Or, in the comparison Williams brought up in an interview with Variety, “Being on the floor is going to be quite something. Or at least mega-club at or slightly above floor level, it kinda just feels like the Hollywood Palladium, albeit with more of the audience wrapped around the sides of the stage. But at the same time, if you’re on one of the lower levels of the multi-tiered auditorium, looking out over the general-admission SRO floor, and block out what’s hovering over you (which is surprisingly easy to do), you suddenly feel like you’re in the world’s coolest nightclub. (One seatmate described the feeling of looking up at this while waiting for the show to begin as “terrifying… but not in a bad way.”) It’s an immediate indication of some of the offbeat photorealism you will be in for. Above you, that massive domed ceiling has been made to look like you are in some industrial grain silo that has been constructed sky-high. And that happens on two levels, literally. Not to take any credit away from U2, but the most impressive moment of the Sphere show may be when you first walk in the room. You may know a little bit now how jacked-up Frank Booth feels, minus the malevolence. Look carefully during that segment, and you will see the recurring image of Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth in “Blue Velvet,” huffing on whatever he was huffing on in that movie. But it is heady, especially in one of the first numbers, “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” which has a flow of pop and film imagery that includes a lot of shots of Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra, embedded in an ornate, almost Hindu-temple-like tapestry. None of these visuals are ever in much of a rush, with the exception of one setpiece lifted from the original Zoo TV tour that is actually about overload, with printed slogans passing across the big screens faster than you can take them in.Īpart from that one bit, Williams knows that your brain has to take a while to take anything, so you never feel like you have to close your eyes to give yourself a break. He is the creative director of 40 years standing now for U2, and he’s outdone himself with a series of settings - some directed by him, some outsourced to amazing digital artists like Es Devlin - that blow your mind, then give it a helpful rest, and then return for further sensory overload at the end. It was a rhetorical question, but the answer is, Willie Williams did. “Who spiked your drink?” Bono asked the crowd early on. These surfaces feels like they should be measured in square miles, not square feet, but U2 does not feel dwarfed in their glow. It is, at its giddy and delirious best, a slide down the surface of things, to recall a prophetic phrase that might have foretold the very existence of Sphere, a venue that invites you to spend a half-hour at a time thinking or talking just about its interior and exterior surfaces, including a ceiling that reaches to 366 feet tall. That hasn’t changed now that the band is playing in the round… really, really, really, really in the round.īut obviously it’s the audacious hugeness, not the Let’s Get Small interludes, that “U2:UV” will most be remembered for. It’s a cliche to say that U2 can achieve intimacy in the midst of the most ridiculous extravaganza, but nobody in rock history has done a better job of taking visual and aesthetic dynamics to extremes. And these parts of the set work wonders, too… although even then, there is an extreme cleverness to the utter simplicity of the stage they’re on that almost seems like its own special effect. At times, the overpowering overhead visuals are either turned off completely or reduced to a simple single (or quadruple) live image hovering gently and unobtrusively over the stage. Wanting to have it both ways has worked for the group before, and it works again, in this setting. This being U2, they would also like to be seen as an overgrown club band at their core, as the same time they are producing the rock blockbuster to end all blockbusters.
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