E-Mail This Article to a Friend
	Alicia, Beyoncé, and Missy "LADIES FIRST"

Missy Elliott brought the freakiest dancers and Alicia Keys brought the biggest band, but as expected, it was Beyoncé Knowles who provided the biggest bang at the "Ladies First" tour stop a week ago Wednesday at the FleetCenter. Beyoncé’s set began with a suitably imperial entrance — she was carried through the crowd by four musclemen on a bed-sized sedan chair while dousing the audience in rose petals, like an Amazon queen from some golden-age Hollywood jungle epic — and ended with a quick cameo from boyfriend Jay-Z, who took the stage to reprise his verse on "Crazy in Love." But what should have been a highlight-reel evening of fast-paced pop thrills turned into an endurance test thanks to a pair of comically botched set-change fiascos worthy of Spinal Tap. In one, the audience watched Missy Elliott and a cast of 14 dancers (plus a DJ and hype man) shout snippets from her decade’s worth of dance-floor-slaying hip-hop hits into a fast-forward half-hour mixtape, then waited 45 minutes while the crew attempted to disassemble her two-story fishtank.

With a seven-piece band, three back-up singers, and a pair of dancers, Alicia Keys, that nice piano-playing girl next door, was not a reluctant siren but a tentative one. Dressed in a corset and a fedora tipped to a rakish angle, she made a bid to become the thinking girl’s Janet Jackson — but if she’s to become a funk-band showgirl, she’ll need to sip some of Kelis’s milkshake.

As pages from The Diary of Alicia Keys (J Records) floated by on video monitors, her opening "Karma" was stretched to include a vamp on No Doubt’s "Hella Good" and Andre 3000’s "shake it like a Polaroid picture" chant; later, she grabbed a baton and conducted her ensemble in a version of the hip-hop national anthem, "Apache." When she deigned to sit at the ivories and belt out the cascading accusations of "A Woman’s Worth," she connected immediately, and her solo-piano interlude was the set’s highlight — even if during one poignant moment, she was caught between ambitions, writhing arch-backed on the piano top while trying to play its keys at the same time. Her biggest hit, "In and Out of Love," is not the kind of song that makes people scream and shout — its rolling, ancient, dark-hued gospel instead enticed the audience of fly girls and grandmothers and atheists and stockbrokers and pre-teens to stand and sway. Testimony is not always sexy.

Beyoncé was worth waiting for, and for her debut solo outing, in support of last year’s Grammy-gobbling Dangerously in Love (Sony), her handlers smartly swept the stage clean of any distracting props — when you have a golden idol, you don’t need to put anything else on the shelf. As she was carried in, her four female dancers waited atop short pedestals on a bare stage (a six-piece band were concealed behind curtains, with only a DJ behind a sleek, iPod-like capsule visible); two featureless mannequins — a pair of male dancers in skin-tight bodysuits — came to life as the singer rose on a lift, and the entire company launched into maximum-jiggle mode as the dancehall-driven "Baby Boy" erupted with a flash of pyro.

Less was definitely more. Beyoncé’s physique is her show’s best special effect, and the heat of her performances on "Naughty Girl" and "Me Myself and I" was driven by the power of her voice, which was so strong that in the good seats you could hear it above the PA when she got close. There was a palpable lull from mid set on as she tried to have her solo career both ways — in a lengthy and curious medley, the band played a string of Destiny’s Child hits that she only occasionally offered vocals for. And after her precise renditions of Dangerously’s sub-par ballads, even a rock-guitar mash-up of "Hip Hop Star" couldn’t recapture the momentum.