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Baby Shark Live – October 12th – Commerica Center – Frisco, TX
Ok so this entry is gonna be one long disclaimer: Though I am new parent (our son is 14 months old) we are not traditional people nor is our parenting “style” anything of the ordinary nor is our son’s tastes because of it & what he’s been exposed to. Having said, we (nor our son) had ever heard the Baby Shark song & blissfully unaware of the global Pinkfong juggernaut. At our wedding, we heard one of my wife”s relatives’ kids singing it and a few days later when Miles was upset about something, I asked our Google Assistant to play it. I couldn’t believe how simple, repetitive & just how unimaginative it was. Miles didn’t seem that impressed either. While he liked the syncopation somewhat (Miles is a born drummer) you could tell he could feel the lack of organic instruments (Miles is into Metal and Classical Music). However on occasion, again when he was upset and we needed something upbeat immediately, it was Google Assistant & Baby Shark to the rescue.
Sooo, when I saw that there was gonna be a whole show around this one song & just up the street from us, I thought it might be a fun afternoon for him. He’s always being dragged to my stuff, so I thought for once it could be something that’s entirely about & for him.
Ok so its just me & him as his mom was teaching violin (literally across the street) and I get to the window & found out the “Meet & Greet” was sold out so I bought the best ticket that I could for around $60. I would soon learn that once inside I could have bought a regular ticket for $11 and sat basically anywhere we wanted or at the very least exactly where we ended up sitting.
With less than 2 mins to showtime & the even more expensive floor seats mostly empty, I helped Miles & I to a third row pair on the aisle.
It was the only way to get close to the “openers” which were these female “sea creatures” puppeteering these giant jellyfish.
Lights are down, show is starting & suddenly we are kicked out of our seats (this isn’t me & my friends, I have a diaper bag & other necessities) so I immediately move to the other seemingly endless empty seats near us when we are moved no less than six more times (fuck you to all the parents that showed up late and filled all these seats 10 mins into the show) when we retreat hastily and turn down the next available aisle behind us (it is now almost total darkness) when the gentlemen on the aisle stands up to let us in the row, my eyes adjust to see that freedom is at least 8 seats away and this family has seemingly moved in to the arena. Before I could even turn around and leave the row in the same fashion we entered, I was already unwittingly stepping on strollers & diaper bags and god knows what else. I was so mortified, turned around immediately with Miles, apologize to the still standing Dad & shouted “We will go around” (if somehow this family is reading this and recognizes the situation as themselves I am terribly sorry and the incident has haunted me since).
So, we walk all the way around to a row that had at least 20 empty seats in it and finally sat down. I shit you not, 10 mins later a family of freaking TWENTY PEOPLE showed up & once again we were on the move. I could see this if I was some scam artist that indeed only paid $11 but $60 should get us better than this. So I was like “Ok, where exactly is this $60 seat?) so went there to see that it would have been a claustrophobic nightmare and settled on some higher up seats near the stage that gave us complete isolation. My next question was: How can a 90-second track be effectively stretched into an 80-minute live show?
Some of the ticket prices for the seats we had to evacuate reach triple digits, even though you can spend the entire day at the nearby Aquarium and see real sharks for less. What could a live version of these popular videos offer that would beat the convenience of playing the same songs at home, for free, on-demand?
The answer frankly is not much.
The production’s uncomplicated narrative sees the friendly yellow Baby Shark character try to meet with friends: the magical fox Pinkfong and the intelligent hedgehog Hogi. (Of the shark family, only Baby Shark is touring; the rest of the family appears on the onstage screen.)
In the show, pink fox Pinkfong and hedgehog Hogi meet a pair or rangers and learn about the rainforest.
The titular track wasn’t played until the end of the first act, but throughout the show, a small yellow shark sporadically appeared onscreen and sang a single “doo doo doo doo” riff — a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment that got kids very excited every time.
And when the song played again at the end — with a beefed-up instrumentation, an exponentially quickened arrangement and the flickering visuals of a nightclub — the audience was completely rapturous, as streamers and inflatables were tossed among them.
That part was fun, except Miles couldn’t care less haha. He was sooo bored! He kept looking up at me as if to say “Dad, what the fuck are we doing here?” like I had somehow betrayed our mornings listening to Slayer together to give in to the trendy masses and put us on this treadmill of mediocrity. Thank goodness that Meet & Greet was sold out or I would have been out even more cash, dude was OUT. Good times
