course, that’s not what “Because I Liked a Boy” is at all, having helped further establish Carpenter’s name in the public as “the other woman” in the Olivia Rodrigo-Joshua Bassett-Carpenter love triangle. Which was “all the way back” in 2021, when Rodrigo dropped her debut single, “drivers license.” But over a year later, Carpenter restoked the drama by releasing “Because I Liked a Boy” as a single from Emails I Can’t Send (not that people didn’t think that’s what she was doing soon after the release of “drivers license” with “Skin”). And so perhaps including it in her setlist now is ultimately meant to remind her audience how truly far from those days she’s come (and Rodrigo too, for that matter—meanwhile, no one seems to remember who Joshua Bassett is).
With that in mind, she richochets right back to the Man’s Best Friend era with “My Man on Willpower,” complete with a conveyor belt set that sees multiple men on it as Carpenter struts next to them while they mostly run in place. That is, until the end of the song, when she’s pushed in the total opposite direction of them for an effect that makes it look as if the wind is blowing her away. She then falls into a hatch on the stage in a style not unlike Taylor Swift pretending to jump into water after her “piano surprise song” for The Eras Tour (and yes, it wouldn’t be unheard of if Carpenter had picked up a trick or two from Swift while opening for her on said tour for select dates throughout 2023 and 2024).
For the next segment, Susan Sarandon is given an opportunity to shine while Carpenter goes through another costume change. The decision to include Sarandon felt, to some, like a “political” maneuver on Carpenter’s part in that the actress was effectively blacklisted from Hollywood after showing support for Palestine in the immediate aftermath of the Israeli infiltration and genocide that began following the events of October 7, 2023. But then, Carpenter being political doesn’t really track. For even her “Tears” performance at the 2025 MTV VMAs was a knockoff of Madonna’s more genuine form of LGBTQIA+ rights activism.
In any event, Sarandon is shown in the driver’s seat of a car at the drive-in (again with that milieu), playing the ostensible role of an “older” Carpenter. And so it is that she begins,
“What a moron I was [she laughs to herself]. Running around like nobody’s gonna judge you, just bippity-bobbity-boo. When, of course, everybody’s judging you. What about that? What are you gonna do about that? Care? [she sighs] Of course you care. I still care. You are supposed to care. I look happy though. I do. What is that Franny always says when she looks at pictures of me from way back in the…in the day? Shit, what was it? She’s so cute, it was so cute. Ah yes. ‘And Sabrina is happy. But she doesn’t smile.’ Yeah. So, what was that about? Where did that come from? You know, I bet her mom told her that. I wonder what else her mom told her about me. No, our mom never told us anything about her sister. No. And what’s an eight-year-old supposed to figure out when her aunt’s a star? Franny likes to YouTube me a lot. She YouTubes me and she brings it to me, and it doesn’t even look like I’m in it, she says, because, you know, YouTube is not real. Yeah. It’s a shame that she never got to see me do anything real like a concert, live in a real nice arena. You know what I would do? I would’ve made the label fly her and her mom and her dad to whatever country I was in and, uh, they would live right down the hall from me in a really expensive hotel in whatever city that I was… Yeah, well, probably that wouldn’t have been such a great idea. It might’ve been a little weird. In this way, I’m just…Aunt Sabrina. And that’s real. It’s maybe not that exciting, but it’s real. Yeah. And anyway her mom probably would’ve been not very happy. Laurie was always really uncomfortable whenever I was the center of attention. Sometimes she would just ignore what I was doing or other times she would shit on me and…probably she’s putting down my career right now and just tells her, you know, ‘That was so long ago, it really doesn’t mean anything anymore.’ Anyway, must be impossible for a little girl to really understand what’s going on onstage. I mean, all people think they know what it’s like…what it’s like to be a star, you know, the glow of all that attention. Of all those people rotating around you like little tiny planets, everybody’s laughing and eating candy and you don’t have to do anything that you don’t wanna do, but they don’t see all the nasty people. Yeah. All the vampires [a moment that feels very Olivia Rodrigo-coded]. They just see the light. And I like that. I like them to see the light. It’s from the positivity, and that’s what the positivity is, from all that work and concentration and willing it to happen. Well, shit, do you remember when you were a kid and you try to figure out some really intricate dance move that…it was just impossible and you’re like, ‘I don’t think I can ever do that. This isn’t working, I don’t know’—and then you quiet that little voice and you say, ‘Fuck it. I can do this. I can do whatever I put my mind to.’ Yeah. Oh my god, why do people stop saying that to themselves when they become twelve years old? Because when I see somebody that has really accomplished something, and they’ve figured it out and it’s really impossible, and you’re a little kid and you see that or even now, when I see it, these people that have done the impossible, well, you realize, you know, once upon a time, they didn’t know what they were doing. But they had all this courage, and they had conviction and they had…they had themselves. And they did it. And that means…you could do it too.”
Her reverie is then interrupted by her drive-in server, played by Corey Fogelmanis (more proof that Carpenter hasn’t forgotten her past, or how long it’s taken her to get to this point, starting as far back as Girl Meets World). When Sarandon pays her tab so that Fogelmanis can “clock out,” Carpenter at last returns to the stage to lighten the mood with “Go Go Juice.” Now dressed in black underwear (or is it a leotard?) with black tights paired with a blue turtleneck sweater (it does get cold in the desert at night, after all), Carpenter continues to show her love of the spotlight during this performance, joined by numerous dancers as they help Carpenter convey the joys of drunk dialing.
From there, she goes into the lone bonus track from Man’s Best Friend, “Such a Funny Way.” And, for a bonus track, she certainly gives it a lot of love, playing up a kind of Flashdance element with her backup dancers’ costumes, followed by a touch of The Chemical Brothers’ “Let Forever Be” video by way of a few mirrors that create a whole slew of Sabrinas.
Delighting the audience with another debut live performance, Carpenter then offers up “Sugar Talking,” centered on a decidedly Grease-esque concept in terms of how Carpenter acts all Sandy Olsson in rebuffing the advances of her Danny Zuko, effectively also telling him, with her body language, “You better shape up, ‘cause I need a man.” There are also moments when the choreo feels like a distinct nod to Dirty Dancing (specifically, the scene where Frances [Jennifer Grey] and Johnny [Patrick Swayze] are dancing to Mickey & Sylvia’s “Love Is Strange”).
Adding a “costume change” flourish again by donning a red coat as she approaches the “catwalk” part of the stage where a bench awaits, Carpenter sits down to sing another surprise choice in the form of “Don’t Smile,” the concluding track on the standard edition of Short n’ Sweet. And while it might seem like an appropriate “sendoff” song, Carpenter doesn’t stop there, even though she runs off the stage and past the front rows (if “rows” is really the right word for this context) of the audience. But this is just a chance for another interlude that looks like something out of Chicago-meets-a Joe Eszterhas screenplay as dancers move and writhe to “sultry music in an 80s style” (as it would be told to some kind of AI prompt).
But it’s not the 80s that Carpenter goes back to with her next lead-in, but rather, the 60s, “lip-syncing” a quote from Sex and the Single Girl where Natalie Wood, as Helen Gurley Brown, declares, “And I shall insist on the right to have as many love affairs as I please. I’m certainly not going to sacrifice one iota of my freedom or dignity for any man.” With that in the audience’s mind, Carpenter segues into “Feather,” which has a very, you guessed it, showgirl-y aesthetic—complete with the giant feather fans being waved around by Carpenter’s backup showgirls on the staircase set. Indeed, it feels like another insult to L.A. that Carpenter feels the need to take on a Vegas vibe for this segment, including a disembodied male voice, singing to the tune of “Copacabana,” “Sabrina, she’s at Coachella.”
The Vegas aura persists (despite the announcement of, “And cut! Okay, folks, that was great”) as Carpenter goes into “Bed Chem,” featuring chairs and chair choreo that feels plucked from the Madonna oeuvre (think: the “Open Your Heart” video or her performance of “Bye Bye Baby” during The Girlie Show). Though, of course, some people might be quicker to associate it with Britney Spears’ “Stronger,” itself a Madonna nod. There’s even a touch of Madonna in the “parody” element of Will Ferrell appearing as an electrician who has to come onstage to fix the power outage after “Bed Chem” (another sign that acting gigs are not what they once were if both Sarandon and Ferrell were willing to be a part of this).
When he does simply “plug in” to make all the lights come back on, Carpenter doubles down on her alleged “pro-L.A.” sentiment with “Hooray for Hollywood” literally playing in the background before Carpenter materializes in yet another showgirl-y costume to perform “Juno.” And when the famed portion of the song during which she asks, “Have you ever tried this one?” occurs, instead of posing in a sexual way as she did throughout the Short n’ Sweet Tour, she has Samuel L. Jackson make a voice cameo after she bangs…a gong. With Jackson then leading the audience in a “relaxing” breathing exercise before Carpenter picks up the song again.
For the intro of the next tune she dives into, “Espresso,” Carpenter opts for a decidedly 70s-inspired musical sound to go with the costumes and mood of her dancers. She then reminds the audience that she debuted the single two years ago at Coachella, with no one knowing the words that day, but surely the do now. And, by the end of this song, Carpenter is wearing a white wedding veil, something that not only connects to her recent Perfect magazine photoshoot, but, more obviously, to Madonna and her “Like A Virgin” era. And since Carpenter has made no secret of her Madonna “appreciation” (i.e., obsession), it seems like a direct reference.
She keeps wearing the veil for the intro to “Goodbye,” the closer to the standard edition of Man’s Best Friend and what would be a rightful closer to her set as well (just as “Don’t Smile” could have been). Or so one thinks it is—until Carpenter keeps going with “Tears.” At which point, she makes her way to the “floor” where the drive-in set is so that she can frolic among the “throwback” cars with her dancers. Indeed, this is just one of the many elements of the show’s concept that has echoes of Lana Del Rey (and since Carpenter admitted the phrase “manchild” came from Del Rey’s “Norman Fucking Rockwell,” why not certain aspects of this performance as well?). Not just her general aesthetics, but her own “Lanachella” performance from last year. Except that while Del Rey rode in and out on the back of a motorcycle, Carpenter opted for a classic car for her entrance and exit. The latter of which is made after she gets sprayed with plenty of water while sitting on a giant sprinkler that comes out of one of the cars at the drive-in. Because she has to make it clear that she gets wet at the thought of you.
To drive home (pun intended) the final point about her L.A. love (ersatz though it may be), Carpenter wields Kool and the Gang’s “Hollywood Swinging” as the song that’s playing on her “car radio” on the way out. Though, of course, one wouldn’t be surprised if she caught the first flight out of LAX to New York to wait there for the next week until she has to return to the L.A. area for Coachella Weekend 2.
[…] one. Sabrina Carpenter’s headlining performance was just one of many indications of that, with her Weekend 1 show pulling out all the stops (not just in general, but also to ultimately faux honor…). However, she waited until the second weekend to pull out the ultimate stop: a Madonna […]
[…] Madonna made a “surprise” (though everyone seemed know about it beforehand) appearance during Sabrina Carpenter’s headlining set for Weekend 2. And from the instant the opening notes to “Vogue” played, Madonna commanded the […]