Pink is master of ceremonies at Toronto stop of Summer Carnival tour

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Pink
Rogers Centre
Monday night
RATING: (**** stars out of four)

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Pink isn’t F***ng Perfect — also the name of one of her well-known hits — but she’s pretty darn close.

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The 43-year-old singer, who possesses some of the best pipes in the business, kicked off the North American leg of her Summer Carnival stadium tour on Monday night at Toronto’s Rogers Centre bringing plenty of pop-and-circumstance to entertain the 50,000 assembled fans at the sold-out show.

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Pink is touring in support of her 2023 album, Trustfall, but left the new material until later in her two-hour concert, preferring instead to kick off her set with such celebratory hits as Get the Party Started — descending from the rafters on a giant pair of lips — and Raise Your Glass before moving on to other well-known songs like Who Knew, Just Like A Pill, Try and What About Us.

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(Full disclosure: An unexpected case of heat exhaustion on a very humid summer night took me down at the end of opener Brandi Carlile’s set so I watched the first quarter of Pink’s show from the first aid room where a big bag of ice on the back of neck brought me back to life.)

Pink, meanwhile, was definitely in the mood for supersized fun as she performed on an enormous stage dominated by those pair of lips — another new song Blow Me (One Last Kiss) later featured dancers dressed up as lips with legs marching along the T-shaped catwalk — and several huge video screens.

The first new song of the night, Turbulence, saw Pink and one of her male dancers twirl around silk sheets performing some of the impressive aerial gymnastics she’s become known for.

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Let’s put it this way, the girl was working hard.

“I hope you enjoyed my makeup for the first three songs — I’m sure I was super cute,” joked Pink, with a nod to the sweat she was working up, before she settled down to play the piano for a cover of Bob Dylan’s To Make You Feel My Love and later covered Sade’s No Ordinary Love, doing a modern dance with her dancers.

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Her own song highlights included Just Give Me A Reason, F***ing Perfect, Just Like Fire (with plenty of firebursts on stage) which segued into Pat Benatar’s Heartbreaker, Please Don’t Leave Me, When I Get There (after she made a dig at controversial country singer Jason Aldean telling the audience they were loved even if they were surrounded by terrible people who gave off “Jason Aldean vibes. Yes, I said it. I went there”), I Am Here (despite it having to be restarted after a guitarist mistake), Irrelevant, and Trustfall which featured trampolining dancers.

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Pink, who did indeed don many shades of pink outfits throughout the night, from a pale pink bodysuit and matching long skirt to a bright fuchsia feathered jacket, was also happy to get a gift bag backstage from Roots saying it was well-suited to her style: “It was full of sweat pants.”

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