Taylor Swift Laser Show Review

by Doc – Owner, Founder, No Longer Felt The Need To Defend His Masculinity After Doing A Set of Handstand Push-Ups

It’s rare that I end up making the (quite lengthy) trek all the way to Kansas City, Missouri. It’s even rarer that the planetarium in Union Station performs its Taylor Swift light show. Fortunately, both events happened to occur simultaneously today and I found myself as a 25 year old man in a room mostly full of parents in their late 30s with their elementary age children. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from being a swiftie, it’s that when you’re the odd one out in these situations, you’re on your own, kid.

The light show itself was quite creative, being lasers projected against the black backdrop ceiling of the domed planetarium to create sequences of colored dots and lines reminiscient of a Microsoft Paint drawing on a black canvas. Partway through the performance, a smoke machine turns on above the crowd (there’s an invisible glass roof about 10 feet overheard to protect the audience) and the more intense lights are reflected in the smoke while the less intense lights aren’t, which lets the light show designer combine lights to make waves of colored light reflected in the smoke. The result of this combination was a show that, despite its seeming technical simplicity, went above and beyond in stretching its capabilities. Love Story and You Belong With Me had full animations with their own stories, with Love Story featuring a Romeo and Juliet-esque story and You Belong With Me being a cute story about two mice that you think will end up together, but the lady mouse ends up kissing a bull. Because You Belong With Me.

Okay, so the stories didn’t always make sense. But it was fun! And there were some technically impressive moments, like when the lasers were used to draw the reflections of water in puddles using only a single blue and green line during Exile. Or when Blank Space had rectangles moving in front of the “background” light display, and the rectangles changed the color of the line behind the rectangle to give the notion that there was a sort of filter being applied to the color of the line. Throughout the show, the smoke gave the more intense lasers some solidity and allowed them to rise off the “canvas”, giving you a feeling that you were watching a minimalist painting come to life. Each song had some sort of unique effect that lent a bit of creativity to the music.

It’s hard to describe the impressiveness unless you’ve seen light shows like this yourself and understand what they’re working with, and I suspect this kind of light show technology is long outdated and will soon be unavailable for commercial use due to age. Take my word for it; it looks cooler than it sounds, especially when you see the reasonably good cartoon portrait of Taylor Swift at various periods of the show and at the end. Basically, there was a lot of real work put into this fairly unnoticed show and I appreciated the effort.

The set list went as follows, with the sets using the Taylor’s Version where one exists (at the moment Debut and Reputation don’t have Taylor’s Versions):

• You Need To Calm Down
• Love Story
• Anti-Hero
• Exile
• Look What You Made Me Do
• Willow
• Lavender Haze
• I Knew You Were Trouble
• Bad Blood
• Blank Space
• You Belong With Me
• We Are Never Getting Back Together
• Shake It Off

Overall this was a great event for a great price – $13 per person. The whole shebang was 45 minutes or so not including the typical “don’t stand up, no drinks allowed” disclaimers at the beginning of most planetarium shows, and there was plenty of seating available. Hopefully this event returns for a third time with some Tortured Poets Department content; that’d be reason enough to go back and see it again.