Onstage, the Girls Could Use a Dash More Spice

Scoff if you must, but the Spice Girls have shown a flair for colorful, if fluffy, pop on the radio, in videos and, by early indications, in their coming film debut, “Spiceworld.”

So with a world tour planned, can Girl Power get the job done on the concert stage as well?

The answer, from a pay-per-view telecast Saturday of their first-ever concert performance taped in October in Istanbul, Turkey: zig a zig naaaah.

It’s not that Ginger, Baby, Sporty, Posh and Scary were bad, per se, or that their young fans didn’t seem plenty pleased with what they saw and heard. It’s simply that where in the other media they and their creative associates have found ways to, pardon the expression, spice things up a bit, in this setting there was little to cover their obvious deficiencies and inexperience.

It wasn’t even a question of whether they can really sing--though the sound often seemed so canned that it was at times hard to tell if they really were singing live. (The credits at the end included a dubbing mixer, raising the question of touch-ups being done in the studio.) It was that they neither created a smoke screen of showy razzle-dazzle nor camped up the amateurish goofiness and chummy spirit that are their most endearing qualities.

Even the five outfit changes (including a teasing are-they-naked? bit posed on backward chairs, a la the famed Christine Keeler photo) did little to liven up the tepid pace. The mostly mid-tempo material wore thin quickly, especially with the relatively spunky “Move Over” and the guilty-pleasure, pure-pop pastiche “Wannabe” both held for the encore. The choreography, too, had little hold, a mere assortment of moves with little connection to the songs.

For pop fluff to have any value, it needs to be either over-the-top crass or completely honest and warm, and this show only reached each extreme once. “Mama” was the latter, with the five dedicating it to their mothers as the source of their Girl Power and sitting on fluffy cushions while baby pictures and home movies showed on the giant video screen behind them. And for crass, you can’t get much more crass than during “Move Over,” accompanied by visuals of the logo for the sponsoring cola for which the song and its “generation next” tag line were custom created.

If they have any thought of sticking around for awhile, then more of that’s what we want, what we really, really want.