Katy Perry plays candy-coated show at Mohegan Sun Arena

Never one for subtlety, Katy Perry’s California Dreams tour turned the Mohegan Sun Arena into a giant, living Candyland Saturday.

The performer wasn’t so much Katy Perry as “Katy Perry,” a pop star amalgam of batting eyelashes, cotton candy and Crayola’s classic 8. The persona was in full effect, from the costumes with moving parts to the trippy, cartoon-laced videos. Every second of her almost-2-hour show was crafted to reinforce the story — she even pretended to faint and had a plainclothed roadie carry her offstage.

But that hard-candy precision also enables her to pull off a pop spectacular. She took concert classics and pumped up the volume. Lights were flashier. The requisite bubbles were filled with fog, so that when they popped, they left a wisp of color behind. And onstage costume quick-changing during “Hot & Cold” pulled off a clever trick as well — her last dress swap was aided only by two bagfuls of glitter.

Even if you’re not a fan, you’ll never be bored.

Perry frequently gets criticism for being a weak singer, a note she’s clearly taken to heart. For most of the show, she was in control of her singing: solid, if not stellar. As the night wore on, she got breathier, but she played to her strengths and mostly stuck to her lower range. She even threw out a few impressive runs, the best of which was located, puzzlingly, in a cover of Willow Smith’s “Whip My Hair.”

She saved “Firework,” one of her biggest hits, for her closer. It was smart setlist design, saving the anthem to end the show, but by then she was vocally tired. The song came out patchy at best, and was frequently flat-out off key. She also didn’t gain by coming through town a few weeks after the Glee tour, which used the same song to much better effect.

But volume covers a multitude of sins. Rough vocal moments were masked by overly loud backing band, occasionally pumped so high you could barely make out Perry’s singing. Her backup singers were often rendered useless.

Despite the pretense of the show, there was one legitimate goof. The night ended with an encore of her monster hit “California Gurls,” a song as frothy as the foam she tried to shoot out onto the audience. Her cannon malfunctioned, and a dancer tried to fix it, but Perry didn’t waste a second. She ran backstage, swiped a backup singer’s cannon, yanked it out to the edge of the stage and turned it on the screaming crowd