Miley Cyrus is an ambivalent comeback queen

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Set us as preferred “For me, performance can’t be everything,” Miley Cyrus declared on Friday night, and you had to admire her choice of setting: onstage at the Hollywood Bowl in front of approximately 18,000 people who’d turned up precisely to see her perform.A star since her teenage days on the Disney Channel’s “Hannah Montana,” the 33-year-old musician and actor was maybe half an hour into the first of two sold-out concerts at the iconic hillside amphitheater — a place close to Cyrus’ heart, as she explained in a videotaped intro recalling a gig she and her fiancé, Maxx Morando, caught last year by the French band Air.“I step into wine, which soaks onto my boots,” she said in the dramatic black-and-white clip.“I don’t mind stained leather — it only adds to their character.”Cyrus’ shows were billed as part of the rollout of her latest album, “Bass Persuades,” which came out in September (and which found her dropping her last name to go simply by Miley).

Yet the two-night engagement is really meant to mark her grand return to the stage after she said a few years ago that she’d sworn off touring because it was too harmful to her mental health.Music The former R.E.M.

frontman has been working for years on his debut solo album.With producer Andrew Watt, he’s finally in the home stretch.Is “grand” the right word for a comeback as equivocal as this one? Despite all the hype surrounding this weekend’s concerts, Cyrus spoke again and again Friday about how much less space for performance she has in her life these days than she used to; she talked repeatedly about her quest to balance her fans’ emotional needs with her own.At one point, after singing a couple of numbers on a small B-stage about halfway up the bowl, she walked through the crowd back to the main stage, gripping and gri...