| rev:text
| - Let me start off by saying I enjoy the holidays. I like the snow, the smell of pine, getting together with my family, and yes, I even enjoy Christmas Day. My dad's significant-other recently purchased tickets to see Mannheim Steamroller in an effort to bring our family together to have a fun time and enjoy holiday music.
I feel compelled in many ways to write down my experience. In fact, I even made a Yelp account so that I could share the...uh, interesting... show. I honestly don't know where to start and I want to be polite, so I'll just start with my overall feeling from the beginning. First, I'll talk about the cast. There was a total absence of diversity. Like, this Chip Davis guy didn't even give one pathetic attempt to find any talented people who weren't White. Now some of you reading this may be thinking, "I might as well stop reading this review now because this is clearly just another sensitive liberal complaining about not enough diversity." And if that's the case, then this show might be for you.
Alright, so all the cast members are White. Yeah, that's pretty questionable, but at this point, I'm thinking I'll give them the benefit of the doubt since the show hasn't started yet, and let's be honest, I'm not that surprised. But then the show starts. Videos are projected onto a giant screen behind the band. Really, really horrible quality outdated videos. Like from the 1980s. They were actually pretty amusing, although something tells me they weren't meant to be. The content of the videos was equally painful. At first, there were over the top self-promotional clips of all of their albums and so called accomplishments. It was like watching a badly done informercial. Then, during These Three Kings, the projection showed 3 white men looking really awkward and uncomfortable, petting a horse in the middle of what I'm guessing was the Middle East. At one point my sister accidentally let out a brief snort-laugh. She later told me the whole concert was an abdominal workout because she tried to contain the will to laugh. During some songs, the videos had the most arbitrary content. Like, I'm truly not trying to be mean or insensitive, but these video editors clearly lack the capacity to think beyond the literal.
During intermission, I look at my program. I notice that next to each song doesn't include the composer or when it was composed, but rather the album of theirs which it is on. I viewed this as an obvious self promotional tactic, which clearly showed a lack of awareness (or respect) to who actually wrote the song, no matter how long ago it may have been. But the most painful thing of all was looking at their album covers they included. If you want to see for yourself, type in Mannheim Steamroller plus "Exotic Spaces" into Google. Yeah, Exotic Spaces. lol. The art (or stock images, rather) on the album includes two humpback whales swimming in the ocean. Above the whales rests the Taj Mahal and behind the Taj Mahal (which in real life, is located in India) are the Egyptian Pyramids (which in real life, are located in Egypt.) Culturally unaware and insensitive? Yes. Hell yes. Not to mention, the horrible overly large font of the title of the album. That was a for sure a facepalm moment.
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