Okay, I guess the first rule is that thing about babies and animals – but this one is certainly up there. Don’t let yourself get upstaged by your . . . well . . . your stage.

On Wednesday I went to see Nicki Minaj.  I knew that I was stepping a little bit outside of my usual indie rock comfort zone; but I figured the show would be an incredible spectacle and I’ve given up a smile or two while driving home in the middle of the night and listening to her Starships song (also Super Bass – even if she doesn’t give the definitive rendition of it), so I went ahead and picked up the tickets to her Detroit show at the Fox Theatre.

This was my first trip to the Fox, although I’ve visited the sites of a couple of the other great Detroit movie palaces of the 1920s and 1930s. I say “sites” because the theaters themselves are now either completely gone or gutted ruins. I’ve made several trips over the past three years to the Easttown – and clinging to its skeletal remains are tattered bits of skin that suggest it was once every bit the equal to the baroque majesty of the Fox.

These are/were places of fantasy – organs that looked plucked from a medieval church are embraced by gilt plaster sphinxes and Buddhas fight for wall space with angels and gargoyles. This is a place where one has to work to remember the real world exists at all. It’s also not a place that one should visit wearing blue jeans. In that respect it would seem to be a perfect match for Minaj – whose celebrity seems far more based upon her fantastical presence than upon a depth of musical talent.

But not if she’s just phoning it in . . . and that’s what it felt like she was doing here. Or at least what her handlers were doing.  She was working it – costumes, rapping, dancing (or at least wiggling); but she was supplied with less than a dozen backup dancers, the stage looked like a high school musical set, and at times it felt like she just ran out of material. The “I love you Detroits” filled a lot of the gaps . . . but the whole performance smelled like it had been designed not for a maximum number of “wows,” but for the minimum cost required to fill the seats.

And at that it worked. The place seemed to be sold out and the (overwhelmingly white) audience seemed pretty pleased with the performance. I was. It was fun. She is a performer. The drum machine made you want to dance. There were lots of drunk hot girls. Asking for more is probably just being greedy.

Still, except for a few moments, the impossible glory of the Fox itself dwarfed everything that was happening on its stage.