concert reviews

This was a fully engaged audience feeding off the contagious, nonstop energy of the free-spirited five-piece act.

You haven’t quite lived until you’ve heard Lily & Madeleine, Time for Three, and Tony Styxx take on Kanye West’s “All of the Lights.”

The playfulness peaked midway through Act II with the quirkiness of Burt Bacharach’s “Turkey Lurkey Time.” That song, full of fun choreography and the merging of retro fashions with formal tuxes, gave way to the heartwarming high of the night, a haunting performance of the beautiful “Ave Maria” sung by Alex Reuter.

The songstress revealed various realms of her range, both musical and stylistic, and, at one point, took the theater to church.

The intimacy of the venue and the performance shone through Panic!’s willingness to joke around on stage and fill awkward pauses with ’90s cover songs

The majority of these songs provide mellow-rock moodiness that begs for a beer or three. While that held true for this live show, it was also amped up a significant notch.

The star’s appearance elicited the expected response: stop-start traffic on downtown streets and oodles of tween screams piercing the arena air.

About 85,000 attendees took in the day’s events, including the entertainment on three stages—DJs, drag queens, and song-and-dance acts. The week-long festival’s main day of events attracted about 15,000 more comers than in its previous two years, a sizable gain.

The happy-go-lucky phenom danced his way through a lot of lightning-fast rock pieces, but it was the classical tunes and his friendly interludes at the mic that won us over this time around.

Eventually, the time comes when you realize the music that defined their youth is now old—and that you, by extension, are now old, too.

With her red microphone, red shoes, red guitar, red outfits, bright red lipstick, and red stage lights, fans were forced to see the color that Swift touted as being the key element combining all her feelings, feelings about which she’s obviously quite open. As gallons of confetti fell and the band waved goodbye, I realized Swift isn’t the girl you read about in the gossip magazines.

Celebrating 25-years-young musicals such as Les Misérables and The Phantom of the Opera, among other stalwarts of the stage, the IMC puts on a classy, smart show.

Macklemore, Talib Kweli, and Wale brought decidedly different styles of rap to Assembly Hall for a frenetic performance ahead of IU’s Little 500 bike races.