more than you ever wanted to read about the difference between Panic!’s two 2006 national headlining tours:
so I’ve been seeing stuff that seems to combine the summer 2006 tour with the Nothing Rhymes With Circus arena tour at the end of the year as though they’re the same thing aaaand that makes me kind of sad because they deserve some major individual appreciation.
they were for the same album but had totally different costumes, makeup, stage design, dancers, support bands, scripts, and… well they were just completely different productions. you get it.
the band did at least 8 tours for AFYCSO, but these were the two headlining national ones with the big production value. they’re both iconic works of actual art so let me just break them down & we can get nostalgic about something we’ll never even see….
Their first national headlining tour (not an arena tour) was in June & July 2006 when Spencer was 18, Ryan & Brendon were 19, and Jon was 20.
The stage had the giant moon & windmill but was kind of just a plain black stage beyond the props & decorations. Spencer, Eric, and Bartram shared the same riser towards the back. The band filmed their show in Denver and then turned it into the Live in Denver dvd for the AFYCSO box set that had the same “1920s Moulin Rouge” theme as this tour. (x)
Panic! did a costume change halfway through each show so the main outfits for this summer were:
Jon also had a random blue shirt for the first half of some shows, but for the most part this summer followed a red/white/black theme with some GORGEOUS floral detail going on in some pieces. Brendon also had a black coat that’s the greatest thing he’s ever worn (facts) to go with the white ruffly shirt but sometimes he skipped it indoors. Right after this tour the band went back to their simplified black/grey/white look (except Jon was still doing his own thing lol). Here’s a more detailed look at the summer outfits.
The Lucent Dossier Vaudeville Cirque was in the I Write Sins Not Tragedies video and then joined the summer tour. The band didn’t have enough material for a headlining spot with just the one album, so they padded their time on both tours with song covers & other performers.
“We wanted our live show to be kind of like a Broadway play in a sense,” Urie explains of the addition of the old-timey strippers. “You have music being played and performance going on or a little skit.”
– Brendon in a 2006 Buzznet interview
The Hush Sound opened for this whole tour. The Dresden Dolls opened for the second half, and OK Go opened for part of the first half (Lovedrug had to step in to replace them when OK Go was double booked).
Both of these elaborate tours were just in North America btw. I remember Australian & European fans complaining that the shows in their April & October international tours were pretty plain in comparison (except for the Brixton shows).
NOVEMBER & DECEMBER 2006:
So during their 2006 fall European tour Ryan said their next national tour at the end of the year was “going to be our biggest tour we’ve ever done. We’re planning a lot of production on that tour. We have a drum riser that’s gonna be like 8 feet tall and look like a carousel… and then we got like 6 performers coming out… It’s just gonna be a big show and something we haven’t seen a band do.” (x)
The Nothing Rhymes With Circus tour was a Very Big Deal™ and is the one that Rolling Stone shadowed the guys during for their cover article. This was Panic!’s first headlining arena tour and went for most of November & early December. Brendon and Spencer were 19, Ryan was 20, and Jon was 21.
So this super theatrical tour is where we got several versions of the puppet makeup & incredible costumes styled by Anthony Franco:
“A Cirque du Soleil fanatic, Ross has seen three of their shows and says the costumes and sets on his band’s Nothing Rhymes with Circus Tour – a three-ring rock spectacle featuring contortionists and stilt-walkers – were inspired by the new Cirque Beatles production, Love.
… ‘I was always more impressed by Vegas shows than by any rock band I saw,’ Ross says. ‘Just the super over-the-top-ness of it all. I wanted to incorporate that into our concerts – to make it more than T-shirts-and-jeans.’”
– from Ryan’s Blender interview in early 2007
The band brought in a few elements from other tours (like their light-up name, white piano, and Brendon’s choreography in There’s A Good Reason), but most stuff was completely different. The much bigger stage was a massive circus tent with Spencer, Eric, and Bartram up on 3 separate risers.
Robb Jibson was the band’s art director & lighting designer (here’s Zack talking to him in 2008). He based the concept for this tour off of the gothic circus theme that started in the IWSNT video. Atomic Design did the stage and Tait Towers did the custom risers, which included a lion cage riser for Eric and a carousel riser for Spencer that was also a door the dancers could use (idk what to call Bartram’s riser but it’s cool too).
The songs on the AFYCSO album were split between a modern and old-fashioned feeling, which was mirrored in the cover art with the split women. So then the band carried that idea into this tour’s stage design by having a Victorian audience opposite the modern audience.
Once the designers understood what the band wanted, they had Joanna Davis hand colored the Victorian audience and printed it in a large scale (x) The band’s art director said that “in the world of flashy LEDs and constant changing scenic elements having a tangible set with real, physical set pieces gives this show a Broadway musical look instead of an awards show.”
“We wanted to be the band that had its own carnival,” says frontman Brendon Urie… But what if Vince Neil were to accuse [Panic! at the Disco] of ripping off Motley Crue’s traveling-circus idea? “I could see why he’d be upset. We actually tried to get their circus tent, so I couldn’t really disagree with him.”
- Brendon Urie to Spin Magazine (published in Feb 2007)
There was a lot of other stuff the guys wanted to include but weren’t able to, like fire breathers, a tiger, trapeze artists, and Brendon being shot out of a cannon (x). This tour did include a drumline with the whole band, though!
The band was also joined by six performers who did a range of routines…
The tour got its share of negative reviews & angry feedback from parents of middle schoolers because a lot of songs had some pretty risqué dance numbers…
but here’s a really great livejournal entry about the dancers from a girl who went to 7 shows in this tour:
Here’s one of my posters from this tour – Bloc Party was scheduled as a support band but had to cancel after a couple shows when their drummer collapsed a lung. So The Plain White T’s opened a lot of shows and then Cobra Starship opened others towards the end.
There’s no full professional recording of this show available (even though the Fairfax show was recorded), but I went through over 600 videos of fan footage on youtube and then edited shots together to come as close as I could to what this show would’ve looked like. THANK YOU TO ALL OF THE FANS WHO RECORDED THIS SHOW and took the time to share!!!!
and then here’s a bit more info about Brendon & Ryan’s interactions during this tour.
