NEW YORK — To use the Britney Spears catalog as the material for a musical preaching feminist enlightenment is, to put it mildly, a stretch. The now reclusive pop star’s heavily sexualized and self-objectifying body of work includes such fodder as “Baby One More Time,” (”hit me baby ...”), “Make Me” (”I just want you to make me move ...”) and, of course, the inimitable “Oops! I Did It Again,” wherein the singer declared she was “not that innocent.”
To no one’s surprise.
Sure, there has been the more recent #FreeBritney movement on social media and the long-troubled star, who is in her 40s, now is reasonably viewed as a victim of exploitation by family, the music industry and the entire aughts decade. Most things Spears, though, remain shrouded in mystery. The ideal jukebox Britney Spears show would imagine a star, or a fictional surrogate thereof, who came with great talent, neediness, complexity and vulnerability, riding on a knife edge of victimhood and ironic power, influencing the millions of impressionable teenagers who followed her music from around the globe for good and ill and defining her moment.
