TORONTO – It started off so good. Honestly, it did.

While it’s nice to have co-headliners that sound different, it’s a shame when one act outshines the other. On Wednesday night, two very different pop personas played at Sound Academy for a near-capacity crowd.

While both performers shared a similar fan base, American Idol alumnus Jordin Sparks and baby-faced pop singer Jesse McCartney acted very, very different on stage. It made you want to root for Sparks, but not so much for her cocky male counterpart.

Sparks, the winner of Idol’s sixth season, took the stage first and performed a mixture of cover songs and R’n’B-flavoured cuts from her self-titled album, which was released last fall.

She opened with current single One Step at a Time, hustling to each side of the stage to wave at pockets of fervent female fans. Heads bobbed and toes tapped along to the upbeat tune, even if some of the performer’s actions – such as miming an airplane during the “learning to fly” part in the chorus – grew a bit cheesy.

While her vocals received most of the attention, Sparks was also joined by a bassist, two keyboardists, and a drummer who shed his computer-geek appearance during a thundering rendition of Stevie Wonder’s Superstition.

Sparks smiled throughout the entire night, often pointing at young fans reaching out from the balcony and following their screams with “I love you, too.” The 18-year-old singer spoke to the crowd in a cutesy, rapid way, as if she was just chatting to a group of girlfriends in a restaurant. Surprisingly, this was very appealing, because it connected the performer with her people below.

“I know what you’re going through, I know how you feel,” she said, more than once.

She confessed her self-image issues before performing God Loves Ugly, and then wiped away tears after the song. She ended her set with the ballad No Air, and the soulful chorus was so good it produced shivers, even though males in the audience probably tried to blame it on the A/C.

Her gentle persona couldn’t have contrasted more with McCartney, a performer who seemed to think that his body was made out of gold.

McCartney, a 21-year-old musician and actor, performed a number of tunes from his third album, Departure. After an introduction that combined video clips of the singer with an odd rendition of the Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony, McCartney arrived onstage wearing a grey suit and shades.

He looked like a mini-me version of Justin Timberlake, like a younger brother trying on his older sibling’s clothes.

McCartney opened with Freaky, and two well-dressed backing singers sashayed with him across the stage. Even though some of the newer tunes worked well – such as the synth-heavy single It’s

Over – the majority of songs in his set sounded exactly the same. The crowd cheered loudest for his earlier, pop rock material, showing that perhaps they liked the old Jesse better.

McCartney spent the set staring into the audience with a serious face, and when he plucked a girl out of the audience to sit onstage with him, his messiah-like shtick became annoying – whether you liked his genre or not.

It nearly spoiled an evening that began with an inspiring performance from a seemingly ordinary girl.

Play on, Jordin. Ditch the pretty boy.