Regina Spektor

Last night we went to the Esplanade Theatre to see Regina Spektor perform. It's a much nicer venue than the Marina Bay Sands, where we saw Wicked; although there's a lot of seats, the auditorium goes up, rather than back, so you don't feel so isolated from the performers if you haven't purchase front row tickets.
On the other hand, the seats were made for Munchkins; anyone my height or above is going to have horrible trouble standing up again afterwards.

I'm not used to sitting down at concerts. This is the first time we've seen a live performance this year (if you don't count when I ran past a heavy metal band playing the Slutwalk 'festival' in the park two weeks ago). In my day, you drank five pints of gassy lager and got punched in the side of the head in the moshpit; you didn't sit and stare at the performers.

Luckily, some things (like the interminable wait before the performers come on stage) haven't changed. Actually, somebody should have had a word with Ms Spektor: the audience was getting impatient very quickly when she didn't show up immediately, but then it is Singapore: everyone has to be home in bed by 11pm, which means artists need to respect a tight schedule.

When she did get on, she was great: she played all the standards you'd expect, plus some old and some new stuff (who would have thought a Russian-Jewish American would be on the soundtrack to a Narnia film?). Some of it was with her backing band (a cellist, Sideshow Bob on drums and a man hiding behind a lot of laptops), some was on her own, and one song was with her husband, who doubled as the supporting act, and was a fairly good black-skinny-jeaned-hipster-Dylan impersonator. With a backing band of an iPod.

The encore was Fidelity and Samson, which were the two songs I was waiting for, and then we were vomited out of the Durian (how ironic) and walked home. I think I was a little wiped out by the light show (complementing the music very well, all reds and yellows and greens) but I'm not sure if that was the show Spektor had brought with her, or some very accomplished Singaporeans hard at work.

Got home, realised I hadn't bought a t-shirt with the tour dates on the back. God I'm getting old now.