Wednesday, July 20, 2016

Lindsey Stirling Summer Tour 2016


Back in about May, JoAnne got tickets for Kira and me to go see Lindsey Stirling at Oven's Auditorium in Charlotte. We just about forgot about the concert until the bishopric was considering whether to have a meeting this Tuesday (19 July) and one of the other members remarked he was taking his daughter to the concert. That is when I remembered Kira and I were going, too!

Concert started at 8pm, so we left the house a little after 6. Traffic was an issue but we got to Oven's right before 7pm which was when the doors opened. Our seats were pretty good, in the mezzanine, left of center but not against the wall. We had seats BB10 and 11. I wanted BB8 :-) .

View from our seats
The opening act started at 8pm. I don't remeber the artist's name, but she was a "Power Rock" act. I really wanted to like her, but quite frankly, her songs all sounded the same, with loud verses and painfully loud choruses. Kira and I both were sitting there trying to tactfully put our fingers in our ears to stop the noise. Thankfully, she only lasted 30 minutes!

Even though the stage was reset for Lindsey by 8:40, she didn't come on until 9pm. It is kind of hard to see from the picture, but the front 2/3 of the stage was bare floor, with a series of platforms on the back 1/3 of the stage. The keyboard/guitar player was the platform to our left and the drummer to the right. They would periodically bring out screens about 3-4 ft wide by about 8 ft high. They could project images on the front of the screens, or they could shine lights from behind to silhouette a performer behind the screens.  They would also project images on the white area on the proscenium arch, and a screen at the rear of the stage and on the front of the platforms. 

One of the early number featured her dancers as zombie coming out from behind tombstones. Kira noticed that one of the judges who dissed her on American's Got Talent had their name on one of the tombstones!!!
Internet picture of a Las Vegas Performance
without the scrim in front of her
The lighting effects were amazing. The picture above is from one of the numbers they did called Elements.  The costumes were a little different last night and you can only see part of the effects.  Before the number they dropped a full stage-wide scrim from the proscenium arch. They projected rain, fire, forests onto the scrim, the front of the platforms, the white areas on the arch, and onto the back wall. The performers were mainly behind the scrim but lit so you could see them clearly. It made them look like they were in the middle of a fire, or storm, or forest. It was awesome. (I may run out of superlatives before I am finished!)

She did numbers from her new album that will be released next month, but she also did her old favorites.  There was a medley of her games tunes (Skyrim, Zelda, Assasins' Creed, etc with clips form the videos), Crystallize, Shatter Me, and my favorite, Roundtable Rival. The girl who did her opening did the vocals for Shatter Me as was actually pretty good on that number. Lindsey also performed the song she wrote for Pete's Dragon called Something Wild, and had video clips from the movie running on the screens.

At the end there was a standing ovation (of course!) A few people got up to leave. They messed up. She came out and did an encore that morphed into an incredible medley from Phantom of the Opera. It was after 10:30 before we got out.

In case you wondered, she really does do all the running, jumping, and dancing while playing the violin. Do not get into a limbo contest with Lindsey. She will beat you and she will be playing the violin while she does it. My only very minor complaint - even Lindsey was too loud (but not as loud as opening act). Darling, making it louder does not make it better.

So if she comes to a auditorium near you, I can recommend the show. If you like the videos you will love the show.