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Friday, Jul. 25, 2008

Raven-Symoné brings to the flair positive messages and plenty of energy

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"Yay!"

That was Raven-Symoné's enthusiastic response to being told that her performance at the Stanislaus County Fair on Thursday falls on Kids' Free Night, ensuring an audience packed with preteens, tweens and teens. The 22-year-old actress/singer is big on "keepin' it real"; she knows her audience and is happy to have it.

Raven is beloved by girls across the country for her starring role in "That's So Raven" (2003-07, Disney Channel's longest-running series), her acting and singing with The Cheetah Girls (Disney again) and her parts in "The Princess Diaries 2" and "College Road Trip" (Disney again and again).

So while she's not the 15-year-old character Raven Baxter her fans still watch in reruns, and while she's touring in support of a more grown-up CD produced by some of R&B/hip-hop's hottest, it should come as no surprise that her stage show is a fun, family-friendly affair.

"There is a lot of audience participation," she said in a telephone interview earlier this month before kicking off a 21-date summer tour of festivals and theme parks. "We have a whole set of Disney soundtrack songs where four kids will be able to come up on stage and perform three songs with me. It's 'Some Call it Magic' (from 'That's So Raven, Too'), 'Superstition' (from 'The Haunted Mansion') and 'Grazing in the Grass' (from 'The Lion King 1½'). And we also do a question-and-answer, so if you have a question you've been wanting to ask me, I'm there at your disposal.

"The show itself is very hype and very fun, I guess, to the visual eye." A production company Raven has worked with since she was 9 has created a show with "everything from African to hip-hop to modern and ballet," she said. "They incorporate all that into the show, which gives it kind of a Cirque du Soleil, Broadway feel instead of just a regular concert, so I cannot wait to get on stage to show people what we've been rehearsing for a while."

In addition to meeting fans' expectations, Raven hopes to win new ones with her more mature music, as well as regain fans who've drifted away. The latter two goals are "a little difficult," she said, because she hasn't yet had a TV show or movie that's let her play a a full-fledged adult. A lot of people her own age who were fans of "That's So Raven" still think of her as that teen character, she said. "Once you grow out of something, you're like, oh, that person's a certain way, but you have to come to the show and realize that I'm growing up, too, and that I'm not going to be in the same 15-year-old state that I was. As I grow, I think my audience will grow, and we have to see what this tour will bring."

Her latest, self-titled, disc was released in April and includes songs that give "a little bit of insight into who I am," Raven said. On the CD cover and in several photos among the liner notes, she's wearing sleep masks, as in the shot on this page. She offered an explanation of the masks' symbolism: "I think a lot of the time, people don't really understand or grasp my music sometimes, so in my circle of friends, we say, 'Well, you know, you're sleepin' on it.' ... I think a lot of people just missed out on this album, and I had a feeling it was gonna be that way, so I decided to do that."

For many of the new disc's tracks, Raven met with her producer/songwriters before anything was put on paper. "We sit down, I tell them about the topics I want to talk about and then they'll write from there," she said of the process. "There've also been some songs that were just submitted to me, like 'Hollywood Life' and 'In the Pictures,' that I have talked to the people beforehand ... and they're like, 'We've seen your career and this and that, and this is what we feel would work for you,' and I've loved the songs because they do represent me."