The several thousand shrieking girls in the audience might not have noticed, but things weren’t going smoothly for Demi Lovato during her concert at the Prudential Center here last month. For the first few minutes, as she sang and pranced across the stage, not a sound came from her microphone. Later she flubbed lyrics on a few songs. On Ms. Lovato’s face, barely masked by the grin of the longtime pro, were persistent flashes of concern, discomfort and fear.

It was the night before her latest film, “Princess Protection Program,” was to make its debut on the Disney Channel, where Ms. Lovato, 16, is an ascendant star, the heiress apparent to the tween-pop crown.

But where in the not-too-distant past that would have meant she was an automaton of joy and relatability, Ms. Lovato is already proving to be far more intriguing, and far less predictable.

About midway through the show came “Catch Me,” one of the best songs on her new album, “Here We Go Again” (Hollywood), and the only one for which she receives sole writing credit. Like those that preceded it, it threatened to become something of a shambles.

But as Ms. Lovato eased into the lyric, intimate and measured, a calm spread over her. Her shoulders eased. Rather than overwhelm the crowd with razzle-dazzle, she turned inward, and for a few moments looked as if she might prefer to be playing in a coffeehouse somewhere, where the lights weren’t nearly as bright.

“Catch Me” was “written by myself in my room,” Ms. Lovato had said earlier that day, taking a breather at the Trump International Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. “Those songs mean more to me than when we’ve got two weeks to finish an album and I’m with three different writers.”

Time has certainly become compressed for Ms. Lovato, a singer, songwriter and actress who just over a year ago was a relatively new face in the Disney ecosystem, opening for the Jonas Brothers on tour, performing her own shows for a few hundred fans and playing the romantic interest of Joe Jonas in the TV movie “Camp Rock.”

Now she’s the headliner, her warp-speed climb to the top of kid pop — by way of albums, TV films and her sitcom, “Sonny With a Chance“ — a testament not only to her indefatigable energy and legitimate talent, but also to the vitality and efficiency of the Disney star-making machine, which cultivates young talent across media platforms.

But while she has joined the ranks of Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers and to a lesser degree some of the stars of the “High School Musical” franchise — who have followed a similar path to fame — Ms. Lovato appears to have a different plan. Along with, perhaps, Nick Jonas, the brooding auteur who gives the Jonas Brothers megabrand a dash of thoughtfulness, Ms. Lovato has a kind of alt-Disney aesthetic, simultaneously building the brand and proving its elasticity.

In the last three years Disney, through a series of successful pop acts and synergistic television shows, has firmly established itself as family-friendly, inclusive and accessible. While Ms. Lovato, with her prom-queen looks and eager friendliness, is certainly all of those things, she also stands out artistically, with tastes and attitudes that appear unscripted. Her debut album, “Don’t Forget,” with its flashes of hard rock and pop-punk, was surprisingly sprightly and tough, easily the most dynamic from a Disney act. A fan of heavy metal who covers Aretha Franklin in concert and has written, by her count, several hundred songs, Ms. Lovato is the most exciting of the company’s musical stars.

Her otherness is underscored by the roles she plays (and is cast in) on the Disney Channel. While on their shows Ms. Cyrus (“Hannah Montana”) and the Jonas Brothers (“Jonas”) play versions of themselves — young famous people trying to figure out how to be young and famous and normal — on “Sonny With a Chance” Ms. Lovato plays her own doppelgänger: someone figuring out how to fit in.

“I’m the new kid, and that’s how I kind of felt when I came into the whole Selena-Miley-Jonas Brothers thing,” Ms. Lovato said, referring to Selena Gomez, her closest friend and star of the Disney sitcom “Wizards of Waverly Place.” “Like, O.K., where do I come in? How am I different?”

Teenage stardom is intense, complex business, and the Walt Disney Company has been honing it since “The Mickey Mouse Club” made its debut in 1955. In the early 1990s a revived “Mickey Mouse Club” helped spawn a generation of talent that later came to dominate pop: Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera. (Even Ryan Gosling and Keri Russell sported the black mouse ears.) In the years since, Shia LaBeouf, Hilary Duff, Zac Efron and Ashley Tisdale have all made the leap from Disney talent to mainstream celebrity.

Demetria Devonne Lovato got her start outside the company. At the age of 6 she landed a role on “Barney & Friends,” and for several years she worked the pageant circuit. There’s a hilarious clip on YouTube of a 13-year-old Ms. Lovato receiving an unfortunate pageant hairdo on the Style Network reality show “Split Ends.”

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-Source: New York Times