A year ago, Panic! at the Disco played sold-out arena shows as openers for the Nintendo Fusion Tour. Back then, however, the band was the Las Vegas scene’s latest export, a group of musically inclined high school graduates who got lucky using the Internet.
In front of a crowd of screaming teenage girls, the band that calls itself a “wet dream for the webzines” proved it could sell out shows on its own last Saturday night at Tsongas Arena with a performance closer to a circus-like spectacle than a concert.
Under two big tops and a painted backdrop of 1920s circus-goers, the members of Panic!, clad in glittering gold vests, ruffled silk undershirts and tight, ripped pants, played through their entire repertoire of songs from 2005’s A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out, straying only twice with bold covers of The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” and Queen’s “Killer Queen.”
Largely due to appearances by the Lucent Dossier Vaudeville Cirque, a group of contortionists and dancers that brings to mind the cast of Moulin Rouge, the entire performance had a distinctly sexual vibe. Throughout the show, a dominatrix whipped another dancer into submission, three men appeared from beneath a dancer’s white tulle skirt, and lead singer Brendan Urie grabbed his crotch while dancing with three half-naked girls in ballet tutus.
Like the rest of the show, Panic!’s music was loud and ostentatious, at some points too loud for the venue’s sound equipment. The band avoided too many special effects on the electronica songs from the first half of its debut album, while songs from the second half were bolstered by live cello, violin and piano performances.
Urie acted not only as a charismatic frontman for the band, but as a narrator for the whole show. During “I Write Sins Not Tragedies,” a gothic bride and groom portrayed the story of a wedding doomed from the start. While Urie played piano on “But It’s Better If You Do,” which describes girls who “shed their skin on stage,” four girls shimmied around him before tearing off their clothes and treating him to a lap dance.
Panic! bid the crowd good-night with a bang, ending the show with “Build God, Then We’ll Talk,” an ode to infidelity, drug use and a loss of faith that hardly seems relatable to an audience that probably hasn’t even taken Sex Ed yet. With typical grandiosity, the entire Vaudeville Cirque joined the band onstage for a decadent show of debauchery.