I'm not quite sure why people were complaining about Rizzo. The tickets say doors OPEN at 7pm, not that the show starts at 7. I was always under the impression that the show started at 8, and it did. He wasn't half bad, either, in my opinion.

The management of HoB was absolutely horrible. After driving 12 hours from Colorado, we were the first people in line that morning, and it only kept growing. Then a security guy walks up around 3pm and tells everyone to move to the escalators, and suddenly the people who had just shown up were in the front of the "new" line. Luckily the people were decent enough to let us back in front. But then after they set up the ropes/gates, a handful of people just strolled up and were allowed to skip the other line altogether, which was pretty ridiculous. I think the whole problem was a lack of communication between staff members. The "pass the line" line was a good fifteen to twenty feet wide, and they expected people to come through one-by-one. Haha, yeah right.

In the end, we ended up dead center right on the rail by pure luck and having to move down the stairs pretty quickly; when they opened up the ropes it was an absolute mad rush that they had absolutely no control over. The entire experience was so surreal, and completely worth it all. Seeing her the entire show from less than 10 feet away was crazy, I felt like it was a dream or something. I had no problems with the crowd, either. I had plenty of space to move around and was never bumped at all during the show. She really knows how to get the crowd going and put on one hell of a show! The guy next to me had never listened to her before and he said he loved it.

Her rock-style renditions of the songs were great, and even made You Make Me Want To Be a Man an enjoyable song We made eye contact during it for a few seconds, then she winked and moved on, haha. Her comments regarding the cut straw were pretty entertaining too. She also asked (in Japanese) who was Japanese/had come from Japan, and most of the crowd screamed. Then she goes, "I know it's common at shows to cheer whenever the performer says anything, and I do too, but I see a lot of you raising hands that are WHITE!" That was rather amusing.

I wish I would have really looked for a back door to HoB, but Mandalay is such a huge place I didn't even know where to begin. That's okay though, it was still the most amazing performance of my life. I feel like her studio recordings do her voice no justice; she is absolutely amazing live. Definitely would do it all over again!