Justin Timberlake and P!nk Bring FutureSex/LoveShow to Sunrise

Justin Timberlake walked out from a metallic riser to the synth pulse of "FutureSex/LoveSound" shortly after 9 p.m. Sunday, opening his FutureSex/LoveShow at a packed BankAtlantic Center with P!nk already having torn through her own forty-minute opening set. The Sunrise stop on the tour's North American leg arrived three days after a tour kickoff in San Diego, putting Broward near the front of the schedule for what is shaping up to be one of the most heavily marketed pop tours of the year.

The show is built around the staging concept the tour name implies. A long catwalk pushed deep into the floor seats, a rotating B-stage, an in-the-round piano segment, and a horn section that came up from below the main platform during a rearranged take on "Señorita." Timberlake spent much of the night moving between his "Justified" material and the songs that have dominated radio since "FutureSex/LoveSounds" was released last September, including "SexyBack," "My Love" and "What Goes Around... Comes Around."

P!nk's opening set leaned heavily on songs from her current album, "I'm Not Dead," with "Stupid Girls," "Who Knew" and "U + Ur Hand" all landing inside the first half hour. The pairing — a male R&B-leaning pop star and a guitar-forward female rock-pop singer — gave the bill a wider stylistic range than most arena pop tours bring through Sunrise.

The BankAtlantic Center floor was a near-equal mix of high schoolers and twentysomethings on a Sunday night that was also the night of the Academy Awards telecast. Outside on the Sawgrass Expressway, traffic had clogged the exit ramps shortly before 7 p.m. and stayed clogged through the start of P!nk's set; inside, scalped tickets in the upper bowl had been changing hands at face value or below, with the floor and lower bowl long since sold out.

For Broward seniors, the tour stop sits in a sweet spot of the school year — past the holidays, before AP exams, just inside the window when prom and graduation are visible on the horizon. The FutureSex/LoveShow is scheduled to continue through the spring with European dates after the U.S. leg wraps. The next stop is Tampa.