OAKLAND — Dressed in a kind of shredded ballerina’s costume, her signature ponytail tied into a bun, Ariana Grande leaned toward a microphone on a stand and asked the thousands of people screaming for her to please stop.
“For just this one part,” she said. “Sorry, sorry.”
The 32-year-old pop singer was maybe 20 minutes into her concert Saturday night at Oakland Arena — the first date of her first tour since 2019 — and had opened with a string of uptempo numbers including “Yes, And?” and “Positions” that got the room jumping. Now she wanted to try something different: As she tapped at a digital looping station in front of her, Grande carefully layered the vocal lines of her song “Eternal Sunshine” into a mini-choir of trilling Arianas.
The crowd’s near-silence as she worked clearly demonstrated that taking a few years to focus on acting (most notably in “Wicked” and its sequel) had only bolstered the devotion of Grande’s fans. But the sound of the music itself — delicate, precise, a little eerie — was also a sign that Hollywood did nothing to smooth out the quirks of one of pop’s most lovable oddballs.
Set to run through early September, the Eternal Sunshine tour — with five stops in Los Angeles starting June 13 — follows Grande’s 2024 album of that name as well as “Positions” from 2020; the singer has a new LP, “Petal,” due next month that she previewed here with a rendition of its lead single, “Hate That I Made You Love Me.”
“This next song is only a week old,” she said Saturday to introduce “Hate” — another loyalty test passed with no trouble by an audience peppered with bunny ears and Glinda wands. (Also in the house: Grande’s mom, Joan, who was welcomed like a pop star herself.)
All that music to bring to life meant that Grande moved quickly through the two dozen songs she divided into five or six acts. Like the “Eternal Sunshine” album, the production traced a loose narrative inspired by Michel Gondry’s 2004 movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”; interstitial video bits showed Grande submitting to a memory-wiping machine (before regretting it) and befriending what appeared to be a younger version of herself.
But if the concert was probably 30% less coherent onstage than in Grande’s mind — I’m still not sure why one section seemed to take place on Bourbon Street — it overflowed with discrete moments that showcased her peculiar talents: the voice, of course, with its fluttery high end and its belting Broadway-baby midrange, but also her flair for a vivid image and her slightly twisted sense of humor.
For “The Boy Is Mine,” she wore a cat mask and brandished a long leather whip as she sauntered down a runway connecting the main stage to a smaller one in the middle of the arena; beneath her pleading vocals, her live band pushed the song’s slinky R&B groove somewhere close to nü-metal.
“Thank U, Next” was staged like a sleepover — Grande trading intimacies with her crew of male and female dancers — in the world’s coziest nightclub; “Imperfect for You” had her and her guitarist jamming side-by-side in a mock-up of somebody’s bedroom.
Grande strung together her biggest dance hits — “One Last Time,” “Rain on Me” and “Break Free” — at about the halfway mark, and what the bang-bang-bang of it all made you ponder was the tenderness she can find as a singer amid even the most sledgehammering beat.
Given the global success of “Wicked,” I’d have thought the show would feature some kind of musical-theater segment in the home stretch: a bit of “Popular” or “Defying Gravity,” let’s say, or something from “Sunday in the Park With George,” in which Grande is set to star next year in London. Instead, she let a camera follow her backstage as she started “Into You” mid-costume-change — not a novel idea but an effective one — then sang “We Can’t Be Friends (Wait for Your Love)” in what looked like a house taken over by vegetation long after a nuclear apocalypse.
Where do you go from there? Grande chose up, strapping into a harness that lifted her high above the crowd as she sang “Supernatural” before she slipped through a small door in a structure suspended over the stage. She’d finally come back, and now she was gone again.
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