Kathleen Cei Photos
Showoffs.
The College Street Music Hall had an appropriately spectacular, pull-out-the-stops grand opening night Friday. The inaugural event — an orgy of sound, light, harmony, humanity, and good vibes — was an ideal showcase for the awesome potential of the new downtown venue.
The band? The Machine, playing the music of Pink Floyd. The other band, behind them onstage? The Hartford Symphony Orchestra, with conductor Carolyn Kuan elegantly framed by the projection screen behind her in the center of the stage.
The crowd? Floyd fans, obviously. Some curiosity seekers, checking out the new hall no matter whether they cared for the music. The audience was largely middle-aged, though College Street is an all-ages space, and a few pre-teens could be spotted. The main auditorium was packed, with a person for every seat in the rows of chairs that had been set up.
There were long lines at the doors to get into the show, a throng that suited the grand-opening festivities. Some grumbling could be heard, but the lines moved swiftly and staffers in snazzy CSMH-branded attire were polite and attentive, emulating theater ushers more than club bouncers.
Which seems to be a College Street Music Hall dilemma: when to act like a concert hall and when to behave like a nightclub. As in a theater, there was plenty of help in finding seats (and the help was needed, to explain that tickets referred to rows, not specific seats; once you’d found your row, you simply found any empty chair to sit in). As in a club, there was a looseness and openness, with folks wandering the aisles and sauntering over to the bar in the lobby whenever the mood struck.
Besides the expected bar areas, the restaurant Geronimo from Crown Street had set up a tequila bar/taco cart in the lobby, with Arturo Franco-Camacho (of Roomba fame) now a part of Geronimo’s team.
Due to the time it took to get everyone in the hall — all that milling and marveling — the band had played a couple of songs before they stopped and a voice on the PA cheerily intoned “We’re so excited about this new venue, we forgot to tell you about the fire exits — and we’re required to by law.” The announcement made more sense at that point anyhow. The next song was “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun.” (The opening number, naturally, was “Welcome to The Machine.” Nice for a tribute band to have a theme song.)
As new and impressive as the College Street Music Hall is, it’s not daunting or imposing, which is a great thing for people who just want to relax and watch a show. Patrons milled about, intuitively familiar with the contours of the hall, as if they owned the joint. That’s a rare kind of comfort, and CSMH provided it on its first night.
The permanent theater seats of the old Palace Theater that once occupied this site are no more. There’s now a more versatile scheme that will allow seating for some shows and an open-floor, obstacle-free, general-admission set-up for others, when dancing or shoe-gazing is required.
But many elements of College Street Music Hall still evoke the old Palace. There’s the ticket booth shaped like a little house, the grand staircase to the mezzanine, the tall ceiling in the auditorium.
The general expansiveness of the venue suited The Machine’s Pink Floyd show perfectly. Unsurprisingly, it including a fancy light show, with spotlights and fresnels sweeping about the stage and shining on like crazy diamonds into the crowd. Some of the lights were attached to visible onstage scaffolding that hung high above the band. The stage was grand enough to accomodate this, plus a hard-to-miss giant round projection screen, plus The Machine’s mass of equipment (multiple keyboards, a massive drum kit), a guest singer (for the female vocals on “The Great Gig in the Sky”), and a saxophonist (for “Money” and “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”). And, oh yeah, that orchestra.
The blend (clash?) of theater and club mentalities was most noticeable when some audience members sought to shush those who chose to chatter. To these ears, it was an acceptable mix of excitable whoo!s and respectful silences.
What was really gratifying, in terms of the show itself, was the chance to cheer unreservedly for an orchestra. At most orchestra concerts, patrons frown on applause between movements and spontaneous shows of appreciation must reach high levels of internal exhilaration before the bottled emotions are allowed to be released.
Not so at a classicalized classic rock affair such as this: following the big orchestral finish to “Comfortably Numb,” which closed the first half of the program, there were cheers and screams and a standing ovation.
The second half of the concert was a note-perfect, life-affirming recreation of the ultrabestselling Floyd staple Dark Side of the Moon. Some of the stage display was tacky — projected images of myriad politicians, including most of the U.S. presidents and British prime ministers of the last 40 years, while the lyrics “the lunatic is on the grass” (from “Brain Damage”) could be heard. But the orchestra, which was not heard on all the songs in the pre-Dark Side portion of the concert, played along on every tune from the album, adding an undercurrent of strings and woodwinds that could make you feel the way you did the first time you heard the record on a really good stereo, or in its quadrophonic or Surround remasterings.
The classiness of the stage show was not restricted to the presence of a classical ensemble. The vocalist on “Great Gig in the Sky” emerged in an attractive blue knit dress, and the main Machine members were clad in trim uniforms of blue jeans and black T‑shirts.
Following the fluid burst of Dark Side in its entirety, the orchestra left the stage and The Machine — one of the longest-running Pink Floyd replicators out there, still performing with enthusiastic ummagumma aplomb since 1988 — stayed onstage for an encore set: “Hey You,” the hit single “Another Brick in the Wall Part Two” (with its chant of “we don’t need no education” filling the air just a few yards from Yale University) and “Dogs” from the Orwellian concept album Animals.
Would have been nice to retain the orchestra for “Dogs,” but you can’t have everything. At its peak, for “Comfortably Numb” or mid-Dark Side, the multimedia presentation could be mesmerizing, overwhelming — and not a far cry from the light shows and happenings that the original Pink Floyd perpetrated in the theaters and roundhouses of London back in the late 1960s.
The College Street Music Hall had to make an abrupt switch from a tricked-up Floyd revue to desultory alt-country for its second big show of its opening week, Lyle Lovett and John Hiatt on May 2. Another fine test of the venue’s flexibility. Next Saturday (May 9), the first nonorchestral Connecticut-rooted bands to hit the College Street Music Hall stage will be Polaris, Mates of States, and Mighty Purple.
And yes, that was Mark Nussbaum from Manic Productions, which is promoting the Polaris show, outside the hall Friday passing out reams of fliers for upcoming Music Hall shows.
The College Street Music Hall is in full swing. Shine on, you crazy diamond.
The Machine keyboardist Scott Chasolen.
I went to the Lyle Lovett/John Hiatt show last night. Aside from some unfinished painting and decorating, the venue is great. Excellent sound, comfortable seating, great ventilation, pleasant/efficient staff. The place should be a big success as long as they can get the acts. Great show, by the way.