Caught In The Whirlwind
Archive for October 29, 2007
Rock Concert Movement #564: The Morning After Review
01665 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
It is traditional for your audience to "spread the word" after the show by telling their friends and family about the experience. This word of mouth advertising generally aids in generating "buzz" for your show and increasing your megastar power.
Frequently, these reviews begin by discussing how good their seats were, especially if the audience member was seated in the 4th row, dead center.
All right…I can't keep that up. I was trying, but it's hard to talk about everything i want to say and still keep that style up.
If you haven't gathered by now, I went out to Albany last night with my parents to see the Blue Man Group perform at the Times Union Center. In short, the show was awesome.
The premise of the show, if you've never seen it, is that the blue men are trying to learn how to put on a big time rock show by ordering an instructional video from an infomercial, with a credit card provided by a member of the audience. In fact, there was a TON of audience participation in the show, and the blue men often left the stage to grab some unsuspecting audience member or to engage the people in the "crappy seats"
The light show was very well done, one of the better ones that I've seen. Although not quite on the level of Trans Siberian Orchestra. Needs more lasers! There was a lot of electronic effects, from robot light type things playing the music to one song ("I Feel Love") where the singer came out wearing an electronic dress that lit up in time with the song. They also did an entire song wearing LCD screens and syncing up with the video that was playing on there, which was fairly cool.
The sound was really good considering we were so close in an arena with the majority of instruments on the stage being various kinds of drums. It wasn't terribly loud for a rock show and my ears are fine this morning which is a fairly rare thing to happen the morning after I go to a concert.
It's really hard for me to describe in words what happened (as you probably could tell by the rambling nature of this blog post…) but I'll try to highlight a few things.
Before the show began they had a couple of screens going with scrolling, entertaining text to keep people occupied while we waited.
One of the things was that we were going to play a trick on the people who came in late.
Whenever we saw question marks that were laid on their side scrolling across the screens, we were supposed to take out our cell phones and wave them around in the air, thus confusing the people who came in late into thinking there was some sort of cultural ritual involving question marks and cell phones.
Well, as it turns out the people who sat next to me were a group of older individuals who seemed to have no real idea what was going on. They also arrived late.
The first time the question marks showed up, everyone started waving their cell phones around and I turned and looked at them to see what their reaction was and they were awfully confused looking. It was worth it.
That same group of people was being picked on in the beginning of the show when they were trying to pull somebody from the audience to use their credit card to purchase their rock concert instructional video. The blue men came off the stage and went right to our row and tried to take the purse from one of the ladies sitting at the end. She ended up slapping the guy's hand and he went off to somebody in the front row who was more cooperative. She also had a heck of a lot of stuff in her purse…
During the show, they threw out an awful lot of stuff into the audience, drumsticks (to the first row anyway), guitar picks and lots of streamers and cotton balls (from their pipe drum/cotton ball launchers that they used during the encore.) My dad was able to grab one of the streamers they flung out into the crowd at the end of the show and I almost got a guitar pick, but it bounced out of my hand.
Overall, I recommend going to see the show if you've never been. It's a combination of humor, good music and just plain fun that's really hard to pass up.
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