Mary Chapin Carpenter

hi,
Saturday night Marshall & I had tickets to see Mary Chapin Carpenter in concert at the McCarther Theatre in Princeton. I've been a big fan of hers for years and was looking forward to this performance. The McCarter is a great small venue, perfect for what I thought would be an enjoyable evening and date with my husband. It didn't turn out that way.

The concert was a total dud. The most disappointing thing was the sound quality, or rather lack of quality. We had center orchestra seats, perfectly located for optimal sound and view of the stage. From the opening chord we knew there was a huge problem. You couldn't hear the vocals, the piano player looked like he was playing but there was no sound to his instrument. Guitars were muddy and muted. Even the band looked dismayed at what was coming off their monitors in front of them. At one point a stage hand appeared and flipped the drummers monitor around, as if it was set up upside down to start with. It went from bad to worse when half way through the concert all the sound man managed to do was make the whole mess louder instead of fixing the mix. Now all you heard was loud unbalanced noise coming out of the speakers.

The rest of the concert wasn't anything to write home about either. The opening 3 songs were 'new', unintelligible lyrically and dirge-like. The pacing of the whole concert was draggy and dull. The only time the audience got excited was when Mary started in on her older hits which are lovely songs that we all sang along to. She and the whole band were dressed in black. It looked like a funeral procession on stage, and with the black back drop it was positively depressing. Mary also wore an ill-fitting pair of jeans that were not flattering or fit properly. Come on, show some style and grace at least, for what they charge for a concert I don't want to see someone look like they just came in from weeding the garden beds. Pretty shoddy.

Marshall & I both walked out shaking our heads at how lousy the whole thing was. I should have let Marshall go to the mixing board in the back of the theatre and fix the sound problems. He could have done a better job than the fat, pony-tailed yo-yo sitting there. The audience was too polite to cause a scene but you could tell when we walked out that no one had been impressed by the evening. The bus from the seniors home was waiting out front, possibly most of the patrons may have been too deaf to notice the lousy sound quality... or they all thought they needed new batteries for their hearing aids?

I did send and e-mail off to Ms. Carpenters management letting them know how poor we thought the concert was. That made me feel better, sort of, but  I would have rather had the fun night out I was expecting.

........um, I feel lucky today. NOT!

xox
m