The Pussycat Dolls' road back to arenas has been ugly. A 2019 reunion announcement with nearly all original members dissolved into pandemic delays, then a legal dispute, then silence. When three members — Nicole Scherzinger, Ashley Roberts, and Kimberly Wyatt — re-emerged with a 53-date world tour, the US leg collapsed under poor ticket sales before it started. Former member Jessica Sutta alleged publicly that she was excluded for being a political liability, a claim the group declined to address. Whatever the backstage truth, the reduced headcount arrives in Birmingham trailing visible weight. The question the show has to answer is structural: does a group that was always really a dance collective with one exceptional singer still function as a trio? The original Pussycat Dolls' appeal was always the sum — fierce ensemble choreography plus Scherzinger's voice pushing them into pop legitimacy across six UK Top 3 hits between 2005 and 2009. Strip it to three and the arithmetic changes. You get more Scherzinger, less collective, and a thinner visual frame around her. For the first hour, the show earns its keep. The nearly two-hour set is relentlessly kinetic — hair-flipping, synchronised strutting, booty-shaking in the tradition of groups that understand pop spectacle as athletic event. When I Grow Up, Beep, and I Don't Need a Man all land on muscle memory and crowd goodwill. Roberts and Wyatt are genuinely given space during Wait a Minute, where their solos against the clacking pots-and-pans percussion feel deliberate — a pointed answer to anyone questioning whether their microphones are live. They are. The solo sections are where things get uneven. Wyatt's, for reasons not entirely clear, involves a faux DJ set that doesn't match what she does best. Roberts is more restrained, displaying her dancing without overreaching. Scherzinger gets the longest runway: she opens her segment with a tonally impressive rendition of As If We Never Said Goodbye from Sunset Boulevard — the Broadway production that just won her a Tony — complete with cascading pyrotechnics that feel more X Factor than theatre, before her white gown is unwound like toilet paper for a sprint through her solo back catalogue. Don't Hold Your Breath (thundering Eurodance ballad) and Wet (cacophonous EDM) are the highlights, and they're legitimately good. The problem isn't that Scherzinger is too good — it's that a trio format leaves Roberts and Wyatt without enough collective mass to balance her. In a larger group, individual inequality of stage presence gets absorbed by the whole. At three, every disparity is exposed. The final act — particularly React and Buttons, the latter featuring a dance break by students from Wyatt's dance academy — manages to redistribute attention more evenly, and for a stretch the scales level out. But it takes until the end of a nearly two-hour show to get there. Whether this constellation is sustainable as a touring proposition remains genuinely unclear. Tonight it works as spectacle. As a long-term group identity, that question is still open.
