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Alice Cooper's old-school showmanship still delivers

An Alice Cooper concert is a carnival spook-house in a theme-park world.

Let other rock tours lean on the techno­logical: Lasers, fireworks, videos.

Cooper, who hasn't updated his stage props since the Carter administration, had the audacity to go utterly old-school in an engaging 90 minutes on Wednesday at Hard Rock Live.

The secret weapon?

It's between the ears of a guy arguably too old — at 63 — to be singing "School's Out" but somehow still equipped with enough moxie to make it work. Imagination powered this theatrical production, one more reliant on characters than explosions and strobes.

A high-school drama class might have more resources at hand, but the key is what you do with them.

Following a cameo voice-over by Vincent Price (kids, ask your parents), Cooper emerged atop a primitive tower, making grand gestures with the multiple arms of his spider costume as he delivered "The Black Widow." At one point, flashing lights that looked like sparklers shot from the palms of his hands.

It sounds like something out of Spinal Tap, but somehow it was never laughable. Maybe that's because the lighting and fog was impressively done and the band did a killer job of churning out the deceptively simple formulas behind the songs.

The power of the musicians — a lineup that included female guitarist Orianthi, an alumnus of Michael Jackson's band — asserted itself most powerfully in the intricately constructed guitar fanfare, extended drum solo and stately finale of "Halo of Flies."

Mostly, however, the music was folded into a package that relied on vignettes that transform Cooper's songs from merely big, dumb rock anthems into something more.

Whether Cooper was draping a snake over his shoulder to do "Is It My Body" donning a lab coat to create a 20-foot monster in "Feed My Frankenstein" or directing the band with a crutch in "I'm Eighteen" there was always something happening.

Cooper engaged in some creepy choreography with a life-sized rag doll in "Only Women Bleed" which also showed he can handle a ballad. The same doll was tossed violently around the stage as an unsettling accompaniment to "Cold Ethyl."

In "Wicked Young Man" Cooper impaled a camera-toting member of the paparazzi with a microphone stand, which emerged from the dude's backside. OK, that's wicked.

In the next song, he was punished, losing his head in a guillotine as the band played the "Execution" excerpt from "Killer." The sentence was celebrated by a sing-along rendition of "I Love the Dead" as the executioner tossed around the singer's "head."

Cooper re-emerged, with his noggin connected, to finish the show with a run through "School's Out" and "Elected" the latter delivered by a flag-waving Cooper in a glittering Uncle Sam costume.

It was all enough to prove that Cooper's imagination is still going strong. That's a good thing, because a mind is a terrible thing to waste.