Photo: Taylor Swift Productions
It’s not yet Labour Weekend and once again a much misunderestimated young blonde woman has come along to save cinema.
After Barbie’s billion-dollar rescue package earlier this year, Taylor Swift has arrived in local theatres with the movie version of her blockbuster Eras tour show, filmed over three nights at Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium. That’s Inglewood, California, not Inglewood, Taranaki. In fact, Swift is unlikely to be bringing a show of this scale to anywhere in New Zealand and once you’ve seen the film you’ll understand why.
It's doubtful that there is a venue in Aotearoa capable of hosting the show, or a local authority willing or able to offer the kind of subsidy required to entice a production that apparently provides a massive boost to the economy of every city where it lands.
If you’ve ever been involved in producing events of any description you’ll be as gobsmacked as I was at the level of technological prowess that this Taylor Swift show has at its fingertips. I knew it was going to be state-of-the-art, but I had no idea how far the state-of-the-art has come.
US singer-songwriter Taylor Swift performs onstage on the first night of her 'Eras Tour' at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, on 31 March, 2023. Photo: AFP / Suzanne Cordeiro
Swift is a prodigious producer of new music and has released four albums since her last tour in 2018, before Covid curtailed that sort of thing. Rather than focus on one of those albums – or the latest one, Midnights – Eras is a sort of ‘greatest hits’ show with songs drawn from 10 different chapters of her career. And not in chronological order, either, more like a thematic journey through the work of the great chronicler of the inner worlds of 21st century young American human females.
I’m not a fan of Swift per se, although I am very fond of the Folklore record and its accompanying acoustic documentary movie, so many of the songs in the Eras film were either new to me or a case of, “Oh, that’s where that song comes from.”
Swift writes good songs – some are even great songs – but my taste is more to the singer/songwriter period, or the country music that she started her career with, but it’s the pop bangers that really showcase the stagecraft and provide the jaw-dropping visual effects.
On a rhombic thrust stage with literally every surface covered in LED screen technology (and also able to be hydraulically move up and down or reveal doors and trapdoors), the combination of AV and lighting provides some astonishing moments but there are also some built features including a bizarrely rustic piano covered in shrubs.
And every ‘era’ requires a costume change and Swift’s famous attention to detail requires that every costume has a matching microphone. How the crew – who must number in the hundreds – keep track of it all is beyond me.
Photo: Taylor Swift Productions
It took me the first third of the nearly three hour show to work out one of the most brilliant effects, the lighting of the audience. You can see in the image above that the crowd looks like a curtain of stars, as if everyone out there is taking a photo on their phones at the same time. I mean, they are, but that’s not the source of the light.
Everyone in the crowd has a wristband with three (I think) LED lights and those lights can be controlled somehow by the show. It’s gobsmacking but to see tens of thousands of them change colour or pulse in time with the music, or fade to blackout, is one of the most startling effects I’ve ever seen.
Photo: Taylor Swift Productions
What you don’t get with a show this ridiculously well co-ordinated is much in the way of improvisation or inspiration. If one tiny element of the show goes off-script, the whole thing, understandably, breaks down and it’s churlish to complain about something this spectacular but the ‘liveness’ of a live show is what’s missing.
The other thing that’s missing in a cinema version of the show is the feeling of communing with many thousands of other fans, but we get a version of it when the audience is moved to clap between songs or sing along – which many at my screening did.
It’s an interesting experience to compare the 1984 concert film of Stop Making Sense – in its own way the state-of-the-art at the time – and Swift’s Eras mega show. Both are joyous celebrations of the combination of technology and human creativity but only one of them feels really alive, if you know what I mean.
Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (Rated M) is still playing in cinemas around the country.
