Britney Spears lived up to her persona of sex goddess Sunday night while performing her “Britney: Piece of Me” Tour to a sold-out crowd at Mohegan Sun. Britney’s stop in Uncasville was the second of her six-city tour through North America before heading to Europe this summer. The tour, modeled on Britney’s Las Vegas residency of the same name, is now on its second leg after completing its first stretch throughout Asia last year.

In addition to offering the audience the expected amounts of skin, slinky outfits and suggestive dance moves, Britney’s performance excited crowds with music as much as it did with sexuality. Britney, it seemed, was entirely removed from the tantalizing good-girl persona that made her famous in the first place. Instead, Sunday felt like an invitation for fans to indulge in their most fervent of fantasies.

Though the amount of sexual innuendo featured throughout the performance shouldn’t have surprised anyone (“Piece of Me” was, after all, created for Sin City), it was the ferocity of BDSM-inspired imagery and fetish-inspired acts that took me aback. I guess I was still expecting a bit of the coquettish schoolgirl from “… Baby One More Time,” or a sort of retrospective-like performance. It should have been obvious though, after Britney spent years trying to break that image, that she wouldn’t return to such behaviors this time around.

Throughout her 90-minute spectacle, which featured 23 tracks, each of seven acts hinged on different fantasies. Images of an orgy (with participants blindfolded with rope), for example, played over the giant LED backscreen that stretched across the stage for parts of Act V. Act VI revolved around suggestive-circus antics, while Act III, one of the more toned-down parts, put Britney alongside dancers in Daisy-Dukes and plaid-shirt getups — playing a bit into her early southern-girl appeal.

Besides the predicted corps of incredibly fit back-up dancers and high-tech visuals, Britney’s performance overall seemed to fall a tad short of my expectations. My biggest gripe, though not entirely surprising, may be that she lip-synced the entire show. Not once did she seem to attempt to sing herself. She did, however, deliver on all her biggest hits (“...Baby One More Time,” "Oops! ... I Did It Again,” “I’m a Slave 4 U,” “Boys”), as well as some newer tracks from her 2016 album, “Glory.”

To her credit, the 36-year-old did perform a full 90 minutes of choreographed dancing — working up a sweat along the way. But even that felt a tad sluggish. Her movements were neither sharp nor energetic. In fact, it felt as though she didn’t move much at all but was walked, twirled or carried around stage by her backup dancers, who, I must admit, executed incredible choreography. She seemed to merely go through the paces that were assigned to her, recycling the same dance moves over and over. Think: crisscrossing hands, pony-tail flicks, butt shakes and skipping struts.

But maybe she only looked slow compared to them. Should we really expect Britney, at her age, to be on their level?

It crossed my mind that if Britney were to make up for these shortfalls that she would perhaps give the audience more attention. Instead, besides quickly greeting “Connecticut” at the beginning of her performance and briefly saying goodbye at the end, her only other audience interaction consisted of her team pulling one unsuspecting young man on stage halfway through the show to take part in BDSM shenanigans with the pop star. After being strapped into a leather harness and put onto his hands and knees, Britney “walked” the man across the stage while holding onto a leash attached to a leather collar around his neck (much to his enjoyment). Note: This all happened after she “whipped” the sides of his thighs with a horse-whip stick. Otherwise, she seemed mentally removed from her fans, holding herself at a psychological distance from everything that was happening around her.

Despite her show’s relying only on the theme of sex, the audience, which was mostly made up of late 20-, 30- and early 40-somethings, seemed to be all for it. She is, after all, Britney Spears — the pop icon of many of our upbringings. They cheered each time she turned to shake her butt. They screamed when male backup dancers dropped to grind themselves over the floor. And they lost it when Britney knelt behind one of her dancers to reach her arm between his legs and graze his hips and thigh with her hand.

But all this teasing got me thinking. Will Britney ever be able to break free from her image of sex kitten? Her entire career, through all its ups and downs, has hinged on this stage persona. Maybe she knows, then, that all her fans really want is a piece of her.

m.biekert@theday.com