At GM Place on Tuesday, March 31

Photographers shooting Beyoncé on Tuesday were only given the show’s first 90 seconds to snap pictures, and had to do so 50 yards from the stage, two restrictions that pretty much guarantee you’ll never see a live shot of the singer looking anything less than perfect. But here’s the thing: after two thrilling hours, six costume changes, two dozen songs, and countless pelvic thrusts, Beyoncé looked every bit as radiant and graceful as when she first appeared, showing no strain from a performance that was so exhausting even the audience seemed winded by it.

In other words, Mrs. Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter was every bit as superhuman in person as she’s always appeared in videos and on TV.

The world’s brightest geneticists couldn’t cook up a better pop star than the 27-year-old Houston native, first the lead singer of history’s biggest-selling female R&B group, Destiny’s Child, then a solo artist with three platinum albums to her name, and now a multimedia magnate with a budding film career and profitable interests in fashion, cosmetics, and real estate.

At this rate, the presidency of the United States won’t be long in coming.

If women under 30 were the only voters, Beyoncé could have successfully ran for that post long ago. Her widespread appeal was confirmed Tuesday when her disciples sang sweetly along to “Irreplaceable”, her biggest and most emblematic solo hit to date.

With its familiar acoustic-guitar refrain and gently clicking beat, the track seems tender from a distance, but its defiant lyrics about kicking out a good-for-nothing mate give it a brisk feminist swagger, as if the singer were updating Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” for the MySpace age.

“Irreplaceable” came near the middle of the night, well after her ecstatic entry with “Crazy in Love” and “Naughty Girl”, which she delivered whilst sporting a bikini-cut gold sequined dress with a mega-sized bow tied on her backside. It’s worth noting that nearly all of her outfits—from the leopard-print bustier she wore midshow to the black-and-silver frock at concert’s end—were cut at the top of her thighs, the better to show off the longest, most powerful legs this side of Zeus. Those gams got a hell of a workout, Beyoncé matching her backing dancers step for step while hitting her vocal cues with remarkable force and clarity.

The quieter the show got, the weaker it was, with the singer trying on various styles—ranging from the Céline Dion–like ballad “Satellites” to her limp reading of “Ave Maria” to a brief cover of Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel”—that unfairly made her seem almost generic. This woman’s a belter, not a singer, excelling at the hectic up-tempo numbers when she’s called on to berate her spurned suitors. For an example, see “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)”, which elicited throaty cheers and vigorous bootyshaking from her core constituency, as well as from some guys to boot. James Brown used to sing, “It’s a man’s world,” but at GM Place Tuesday, backed by three backing singers, a quintet of dancers, and 10 instrumentalists—all of them female—Beyoncé made it a woman’s world. And the world was better for it.