Every time in its almost 60-year historical past, placing on the Tremendous Bowl halftime present will get tougher. Generally the logistics get sophisticated by issues about defending the turf. On different events, some facet of the present leaks on-line, as occurred final yr forward of Kendrick Lamar’s efficiency. Within the lead-up to Dangerous Bunny’s efficiency at Tremendous Bowl LX, I questioned if worries concerning the doable presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) brokers on the Large Recreation could be the King of Latin Lure’s greatest hurdle.
It wasn’t. It was attempting to satisfy Dangerous Bunny’s want to remodel the sphere at Levi’s Stadium into his residence of Puerto Rico.
That one was Bruce and Shelley Rodgers’ drawback to unravel. Their firm, Tribe Inc., has been producing the present for almost twenty years, and the pair have turn out to be de facto specialists in easy methods to pull off more and more elaborate stage productions through the allotted 26 or so minutes of the halftime present.
For Sunday’s efficiency, located in the midst of the Seattle Seahawks’ rematch towards the New England Patriots, the difficulty was horticultural. Dangerous Bunny, whose actual identify is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, wished his present to have the identical appear and feel as his latest Puerto Rico residency, which coated levels in palm timber and sugar cane to re-create the environs of Vega Baja, the place he grew up.
In a unique stadium, that may very well be completed by rolling carts coated in these crops onto the sphere. However Santa Clara’s Levi’s Stadium, residence of the San Francisco 49ers, makes use of pure grass; the Nationwide Soccer League’s tips don’t permit that many carts onto the sphere, as they’d tear up the grass. The max the staff may use was 25, they usually wanted these for the levels and different props.
Bruce Rodgers’ repair was easy: costume folks up like crops.
As viewers noticed at halftime, Dangerous Bunny, who carried out in an all-white outfit with a quantity and “Ocasio” on the again like a soccer jersey, did get to bop across the set he wished—the casita, the classic truck, the marriage stage—however the crops had been alive in a manner he may not have imagined. Some 380 folks donned costumes to make them appear to be tall stalks of grasses. The stationary palm timber and poles, should you’re questioning, had been rolled out a lot in the identical manner the streetlights had been positioned for Lamar’s road scene from Tremendous Bowl LIX. On Sunday, they hit their restrict of 25 carts, geared up with so-called “turf tires,” and acquired all the pieces safely on and off the sphere.
