Every time in its practically 60-year historical past, placing on the Tremendous Bowl halftime present will get tougher. Generally the logistics get difficult by considerations about defending the turf. On different events, some side 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 puzzled if worries in regards to the doable presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) brokers on the Large Recreation can be the King of Latin Lure’s largest hurdle.
It wasn’t. It was making an attempt to meet Dangerous Bunny’s want to rework the sector at Levi’s Stadium into his dwelling of Puerto Rico.
That one was Bruce and Shelley Rodgers’ downside to resolve. Their firm, Tribe Inc., has been producing the present for practically 20 years, and the pair have develop into de facto specialists in easy methods to pull off more and more elaborate stage productions in the course of the allotted 26 or so minutes of the halftime present.
For Sunday’s efficiency, located in the midst of the Seattle Seahawks’ rematch in opposition to the New England Patriots, the difficulty was horticultural. Dangerous Bunny, whose actual title is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, wished his present to have the identical feel and appear as his current 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 special stadium, that might be executed by rolling carts coated in these vegetation onto the sector. However Santa Clara’s Levi’s Stadium, dwelling of the San Francisco 49ers, makes use of pure grass; the Nationwide Soccer League’s pointers don’t permit that many carts onto the sector, 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: gown folks up like vegetation.
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 bounce across the set he wished—the casita, the classic truck, the marriage stage—however the vegetation had been alive in a method he won’t have imagined. Some 380 folks donned costumes to make them seem like tall stalks of grasses. The stationary palm timber and poles, for those who’re questioning, had been rolled out a lot in the identical method the streetlights had been positioned for Lamar’s avenue scene from Tremendous Bowl LIX. On Sunday, they hit their restrict of 25 carts, geared up with so-called “turf tires,” and obtained every little thing safely on and off the sector.
