“This is R&B 101,” Bruno Mars announced Saturday night at Barclays Center, fixing a stare on one woman in the audience. He cued the band to crescendo, and then to stop on a dime, leaving empty air just as he exhaled a silky “damn.” Afterward he paced the stage with an exaggerated peacock strut while encouraging his bandmates to try to outsuave him. “I don’t mean to toot my own horn,” Mr. Mars said when they were done, his megawatt smile turned up to gigawatt, “but, ‘Beeeeep!’ ”
For a boast, it was completely bereft of ego, Mr. Mars delivering it with an implicit wink that acknowledged its limitations. He is a songwriter and producer turned frontman, a platinum star who can sell out arenas like this one, but who’s most at ease being just one of the guys in the band.
So much of this exuberant but not quite barnburning show, part of the Moonshine Jungle tour, was designed to de-emphasize Mr. Mars — he wore a red suit, a leopard-print tank top and red patent-leather horsebit loafers, just like everyone else in his band; you couldn’t help but think of the Sheraton Waikiki-playing family band Mr. Mars got his start in as a child. You could argue that Philip Lawrence — one of Mr. Mars’s writing and producing partners in the Smeezingtons and his main background singer and hypeman here — stood out more, simply for accenting his outfit with a hat.) Rarely was Mr. Mars out in front alone, typically preferring to be in lock step with some or all of his band members who moved with far more enthusiasm and pluck than he.
It was less like the concert of a superstar than one of the great funk and soul bands of the 1970s: not as ostentatious as, say, the Love Unlimited Orchestra, or as sinuous as Slave, but more in the tradition of Earth, Wind & Fire, or perhaps Maze featuring Frankie Beverly, especially when Mr. Mars’s band slipped into the slow funk reverie of “Treasure,” all heartbeat bass and horn stabs.
That decade is a touchstone for Mr. Mars: a huge disco ball hovered overhead throughout the show, and on the T-shirts at the merchandise stands, the photos of him looked as if they were stills from a late-1970s rough-trade documentary.
But as is clear from Mr. Mars’s second album, “Unorthodox Jukebox”(Atlantic), which was released in December, that era just one of many tools at his disposal. He is the most formidable synthesizer of styles going in pop today, taking in doo-wop, lovers rock reggae, torch songs, 1950s rock, 1970s funk, 1990s R&B and more, making for a sound that’s both pan-stylistic and, in a way, panracial. Mr. Lawrence nodded at this, with a wink, when introducing Mr. Mars as “the only Puerto Rican on the Moonshine Jungle tour!” (Mr. Mars is primarily of Puerto Rican and Filipino heritage; his backing band is primarily black.)
Mr. Mars channeled Jerry Lee Lewis during the mash-up of “Money (That’s What I Want)” and “Billionaire,” and during “Runaway Baby” he did a James Brown side-shuffle. At the top of the encore, he emerged playing “Harlem Shake,” or something like it, on a drum kit. But while he’s versatile, there’s nothing louche about Mr. Mars, from his pearly whites to his fangless flirting to the prim directness of his lyrics, which have great bones yet rarely ooze. He was at his most dangerous during the midshow medley of mid-’90s-to-early-2000s R&B — Aaliyah’s “Rock the Boat,” Ginuwine’s “Pony,” Soul for Real’s “Candy Rain,” Ghost Town DJs’ “My Boo.”
He was more convincing when manhandling the songs: “Grenade” opened like a superhero theme and was delivered with the drama of a bolero, and he was arresting on the modern doo-wop of “If I Knew.”
“When I Was Your Man” is the most anguished song of Mr. Mars’s career, and here it was the showpiece. He stood near the front of the stage, bathed in light, backed only by two keyboardists. Just before, he’d closed out “Young Girls” with his most ferocious singing of the night, and he kept it up, putting that power to work to sell hurt. For a few minutes, he was a gripping, undeniable presence. Beep! Beep! Beep!