Her fans may not be old enough to drive or attend a concert without their parents or a curfew but that doesn't mean that Avril Lavigne's Corel Centre concert last night was child's play.

No way. Not since another angry female singer-songerwriter from Ontario, Alanis Morissette, became the role model for a generation of young women with 1995's Jagged Little Pill has there been a rock-and-roll chick a girl could hang her broken heart on.

More than 15,000 fans, surely one of the largest houses the Corel Centre's seen since the NHL lockout, filled the hockey bunker with waving glowsticks and ear-piercing shrieks enough to fill a haunted house on Halloween.

Speaking of the dead, there was little trace of the old Avril.

Gone was her signature skinny tie and mallrat attire. In its place, the Napanee native sported a big blonde perm, a punk plaid skirt and a glittering diamond engagement ring that she recently accepted from her fiance, Sum 41 frontman Deryck Whibley.

Suddenly, it's a new Lavigne. The brat is gone, replaced by a glamorous chick with attitude.

While not the most theatrical performer, Lavigne demonstrated a level of showmanship that's just about right for a teenage girl ... and her mother.

Splitting from the sex, drugs and rock and roll mantra of pop and the misogyny of hip-hop, Lavigne for the most part played it low-key and sincere, skipping the bad-girl act altogether to focus on singing songs of self-respect and empowerment.

"Be strong, be the person you want to be and rock!" she said, strapping on her guitar.

It was all business for the 20-year old sugar-coated punkster covering 17 songs in her 90-minute set from her first album Let Go and 2004's Under My Skin.

Good choice too. Co-written with Chantal Kreviazuk and former Evanescence guitarist Ben Moody, songs such as Fall To Pieces and My Happy Ending and I Always Get What I Want showed a more sophisticated side to Lavigne both personally and as a writer, without losing her touch with a big pop hook. Little wonder the album's sold more than 5 million copies and won three Junos.

Occasionally, she showed her notorious mischievous side, wearing devil horns, posing aggressively for the cameras and stomping around the stage in a rage on Take Me Away.

There were a couple of nice touches, including the chandelier-lit turn at a grand piano for Together and Forgotten before repeating the story of how at 14, she first sang at the Corel Centre after she won the Shania Twain vocal competition.

And even though her vocals often sounded sharp and shrill, her best moment of the night was her solo turn on Nobody's Home before punking out with her excellent boy-band on He Wasn't and Sk8er Boi.

For her encore, Lavigne surprised all by playing the drums on a cover of Blur's Song 2 before closing the night out with Complicated.

In the end, what was the biggest surprise of the night was that even a curmudgeonly adult, long past teenage angst, found a lot to enjoy in Avril Lavigne's show.