Sabrina Carpenter Coachella Review: Celebrity Cameos and Big Hits

Sabrina Carpenter brought Hollywood, Broadway and a good old fashioned house party to the desert in a rollicking, raunchy and hit-filled headlining Coachella set.

There were costume changes, elaborate set pieces and celebrity cameos — but no duets. (She didn’t “arrest” anyone, either, despite rumors that Madonna might be put in her signature cuffs.)

Carpenter opened the set with a black-and-white intro video — pre-taped scenes have become commonplace in Coachella’s pop star era — in which she’s driving a car down a dark desert road, staring at a younger version of herself in a nearby vehicle. A cop, played by Sam Elliott, pulls over for some reason he can’t articulate and warns her not to go to California (“You know it’s not right out there. It’s wrong,” he says).

The sketch went on a bit long, coupled with Carpenter’s extended catwalk entrance, but when the lights flooded the stage and the orchestral suite segued into “House Tour,” the show got off to a start as red-hot as the headliner’s dress.

The first half of the set exuded a vintage showbiz flare. Retro cars overlooked the first backdrop — a replica of the Hollywood Hills — before big letters spelling “SABRINAWOOD” appeared from behind the miniature mountains. Plus, there was more than one direct reference to Marilyn Monroe. (Carpenter not only sometimes resembles the Blonde Bombshell, but she similarly knows how to straddle the line between sex appeal and self-deprecating silliness.)

Carpenter’s vocals sounded mostly pristine throughout the 90-minute performance, an impressive feat for someone moving around so much (“My Man on Willpower” even had her walking forward and backward on a treadmill in heeled boots). A highlight was the live debut of “We Almost Broke Up Again Last Night,” which had Carpenter belting about a relationship that’s on-again, off-again, on-again, off-again (and so on).

During the exuberant “Manchild,” Carpenter navigated a horde of men costumed as poodles and Dalmatians, prancing around the stage as they lifted one leg to mock-tinkle. (“Squirrel!” she yelled in between chorus and verse — perhaps a reference to the dog from Pixar’s “Up.”) During “Taste,” she kicked her legs high in the hair and let the crowd show off their singing chops. And during “Please Please Please,” Anya Taylor-Joy and fellow Coachella performer Sombr were spotted on the livestream bopping their heads and singing along.

“I can’t believe I’m headlining Coachella!” Carpenter shouted early on. “I mean, I can a little bit, but it’s nicer to say that, right?”

Clearly, the set was front-loaded with hits (three of her four biggest songs arrived within the first 20 minutes or so), which provided a jolt of excitement up top but a somewhat brutal lull in the middle. One bizarre, nearly 7-minute interlude featured Susan Sarandon playing an older version of Carpenter, delivering a wistful monologue about what a future niece might think of her. Carpenter’s “Girl Meets World” co-star Corey Fogelmanis made a cameo, too, as a waiter at a drive-in theater. (And if audiences didn’t recognize him, the festival made sure to plaster his name on the bottom of the livestream.) The scene, a bungled reflection on wish fulfillment, brought the pop show to a screeching halt. A message I received from someone on the ground read: “People are sitting down. This is a momentum killer. Lots of people leaving.”

The drawn-out cameo did allow for a costume change — Carpenter finally reappeared in a blue turtleneck sweater — and the Los Angeles mountainscape was replaced by a 1980s-inspired audition room. But it took a little while for the show to pick back up. The decision to follow a spoken-word performance with three slow songs (“Go Go Juice,” “Such a Funny Way” and “Sugar Talking”) didn’t help move things along.

But then “Feather” rolled around, with a flock of lingerie-laden ladies following Carpenter across the stage with luscious, black bird wings. And a “Copacabana” sample brought back that hint of cheeky glamour.

And then there were a few more celebrity cameos. Will Ferrell played an electrician, dragging a power cord across the stage in a bit that didn’t quite connect, and Carpenter’s usual sex position gag in “Juno” was replaced by the ringing of a gong and a voiceover from Samuel L. Jackson: “Hello, Coachella. This is your spiritual guide. I am here to take you motherfuckers on this journey to relaxation.”

Carpenter finished strong at the center of a Broadway-inspired set piece, with flashing marquees reading “Icon in Motion” and “She’ll Dream Come True It for Ya!” Before launching into her biggest hit, she reflected on the last time she played Coachella, in 2024. She had released “Espresso” a night before her performance and virtually no one in the crowd knew the words. She promised the audience then: “See you back here when I headline!”

Well, it didn’t take long for that dream to come true. “Two years ago, I wanted to put out a little song before Coachella,” Carpenter said, sipping from an espresso martini glass. “And now I think you might know the fucking words.”

The stage erupted into a confetti-covered costume party, with nuns dancing next to showgirls and Chippendales, before Carpenter returned to those vintage cars for her final song, “Tears.” The hilariously raunchy ode to male competence saw the pop star elevated at the center of a sprinkler-head chair, spritzing herself and her backup dancers. And then she got back in the car, turned up the radio and drove the hell out of there.