Perry in no real hurry to act her age

She spat the word out like a bug she’d almost swallowed, as if its two syllables bore wings, antennae and nasty little pinchers.

“Adult.”

Katy Perry, a human emoticon, twisted her features into a mask of exaggerated disgust as she said it, making the kind of face one might when confronting something really gross, like some forgotten tuna salad in the back of the fridge, a corpse whose pockets were stuffed with minced kittens or — hold your nose! — a big stinky pile of maturity.

“Ugh,” she groaned afterward. “It’s like a curse word to me.”

And then Perry got back to rhapsodizing about her garden and doling out pizzas to young crowd members.

So it went for a little more than two hours at the MGM Grand Garden on Friday, where Perry’s show was about two different types of suspension: from the venue’s rafters, via a harness that the singer used to soar high above the crowd on several occasions, and from the eye-rolling demands of being a grown-up.

The latter part was likely a big reason why there were so many mothers in the house with young daughters in tow: Perry may have been singing about adult concerns plenty of the time — arrest warrants, hangovers, the occasional menage a trois — but she did so within a Candyland of her own design, a kind of DayGlo, walk-in adolescence where dancers pranced around in fuzzy cat get-ups, big inflatable tacos hovered high in the air, Cirque du Soleil-style acrobatics were performed upon a massive diamond-shaped trapeze and rappers dressed as pharoahs.

Little was overtly sexualized. It was mostly the opposite, with Perry attempting to attach a playful, childlike innocence to songs where innocence was buried beneath a mound of empty liquor bottles.

This is right in line with Perry’s career, which has been a study in pop psychology in the most literal sense.

She’s spoken in detail about her devoutly religious upbringing and how she could only listen to secular music surreptitiously, and Perry’s first two albums saw her frequently rebel against the restrictions of her youth.

Her first hit was the winkingly tawdry “I Kissed A Girl,” enhanced on Friday with a pneumatic beat that approximated a jackhammer’s hydraulic thrust. And on “Last Friday Night,” taken from her second album, “Teenage Dream,” she sang of getting black-out drunk and booted from bars.

That side of Perry still manifests itself in her music upon occasion.

“Last Friday Night” was performed as a medley with “This Is How We Do,” from Perry’s latest record, “Prism,” where she sang merrily of day drinking in a voice as bubbly as the champagne guzzled in song.

And she hinted that this kind of debauchery was more than a product of artistic license.

“I come here a lot,” she said of Las Vegas. “I do things that are unmentionable.”

But what Perry said next was more telling.

“What if I don’t live up to all your dreams and expectations? And you think I’m wearing too much makeup?” she asked in a manner that seemed to betray at least some concern, her back turned to the crowd, her head inside a large cat scratching post prop that was part of a feline-themed stage design, one of many different motifs featured on this night.

The image encapsulated the evening: Perry toying with self-doubt in a fantastical setting that looked like something from a Disney production.

She puts on a brave face, while occasionally acknowledging that it’s little more than a mask.

“Sometimes I wish my skin was a costume / That I could just unzip,” she’d confess on “Love Me.”

This is what “Prism,” and this tour in support of the album, are all about: confronting insecurities, delivering pop pep talks, setting self-help platitudes to a near-disco beat.

“I went from zero, to my own hero,” Perry trumpeted on a show-opening “Roar;” “Acceptance is the key to be / To be truly free,” she offered on breathy ballad “Unconditionally;” “I know that I am enough, possible to be loved,” she announced on “By The Grace of God,” lyrics that all seemed written while sprawled upon her therapist’s couch.

It all provided deeper subtext to a show defined by surface thrills.

That Perry can embed her pathos and passions in a cartoonish setting that belies neither is what makes her performances work, despite her competent, albeit colorless singing voice and pro forma electro pop.

In many ways, she’s following the reverse trajectory of fellow pop tarts such as Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus, who found fame an at early age and then catapulted themselves into adulthood by equating it with aggressive displays of sexuality.

Perry, who turns 30 next month, became a star in her mid-20s, and if anything, she’s reverted back to childhood, fetishizing it, using a romanticized past to soothe present hurts.

This approach — as savvy as it is saccharine — serves dual purposes.

Take Perry’s performance of the Jackson Five-worthy funk lite of “Birthday,” which she played during her first encore.

As dancers dressed as human candles gyrated around a massive birthday cake that elevated a fan pulled from the crowd some 20 feet in the air, Perry cloaked her come-ons in merrily sung innuendo.

“So let me get you in your birthday suit,” she chirped, having her cake — birthday or otherwise — and eating it, too. “It’s time to bring out the big, big balloons.”

She wasn’t alluding to inflatable novelties, but nevertheless, hundreds of brightly-colored balloons soon tumbled from the ceiling.

The kids in the house cheered — and so did their mothers.

But for entirely different reasons.

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow on Twitter @JasonBracelin.