WALLINGFORD, Connecticut — In less than a year, Alicia Keys has globe-trotted, sung alongside music's biggest stars, sold a boatload of records and been given the stamp of "It Girl" by fans, critics and her peers, but on her first headlining tour, she's showing that ain't nothing changed. The New York native is still keeping it 'hood.

On Tuesday night a kaleidoscope of fans (races, ages, sexes) converged at Oakdale Theatre to see music's most promising wunderkind. After Glenn Lewis warmed things up, Keys, seated at a piano center stage with a backdrop of an illustrated

brownstone, showed off her range of skills right away.

As she's been known to do at shows from time to time, Keys flexed her

classical music muscles — the singer went into Beethoven's Fifth

Symphony but flipped the script by singing over the piano plucks.

"We got a lot to talk about tonight," said Keys, who, like her 12 band members and backup singers, was dressed in all black. A phone booth was brought out onstage and the audience roared back with approval as its musical heroine started playing the first few chords of "How Come You Don't Call Me."

"How come you don't call me?" she said toward the end of the song, right before the music suddenly stopped on a dime.

Keys then got up from the piano and walked around the stage, building up anticipation. Getting a few "woos" from the audience, she strolled stage right to a fire hydrant and drank some water. Taking her time, she sashayed back to her piano and finished her sentence: "... any more!"

She carried on improvising: "Why don't you call me, pretty brother?/ I thought you said you had a cell phone, brother!"

Almost 10 minutes after she started the extended lamenting about her beau, Keys decided she would take the initiative and call him. Rising again, she walked into the booth and everyone heard the phone ringing. "Hello," a voice on the other end said. Without saying a word, she quickly hung up the phone on her man, garnering huge laughter from the crowd.

"It's all good, I'm gonna be just fines," she told the concertgoers, sitting back down to play and sing "Troubles."

As the song ended, Keys' crew showed that rappers aren't the only ones who battle. It was her backup singers and band against her DJ and hypeman, both factions trying to get the crowd to make the most noise.

First, her dancing rabble-rouser Freak Nasty and turntablist I-Rock had their go, playing P. Diddy's "It's All About the Benjamins." Not to be outdone, their competition played Maze and Frankie Beverly's "Before I Let Go."

After a few minutes of the back and forth, the main attraction returned, saying, "I wanna take a minute and let it just be me and you." The curtain closed and Keys sat at a baby grand in front of the stage, slowly stroking the piano for what would be her best vocal display of the night..

"How do you love someone that hurts you so bad," she passionately sang, filling the auditorium with chills as she went into "Goodbye." "Butterflyz" and a cover of Donny Hathaway's "Someday We'll All Be Free" followed before the curtain opened back up.

A few minutes later, Keys showed that she doesn't have to sit down and play all night to entertain — she can shake a leg, too. The singer jumped in from time to time with her dancers on "Jane Doe" and then it was time to show sex appeal. She had another cover to sing.

With just a male dancer with long flowing hair onstage with her, she began Tevin Campbell's 1993 track "Shhh."

"In the daytime, I think not," she sensually declared. "I'd rather do you after school like some homework — am I gettin' you hot?" Then the rest of the dancers brought out a huge white sheet and everyone could see Keys and the guy's silhouettes as they started to grind on each other.

With the curtain taken off, the dancer then laid flat on his back, with Keys standing over him: "Break it down, I don't want nobody else to hear the sound."

"I'm feeling a little upset," she said after performing "A Woman's Worth" and "Why Do I Feel So Sad."

Sitting down, she told a story about trying to spend a quiet night at home with her man, a giant bag of Twizzlers, a large buttered popcorn and "one, two or three Blockbuster videos" ("We always rent a lot and end up only watching one, don't we," she asked the audience). That was the segue into "Girlfriend."

The finale was no shocker — of course she ended the night with the song that put her in position to even have a tour, the Grammy-nominated "Fallin'."

"I need y'all's help," she told the crowd at the tune's midway point. No, she wasn't tired from touching pelvises with her dancers, crying out to a missing boyfriend or even quipping about her man's female buddy — she just wanted to interact more with her fans.

"Say 'ooh, whoo, ooh, whoo, ooh, whoo,' " she told the obliging audience. Everyone repeated after her. As the show ended, she walked around extending her arms to the crowd and retracting them to her heart.

The conversation between two middle-aged men as they left probably spoke for all the attendees. "Her music spans the different mediums," Ted Schaffer of New Haven, Connecticut, said. "Hip-hop, R&B, pop, classical."

"She reminds me of Mary J. Blige a little bit, with that little bit of mainstream hip-hop," his friend Gene Winters said.

"Yeah, a little," Schaffer rebutted, "but she has the old soul feel like in the '60s. I love it."