Current mood:

groggy

Tour of Gymnastics Superstars at Arco Arena: a review.
So last night Tony and I saw the Tour of Gymnastics Superstars. Shawn Johnson! Nastia Liukin! What could possibly be wrong??

Well, I'll tell you. The show pretty much sucked. First of all, Shawn Johnson was ill and unable to perform. She was the one I'd wanted to see most! Secondly, the gymnasts performed to some of the worst live music ever made. Actually, alot of the music was pre-recorded, but they also performed to some Disney band called KSM or something. Oh, and to a singer called Jordan Pruitt. The band pretty much sucked, but at least I think they were really singing/playing. Jordan Pruitt "sang" to such over-layered backing tracks (it was obvious; there were no instruments or backup singers on stage with her) that it was impossible to tell if she was actually doing much singing; some parts were obviously lip-synched.

As for the gymnasts, they didn't do much of anything that a high school cheerleader couldn't do. I mean, yeah, they flipped and stuff but it was nothing complicated like you see on the Olympics; mostly it was badly choreographed *dance* routines. As if I paid to see them dance! Oh yeah, and I'm not sure if the gymnasts are just bad dancers or what, but they were out-of-sync alot. The men had a couple of interesting parts; the bar and rings routines were pretty cool. And there was one guy who dressed as a girl and, like, deliberately landed on his back and stuff. He was pretty funny.

The most entertaining part, really, was one of the announcers. He had the stupidest voice, almost like he was making fun of announcers rather than actually being one. Seinfeld fans will remember an episode where Jerry did a voice: "Helloooooooooooooo! La, La, La!" That's kind of like what this guy sounded like, except he also sort of ran his words together, as if he had marshmallows in his mouth.

Also, there were no monitors where one could watch the show if they had bad seats! Our seats actually were not bad, but it was still, for instance, hard to see the singer's mouth (I really wanted to gauge the amount of lip-synching that was going on). Basically, if a person was in the upper levels, they would just be completely out of luck. And the lower levels, if I may say so, were not worth the extra money IMHO.

The whole thing had the feel of a cheesy high school talent show to me. Gymnasts performing to live music sounds like a good idea, but it was pulled-off badly.

All in all, I think I wasted $117. Boooo!