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As a pop star, Olivia Rodrigo<\/a> wields a rather unusual arsenal of weapons. She is an acute writer and an un-self-conscious singer. She largely abhors artifice. She is modest, not salacious. In just three years, she has achieved something approaching stratospheric fame \u2014 a four-times platinum debut album and a Grammy for best new artist \u2014 while somehow remaining an underdog.<\/p>\n But the weapon she returns to again and again is a very pointed and versatile curse word, one that she used to vivid effect on both her 2020 breakout hit, \u201cDrivers License,\u201d<\/a> the first single from her debut album, \u201cSour,\u201d and also on \u201cVampire,\u201d the Grammy-nominated single from her second album, \u201cGuts<\/a>,\u201d released last year. It\u2019s in plenty of other places, too, giving her anguished entreaties an extra splash of zest. She wants to make it clear that underneath her composed exterior, she\u2019s boiling over.<\/p>\n On Friday night at Acrisure Arena in Palm Desert, Calif., during the opening performance of the Guts World Tour, Rodrigo couldn\u2019t get enough of that word. She used it for emphasis, to connote dismissiveness and to demonstrate exasperation. But mostly she used it casually, in between-song banter, not because she needed to, but because using it felt like getting away with something.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Much of Rodrigo\u2019s music \u2014 especially \u201cGuts,\u201d with its detailed and delirious ruminations about new fame and its discontents \u2014 is about how it feels to act bad after being told how important it is to be good. It\u2019s situated at the juncture where freedom is just about to give way to misbehavior.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n This was true of her performance as well, which brought the perfection and order of musical theater to the pop-punk and piano balladry that her songs toggle between. Over an hour and a half, Rodrigo alternately roared and pleaded, stomped and collapsed. She led a reverent 11,000-person crowd \u2014 a sizable leap from the theaters she played on her first tour<\/a> \u2014 in singalongs that were churchlike and raucous, but never rowdy.<\/p>\n Throughout the concert, Rodrigo made gestural nods to abandon \u2014 singing the first verse of \u201cGet Him Back!\u201d through a megaphone, knocking the mic stand down at the end of \u201cAll-American Bitch,\u201d performing spicily for a camera peering up from beneath a clear section of the stage on \u201cObsessed.\u201d<\/p>\n While she has an exuberant stage presence, she is not a full-service pop star, and is better for avoiding that trap. Rodrigo is on her surest footing when performing faithful, unflashy recitations of her songs. She opened the night with a boundlessly energetic \u201cBad Idea Right?\u201d followed by \u201cBallad of a Homeschooled Girl,\u201d perhaps the truest statement of purpose from her last album, and let the dry, groaning \u201990s guitars telegraph anxiety and gloom.<\/p>\n Those songs emphasize Rodrigo\u2019s yen to rock, which is earnest and studied and bolstered by an impressively roaring band that lent her a soup\u00e7on of grit. But she followed with an even more powerful troika of howling repudiations: \u201cVampire<\/a>\u201d into \u201cTraitor\u201d into \u201cDrivers License,\u201d a string of slow ballads that are among her most invigorating songs. (Almost as moving was hearing three young girls, maybe 8 years old, screaming their brains out to \u201cTraitor\u201d while watching its music video in the back of a tricked-out Mercedes Sprinter van in the parking lot before the show.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But making her songs feel big didn\u2019t require much besides the songs themselves. At the end of \u201cThe Grudge,\u201d Rodrigo stood pointedly alone at the foot of the stage, a flash of self-sufficiency and defiance. (Dancers joined her for several songs, and for some, she danced along with them awkwardly.) Late in the performance, she sang a gasping \u201cHappier\u201d and the casually sinister \u201cFavorite Crime\u201d while seated at the edge of one of the stage\u2019s tentacles. And although she was floating over the crowd on a crescent moon for \u201cLogical\u201d and \u201cEnough for You,\u201d two of her most heartbreaking songs, it was the firm quiver in her voice that thrilled the most, not the spectacle up in the air.<\/p>\n In her outfits, Rodrigo leans into a combination of demure and tough. Her fans have been taking note. In the crowd, there was near sartorial unanimity \u2014 young girls, mostly teenagers, in midthigh skirts and either black boots or Chuck Taylors. Almost everyone had at least one item that sparkled. It recalled early Taylor Swift tours, where young fans arrived in sundresses and cowboy boots by the thousands. At one point, Rodrigo asked the crowd if anyone had come with their father (many), then if anyone had come with a boyfriend or girlfriend (not many). Then she asked if anyone had dressed up for the show, and the crowd roared almost in unison. (Women outnumbered men so significantly, most of the men\u2019s restrooms were converted to all-gender for the night.)<\/p>\n