Source: The Kansas City Star
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Nostalgia is a warm but potent stimulant. It’s a sentiment that’s all reward with no side effects, like dessert without the calories or whiskey without the hangover. It’s history-filtered, whitewashed and airbrushed, a revised portrait of the way things used to be.
Saturday night, nostalgia was thick in the air inside the Sprint Center, where two of the bigger names in boy-band history drew a near full house. Close to 14,500 fans — most of them women, by far — showed up to see and hear the New Kids on the Block and the Backstreet Boys revive the sounds of their teens and childhoods.
The show was divided equally between both troupes. Each took turns delivering songs from its catalog, including newer material from recent albums. Several times they all performed together, including the opener and the rousing finale.
A four-piece band provided live backup all night for a show that was rapidly paced. There were more wardrobe changes than at Cher and Lady Gaga shows combined. (And by the way, Gaga opened for the New Kids at the Sprint Center in November 2008.)
There was lots of dancing and choreography, some of which seemed to generate some awkwardness among men in their early 40s. There were streamers, flash pots and confetti. There were covers (the Delfonics’ “Didn’t I Blow Your Mind This Time”) and mashups: with Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida,” Prince’s “Raspberry Beret” and Queen’s “We Will Rock You.”
And there were plenty of blockbuster hits, which is what set off the real fireworks. The New Kids played most of their best-known material, and several came back to back to back during a feverish midshow set that prompted plenty of squeals and screams of recognition and lots of singing along: “Step By Step,” “Cover Girl” and “My Favorite Girl.” During “Cover Girl,” Donnie Wahlberg ripped off his shirt, revealing a rack of abs and arousing the kind of reaction seen at a Chippendales show.
Most of the crowd, it seemed, came to see the Kids, though not by a large majority. The Backstreet Boys are down one; Kevin Richardson left in 2006. He was part of the group when it sold 27 million copies combined of three albums in the U.S. alone. One of them, “Millennium,” has cracked the 12 million mark. They were that huge.
They played most of the hits off that album and the two other blockbusters, all packed with some of the best Top 40 pop tunes of the era (thanks to hitmaker/songwriter Max Martin). Two of those songs aroused two of the biggest cheers and sing-alongs of the night: “As Long As You Love Me” and “I Want It That Way.”
The encore featured a showdown, “West Side Story” style, between both groups. The Kids came out in hometown Boston Celtics jerseys; the Boys in Orlando Magic jerseys. The night ended with both groups singing parts of each other’s song. One of those songs was “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back).” Given the size of the crowd and its reaction, you could argue that this tour was a bona fide comeback. But instead of a return to the present, this night felt and sounded a lot more like a reason to revisit and romanticize long-gone adolescences and childhoods.