My Chemical Romance have taken a novel approach to the classic-album-in-full anniversary tour. Most fans would have been happy just to hear the band’s game-changing emo landmark The Black Parade front-to-back, but to play it that straight would have been to betray the album’s wild theatricality, and so the New Jersey rockers have seen this run of stadium gigs as an opportunity to retroactively imbue the record with some heady lore. The opening hour of the show is intense, a rock opera with a high-concept storyline that suggests the band have been brought out of exile to reform at the behest of a totalitarian dictator.
The parallels with the American politics of today are not difficult to discern, but just in case you might have missed them, the stage show includes a raft of actors playing every role from green-shirted soldiers to shadowy tyrant to a singer who channels Madonna’s Eva Perón. There’s also increasingly dramatic pyrotechnics, as if to signal the imminent collapse of the “regime”, and even an audience vote on whether to execute a number of “political prisoners” who are paraded on stage.
That I’ve yet to mention the suicide-bomber clown who appears at the end of the first set to provide its violent conclusion should give you an idea of what My Chemical Romance’s stock in trade is; they are melodramatic to an almost unhinged degree.
