![]() You know, a lot of people have great ideas, but it’s a combination of great ideas and executing them. “So I’ve been around it since the very earliest stages. “I was involved in helping secure the land where he decided to build this,” says Azoff, of the plot Dolan picked up to build Sphere one long block east of the Strip, adjacent to the Venetian resort. The latter uber-manager has been a crucial bridge between some of these parties, being a longtime pal of Dolan’s who consulted on the Sphere project for years before he took on the venue’s first musical tenant, U2, as a management client in 2022. Variety spoke with some of the key players in the development of Sphere and bringing U2 into it, including Dolan, Williams, Live Nation’s Arthur Fogel and Irving Azoff. I do have to say, though, that you could put up Looney Tunes cartoons up there with that music, and it will still be a fabulous show.” Says Dolan: “From what I have seen” of the visual display, “it will be a Willie Williams classic. 16 run of “U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at Sphere” did turn out to be some kind of letdown, against all promises? Well, if worst came to worst, having the most-loved rock band in the world taking the stage makes for an awfully reliable failsafe. ![]() (Hey, they’ve gotta start recouping that $2.3 billion somehow.) Even if the doors never opened, that exoskeleton would be a provocative piece of pop art, and a memorable part of Las Vegas architectural history, unto itself.īut what if the visuals that are being put up during the Sept. If it doesn’t actually sound like undue hyperbole, that may be because hundreds of thousands of people have already been gasping just at the outside of the place, ever since its 580,000-square-foot exterior started being lit up two months ago, with jaw-dropping images making Sphere into everything from an enormous basketball to a giant, Dali-esque eyeball to, yes, the world’s most ginormous advertisements. Needless to say, there are quite different adjectives being used by these and other key participants for Sphere in advance of Friday night’s opening, all of them bending toward the idea that minds will be utterly blown once the first 18,000 people get a gander inside the place. It’s a horrible shape, for a classic sound system.” “There are a few dome-shaped venues in the world,” Dolan says, “and I’ve been in some of them. He changed his tune, but in the moment, the idea of moving into a venue unlike any other in the world, and then form-fitting a show to meet those peculiar specifics, felt like the opposite of anything Williams had ever done in his work with U2 going all the way back to 1983.Įven James Dolan, the New York business giant who conceived of the venue and has seen spent the better part of the last decade seeing it through, admits that there were some big, practical roadblocks that had to be overcome on the long path to make Sphere’s sight and sound be as brilliant in execution as they were cool on a sketchpad. ![]() “I thought it was a terrible idea!” confesses Willie Williams, U2’s creative director for close to four decades, candidly describing his reaction when the idea of having the group open Sphere was first informally presented to them close to two years ago. ![]() So putting U2 in there to open a venue that represents how far the audio-visual tech envelope can be pushed in 2023 was a no-brainer for everyone involved … right? ![]() Sphere is being described as the height, literally and figuratively, of what modern live entertainment can and will offer. The 167,000 loudspeakers built into the new venue guarantee that there will be a whole lotta shakin’ going on the gargantuan 16K LED screen promises that fans will be doing a whole lotta cranin’, as well. Or so the joke goes among expectant fans, anyway. So don’t be surprised if the waiting rooms of the chiropractors of the American Southwest are filled with an inordinate amount of patients wearing their new souvenir U2 shirts next week. The more-than-semi-circular screen behind and around the group is about 35 stories tall at its pixellated peak, too. And it’s not just the exoskeleton of the building that towers so high in the desert air. This weekend, the quartet kicks off a nearly three-month engagement in Las Vegas that could be nicknamed “U2 366.” Because 366 feet is the listed height of Sphere, the $2-billion-plus orb that the band will be christening with Friday’s opening night show. In the late 2000s, U2 embarked on the “U2 360” tour, so named because the band was playing stadiums in an in-the-round format. ![]()
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