Sabrina Carpenter’s theatrical set

Sabrina Carpenter ended Coachella’s first night by turning the main stage into “Sabrinawood,” with a set built like a movie lot instead of a standard festival show. Variety said the performance mixed big pop hits with Broadway and Old Hollywood staging, and The Hollywood Reporter said the visual frame was vintage Hollywood from the start. (variety.com) (hollywoodreporter.com) The celebrity cameos were part of the staging, not random walk-ons. The Hollywood Reporter said Sam Elliott, Susan Sarandon and Will Ferrell all appeared during the set, and Variety described Sarandon’s segment as a full monologue rather than a quick wave from the side of the stage. (hollywoodreporter.com) (variety.com) That approach fit the lane Carpenter has been building for the last two years. Rolling Stone noted that her first Coachella appearance was only two years ago, and this 2026 headline slot arrived after a rapid run from rising pop act to one of the festival’s closing names. (rollingstone.com) The setlist also showed how narrow and deliberate the show’s time frame was. Billboard said almost everything came from her newest run of hits, with only “Because I Liked a Boy” and “Feather” reaching back before “Espresso,” which made the set feel less like a career retrospective and more like a victory lap for her current era. (billboard.com) Before she even got onstage, Carpenter had already planted her world in the desert with “Sabrina’s Pit Stop,” a fan activation tied to Airbnb. Airbnb said the pop-up ran April 10 through April 12, 2026, with public hours plus bookable Airbnb Experiences that included early entry, exclusive merchandise and surprise elements. (news.airbnb.com) The pitch was that fans did not need a Coachella pass just to enter the pop-up. USA Today reported that the Pit Stop was open to the public on April 10, and Recorder Online described it as a pre-show stop for fans heading toward her headlining performance. (usatoday.com) (recorderonline.com) Airbnb’s own description made the branding unusually direct. The company said Carpenter wanted the space to feel like “a surrealist fantasy land” of hers, which matched the stage show’s larger trick of making a music festival set feel like entry into a self-contained Sabrina Carpenter universe. (news.airbnb.com) So the night worked on two tracks at once: a public daytime pop-up in Indio, California, and a late-night headline set that pushed the same image to Coachella’s biggest crowd on Friday, April 10. By the time she reached the main stage, the roadside motel fantasy, the old-film visuals and the actor cameos were all parts of the same production. (recorderonline.com) (variety.com) (hollywoodreporter.com)