Dancer, Prancer, Vixen

Sheryl Crow is a singer-songwriter of no great depth or originality, but her catchy craft, a gift for mainstreaming a boho sensibility and her knack for recasting Tom Petty, the Stones, Bob Dylan and Fleetwood Mac made her a post-classic-rock princess when she arrived a decade ago.

She also enjoyed the patronage of in-crowd musicians and stars such as Don Henley, and as recently as three years ago the Los Angeles-based artist showed a willingness to stretch, expanding her range with alt-country and experimental elements on the moody, sometimes difficult “Globe Sessions” album.

But somewhere along the line she’s apparently decided she’s a good-time, hard-rock chick. Maybe it’s fallout from collaborating with the likes of Eric Clapton, Keith Richards and Lenny Kravitz, but it’s a miscalculation currently compounded by her new album, “C’mon C’mon,” which sounds like a simplified, synthetic attempt to regain commercial footing by tapping her inner Britney.

If you think that record is dumbed-down, what would you make of her concert on Saturday at Verizon Wireless Amphitheater?

Actually, some of the new songs, notably the Top 20 hit “Soak Up the Sun” and “You’re an Original” (with guitarist Doyle Bramhall II joining in), benefited by being liberated from the album’s overproduction, gaining a raw, exuberant kick.

But like an insecure party host who keeps breaking the mood and interrupting good conversations to get everyone playing a game, Crow seemed to have no confidence in the ability of her material to hold the audience. If she didn’t keep the crowd artificially pumped up, she’d lose them. So there was lots of prancing and posing and stock exhortations.

Even when she broke the string of rock songs with her first hit, “Leaving Las Vegas,” she couldn’t let the lyric’s personal, character-driven narrative carry the selection. Instead, she used the selection as a platform for an audience-participation turn.

There’s a long list of quality singer-songwriters who know how to showcase their strengths in concert and still create a celebratory mood, but Crow lacks the instincts and energy to carry off this party persona. Five minutes of Gwen Stefani generates more wattage than Crow mustered in 90 Saturday, and her dance steps and gestures were rote and half-hearted.

In addition, the sound was stuck at the threshold of shrill all evening, eliminating any drama by reducing everything to the same tone, even the occasional ballad. Talk about fear of intimacy.

Crow’s performance was the closing set of the Irvine stop of Jeep World Outside Festival, a 23-city tour that featured jam-band O.A.R., reggae scion Ziggy Marley and middle-of-the-road nice guys Train on the main stage.

In the amphitheater concourse, several bands played on a second stage, adjacent to demonstrations of rock climbing, kayaking, scuba diving and other adventure sports. Maybe exhaustion accounted in part for the steady stream of departures during the second half of Crow’s set, but the sense that the show wasn’t going anywhere might have had something to do with it.