Public Theatre

Like my fellow blogging cohorts, I have been rather lackadaisical with my blogging attempts as of late. But I found out about something that I just had to share:

I followed a link from a site about a recent prank that Ben Folds played at a concert in NYC. He got a group of guys from Improv Everywhere to come on stage and pretend to be the band. What they were really doing, however, was lip-synching to a CD recording the band had done. This CD would then 'skip' while the band was 'playing' and it would look as if they had been caught doing a fake performance. Then, the REAL Ben Folds came in, kicked the fake band off the stage, and started the show for real. The whole thing (and a better description) can be seen here.

This got me to thinking about the whole point of live music. I have certainly been to many concerts in my time, some of them in big stadiums. Sometimes a band is much better live, due to both vocal and instrumental improvisations (Pearl Jam, I would contend, is much better live than recorded). Other bands are TERRIBLE live. I've seen Our Lady Peace a bunch of times (mostly on festival line-ups, but also in smaller venues) and Raine just can't seem to get his voice to sound like it does on the records. However, I think it says something when fans can't even distinguish impostors 'playing' along to a recorded CD. What it says, I'm not quite sure, but it's very interesting. It's not like the venue they were at was a stadium with a capacity of 50,000 people. According to the site, the Hammerstein Ballroom has a capacity of around 3,300. And except for the hardcore fans at the front, it seemed as if most were willing to rock out to the actors & CD for the entire evening. What is it, then, about a live performance that is so interesting? Like I said above, I'm certainly not knocking live music, I love it! I just think it's a very interesting question - one I don't necessarily have answers to yet (feel free to post comments).

So anyway, I started checking out their site some more, and found out these folks are hilarious! They do stuff like this on the streets of New York City all the time! Apparently they even have experience as a fake band, since they posed as U2 on a rooftop the day of a scheduled U2 concert at Madison Square Gardens! Some of my other favourites (at least, from the ones I have looked at) include: dancing in the windows of department stores, throwing a birthday party for a stranger, a bunch of people shopping in slow motion at Home Depot, a business man threatening to jump from a 4 foot high ledge, a bunch of people wearing clothes similar to the Best Buy uniform walking into the store and helping customers, installing a high-class bathroom attendant in a McDonald's bathroom, a bunch of phones going off simultaneously in peoples' bags at a coat/bag check, and a bunch of people dancing in sync at the listening stations in a Virgin Megastore.

Videos can be found towards the bottom of each page, but I urge you to read the write up that goes along with them - they're really well done, and it gives you a bit of the context for the event, plus the comments that people report over-hearing are often hilarious. You can find a list of all of the events here - be sure to check out my favourite of them all: the annual installments of No Pants Day (as in 'trousers' for the Brits).