Pop sensation Britney Spears has taken her show on the road once again, starting a concert tour of North America to promote her latest successful record album, Circus. This is Spears’ first concert tour in five years. Those who have already attended “The Circus Starring Britney Spears 2009 Tour” can attest to the classic Spears lip-syncing on stage and the fact that her on-stage dancing is not the perfectly-performed entertainment it once was.

However, Britney Spears is still selling out arenas filled with eager fans, who sing along and avidly watch the choreographed dance moves and concert costume changes. Most of these fans do not seem terribly concerned that Spears walks around the stage sometimes appearing dazed with a distant smile on her face.

To her credit, and according to published reports - her family’s intervention, Britney Spears has at least managed to get her Circus CD released and selling well, and her body in shape to withstand a grueling concert tour that arrives in 27 U.S. cities before landing in Europe in June. The Circus tour director, Jamie King, who has also worked with Madonna, has done a savvy job with the entertaining show spectacle. Spears’ main costume is that of a daring ringmaster directing a cast that includes jugglers, acrobats and martial arts dancers.

The tour is full of three-dimensional diversions that are enticing to the audience. Over the center of the set’s three-ring stage is a video screen-ringed lighting rig. The rig scales up and down during scene changes. Using creatively-designed props, the raised stage-within-a-stage with its own video screen, and the various trap doors for Spears and her dancers to disappear, the concert is a sight to see.

The various dancers come in an array of costume-changing aerialists, acrobats, clowns, and burly men. The group takes Spear from ring to ring and swoops her into the air.

Before the Circus concert tour began, rumors were flying that Britney Spears would dramatize her mental illness breakdown and divorce from Kevin Federline in an overarching story on stage. Instead, the show turns out to be what celebrity blogger Perez Hilton calls a “circus of the bizarre.”

Spears, donning corsets and black boot stilettos, is the ringmaster around which the show revolves. While the costume changes are mesmerizing, Spears’ overall dancing does not match the relative perfection of her earlier years as an entertainer. In fact, it seems as though her back-up dancers do much of the heavy-lifting and try to compensate for Spears’ lack of energy during lulls. However, Spears is on task with her memorization of the dance moves, and does a fair job singing “Everytime” while suspended above the stage on an oversized umbrella.

The show creatively reinvents many of Britney Spears’ actual song lyrics in a visually-pleasing way. “Me Against the Music” can thank Bollywood for its inspiration and during “If You Seek Amy” we see Spears tapping her dancers’ heads with a pink play hammer.

With a lack of material from her first three albums present in the show, the Circus tour communicates that Britney Spears long ago bid farewell to her virginal pop princess and Lolita temptress alter egos. Rather, she is now a single mother with two children who has taken some measure of control over her life once again, and is out there doing a job she does well.

Britney Spears Circus Concert Tour tickets are available for purchase through Ticketmaster.