Katy Perry floats on a cotton-candy cloud over Pete crowds

Decked out in sequins and brilliant colors, Katy Perry’s admirers awaited their pop… Decked out in sequins and brilliant colors, Katy Perry’s admirers awaited their pop star.

The Petersen Events Center glowed with light-up cotton candy, sunglasses and whatever knickknacks vendors could cram LED lights into. The “Candy Land” stage theme  oddly contrasted what could be seen of the athletic arena’s usual decor.

But Katy Perry’s show outdid any baubles the audience toted — perhaps too well.

At times, the concert’s remarkable showmanship and stagecraft threatened to overshadow the music entirely. The technological feats of trapdoors and rising pillars, backup dancers-turned-acrobats on aerial wires and smoke and bubble machines tended to detract from rather than enhance Perry’s performance.

Still, she overshadowed her opening acts so that the audience’s lack of focus during their performances seemed warranted.

Welsh performer Marina and the Diamonds was roundly ignored by the crowd still filing into the Petersen Events Center, with parts of her set of inarticulate warbling drowned out almost entirely by chanters demanding the main act.

Second opening performer DJ Skeet Skeet fared a little better and got the audience members on their feet with his single “Hello.”

But a DJ only holds so much interest. The thousands of teenyboppers wanted their idol.

A video featuring Perry as a butcher’s assistant with dreams of a gumdrop paradise — no, it didn’t make more sense for those in the audience — projected onto overhead screens preceding her entrance from under the stage. She opened strong with the adolescent anthem “Teenage Dream.” The strange and rather weak storybook-narrative video resumed at various points in the show to entertain the crowd during several of Perry’s many costume changes.

Perry is a less-than-gifted dancer, but her confident stride, outlandish costumes — such as a bra made of pinwheels — and staggeringly high heels allowed no room for doubt about who owned that bubblegum-pink stage. Faced with a crowd initially more preoccupied with capturing what was happening up on stage on their cellphones than actually watching, Perry’s guileless, wide-eyed charisma and personable stage banter won out.

In an early sign of the many odd gimmicks to come, Perry introduced “Waking Up in Vegas” with a brief skit featuring an anthropomorphic slot machine. Through different parts of the show, showgirls, an Asian Elvis impersonator and appropriately costumed dancers for the less-than-subtle innuendo of “Peacock” accompanied the quirky pop star on stage.

Perry paused for a bit of fan interaction — getting more than she bargained for when the male audience member she invited to kiss her on the cheek swooped in to kiss her neck. “My husband is backstage!” she shrieked and blushed endearingly. She then moved on to “I Kissed a Girl,” — her changed pace transforming the song’s first verse into a lounge-act ballad before energizing it back into the breakout hit’s original beat.

Costumed as a cat lady — and no doubt missing her own feline, Kitty Purry —, the pop sensation belted out “E.T.” amid elaborate choreography.

Perched on a candy-cane striped bar stool, Perry slowed the show down with an acoustic set, telling her adoring crowd, “All of you sit down and let me entertain you, that’s what you came here for.”

Perry shared a bit of off-target Pa. trivia, apparently mistaking steel- and ketchup-producing Pittsburgh for chocolate mecca Hershey, which the crowd ate up regardless. Then she went into a cover of her close friend Rihanna’s “Only Girl in the World” before a well-received medley of Wiz Khalifa’s “Black and Yellow,” Rebecca Black’s “Friday” and Willow Smith’s “Whip my Hair.”

Perry gushed about how much her fans’ support means to her. “There are almost 10,000 people here! You guys — I’ve only put out two records, it’s crazy that you all came out to see me!” the singer said. Accordingly, she dedicated “Thinking of You” to everyone who believed in her. The gesture escaped unbearable over-sentimentality only because of how genuine she seemed in her gratitude. In the evening’s greatest coup de theatre, Perry then stepped aboard a pink, cotton-candy cloud which rose into the air to hover directly over the audience, keeping very much in line with the “Glinda the Good Witch” motif her stage presence conjured to mind.

After donning her signature blue wig for “Hot n Cold,” Perry invited audience members on stage to join her while she covered Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody,” liberally dispensing hugs and making a tiny, purple-wigged fan’s night when she snapped a picture with her.

Wisely shedding the theatrics to let one of her biggest hits shine on its own, Perry performed “Firework” alone on an unlit stage. The evening appeared to come to an end when real pyrotechnics punctuated the song and Perry disappeared through a lowered platform in the stage.

But, of course, that couldn’t have been the end, one of Perry’s songs was conspicuously absent. The venue transformed into a beach party with beach balls, water canons and confetti galore to end the night on Perry’s smash hit “California Gurls.”