Good Seats, Great Concerts

Sunday. Green Day Concert. My cousin Phaedra and I present our tickets to the ticket-taker. Told our tickets cannot be accepted and we need to go to the Box Office. Nervousness. Bewilderment. Box Office agent proceeds to exchange our upper bowl seats for two in the lower bowl. Complete Awesomeness.

Monday. Sundance Outdoor Theater at the Sundance Resort. My cousin Phaedra and I arrive five minutes before scheduled start time. General admission. No blankets. All seating not on grass seems to be full. We find spot big enough for two... six rows up, dead center. Perfect. Play starts shortly thereafter.

So the Green Day concert was awesome, and not just because of our great seats. For my first Green Day concert, my brother, his wife, and I bought tickets. Months later when the concert arrived, brother and wife were divorced. Both still went. I sat in the middle. Talk about awkward. So this go around was a little bit better.

Green Day came on around nine and played for a good two, two and half hours. For that amount of time, they surprisingly didn't play a lot of songs (considering they've been around since '94 and have released 6 cds). Most of the stage time was for Billie Joe and his manic stage presence/antics; he enjoyed pulling people from the crowd (which he did about four times), making his mom come on stage from her seat in the arena (which was actually kinda cool), insisting on making us sing "Hey, ohhhh" with him between every song, and using a supersoaker and toilet-paper gun on the pit audience.



But I completely enjoyed it. Going to a concert should be a different experience than just listening to a cd, and this was. There was pyrotechnics, Billie Joe's aforementioned stage show, lights, and, yes, the music. I've never given Billie Joe much credit as a singer, assuming that a lot of it was made in the studio, but I was really impressed with him; he has a lot more singing talent that was showcased during the concert than I ever thought.





The next night we went up to the Sundance Resort and with the backdrop of mountains and sky watched a performance of The Fantasticks. I had no clue what it was about, but was completely enchanted within the first couple of songs. And nothing is funnier than Henry and Mortimer doing classic Shakespeare line readings and classic death scenes. It was a first-class production. Beautiful all around.