Review: Justin Timberlake Brought Out the '90s Babies at Ball Arena

During his Forget Tomorrow World Tour show at Ball Arena on January 28, Justin Timberlake took a moment to examine the many signs held up by fans in the front rows. He congratulated a pregnant couple, whose sign read "Five months with twins, wasn't missing this." He let out a titter of giggles at another sign: "At this rate, I'm going to need a senior discount next time."

"Is that because I waited so long to come back to Denver?" Timberlake said. "Well, guess what? At this rate, me, too."

He then turned to a woman holding up a sign that read, "Fan since '98, please make my birthday wish come true to have a selfie with you."

"It's your birthday today?," he asked. "Did you know you share a birthday with the fat one? Joey Fatone."
That's Timberlake's fellow former *NSYNC member, of course. The birthday girl was beaming, and Timberlake did her one better: He took a video selfie on her phone of himself and the entire arena wishing her a happy birthday.

"I would literally die," a woman next to me said, clutching her husband's shoulder. "I. Would. Literally. DIE!"

She then propelled herself off her husband's shoulders, jumping and squealing. Timberlake had started singing "Technicolor," a ballad off his latest album, Everything I Thought It Was. But the show wasn't just about that album — Timberlake is playing all of his hits on this tour, his first in six years. That meant performances of "Like I Love You," "My Love," "Summer Love," "SexyBack" and so much more across the two-hour production, which included impressive light shows and dance numbers.
The choreography was more the concert centerpiece than were Timberlake's falsetto vocals, thankfully bolstered by an incredibly talented array of background singers as well as his phenomenal band, the Tennessee Kids. Timberlake has always been an impressive dancer, and his moves haven't changed much, with lots of fancy footwork, little spins and hops, and plenty of pointing.

The ten-time Grammy winner still has the power to fill venues, and Ball Arena was no exception. I was a little taken aback to see only a handful of people trickling into the venue around 8:15 p.m., but it turned out that almost everyone was already inside. And what a crowd it was: When I reached my seat, a herd of millennials was dancing across the venue, singing along to the lyrics of Flo Rida's "Low," courtesy of opening act Andrew Hypes, who was warming the crowd up with a DJ set of late '90s and 2000s hits — "Firework" by Katy Perry, "Run the World (Girls)" by Beyonce and, of course, "Bye Bye Bye" by *NSYNC.  A large swath of Denverites apparently knows the choreography to that song, but what else would you expect at a JT show?

"Where my '90s babies at?" the DJ yelled, and the venue burst into a torrent of screams before Timberlake took the stage.
As cheugy as the atmosphere and performer were, the venue was brimming with an overpoweringly joyful energy that fueled Timberlake. When popular musicians have to sing the same hit over and over again for decades, they tend to phone it in. But refreshingly, Timberlake poured his all into "Cry Me a River," the song that put the boy-band star's solo career on the map with his 2002 debut album, Justified. He sang in front of a rectangular box screen that moved to the center of the stage, which showed a twenty-foot-tall Timberlake inside it, drowning in water and pounding at walls in what could be the most expensive display of corny symbolism ever. At other times, the screens would depict saturated imagery of desert landscapes that recalled those posters the Ken dolls hung in their mojo dojo casa houses in the Barbie movie.

After all, Timberlake himself is much like a Ken doll, and it was obvious that many of the women there would happily be his Barbie. As one woman put it before he came on stage, "Honestly, he could just stand there and tap his foot the whole time and I'd still scream."

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