Ariana Grande returns to the stage, pop-star quirks intact

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OAKLAND — Dressed in a kind of shredded ballerina’s costume, her signature ponytail tied into a bun, Ariana Grande leaned toward a microphone on a stand and asked the thousands of people screaming for her to please stop.“For just this one part,” she said.“Sorry, sorry.”The 32-year-old pop singer was maybe 20 minutes into her concert Saturday night at Oakland Arena — the first date of her first tour since 2019 — and had opened with a string of uptempo numbers including “Yes, And?” and “Positions” that got the room jumping.

Now she wanted to try something different: As she tapped at a digital looping station in front of her, Grande carefully layered the vocal lines of her song “Eternal Sunshine” into a mini-choir of trilling Arianas.The crowd’s near-silence as she worked clearly demonstrated that taking a few years to focus on acting (most notably in “Wicked” and its sequel) had only bolstered the devotion of Grande’s fans.But the sound of the music itself — delicate, precise, a little eerie — was also a sign that Hollywood did nothing to smooth out the quirks of one of pop’s most lovable oddballs.Set to run through early September, the Eternal Sunshine tour — with five stops in Los Angeles starting June 13 — follows Grande’s 2024 album of that name as well as “Positions” from 2020; the singer has a new LP, “Petal,” due next month that she previewed here with a rendition of its lead single, “Hate That I Made You Love Me.”“This next song is only a week old,” she said Saturday to introduce “Hate” — another loyalty test passed with no trouble by an audience peppered with bunny ears and Glinda wands.

(Also in the house: Grande’s mom, Joan, who was welcomed like a pop star herself.)All that music to bring to life meant that Grande moved quickly through the two dozen songs she divided into five or six acts.Like th...