The Toronto Sunday Sun

Nudie girls. Snot. Middle fingers in the air. You can bet the ushers at the Hummingbird Centre don't see a show like this every night. "Everything has been said before," sang Marilyn Manson during his opening number, The New S***. "Let us entertain you!" And so the shock rocker brought his new album, The Golden Age of Grotesque, to life with a macabre moulin rouge spectacle that was less ranting, more rocking. Manson specializes in shocking the easily offended with anti-authoritarian messages and creepy visuals. But his new disc shows he's more into Berlin-style vaudeville and burlesque lately.
So the 90-minute performance was heavy on theatrical shadows, camp and titilation. Most of that came courtesy of a pair of two flexible, scantily-clad "dancers," who appeared in military chic, as makeshift siamese twins and in garters with nude-coloured bikinis which might have made them look naked to the back of the room, but were all an illusion. A lesser performer would have been upstaged by the girls, but Manson is an excellent showman, a veteran ringleader. He's come a long way from his first Toronto show in 1996, when he took Polaroid photos of his crotch then tossed them into the crowd at Molson Park. Last night, he commanded attention with nothing more than his funny faces, silly John Cleese-style military march and a set of fun, heavy songs like Disposable Teens and Use Your Fist and Not Your Mouth. "I'm not even going to waste breath talking about religion or politics tonight," he said, before launching into a spirited version of Rock is Dead. The show featured a half-dozen different stage setups, various props and costumes, hastily assembled in a few seconds of black between songs. At one point, Manson rose to the ceiling a on a black pedestal, later he donned fake arm extensions. For The Golden Age of Grotesque, Manson wedged his microphone between the butt cheeks of on of his dancers, then sang out of it. Pretty tame for a guy who has been known to expose himself on stage, actually. Just when it seemed Manson's show would be all fun and no fury, he appeared in blackface and Mickey Mouse ears, accompanied by a giant inflatable version of same, for his hit The Beautiful People. Certainly, this statement is giving the Disney family nightmares.
Nice to see that after all these years, even a playful Marilyn Manson can still be a creep.