Dead & Company Prove Las Vegas’ Sphere Isn’t Just for U2, but Them, Too, in Residency’s Astounding Opening Night: Concert Review

variety.com:

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Memo to anyone who “isn’t really into the Dead” but has been cajoled by a friend or loved one into attending an upcoming Dead & Company concert, as a plus-one: Your chances of enjoying the show just went up by approximately 10,000%.

Let’s not stop there, though. If you’re a faithful Deadhead with tickets for “Dead Forever — Live at Sphere,” the Las Vegas residency that is taking place off the Strip over the next eight weekends, you already enjoy insurmountable odds of being fully invested in any show.

But expect your already preordained ecstasy level to go up by 50, 70… ah, sure, let’s say 100%. It’s easy to start sticking zeroes on the ends of things when we’re dealing with Sphere, the less-than-year-old venue that is famous for its 160,000-square-foot wraparound screen. (Less round numbers include a height of 336 feet and width of 516 feet inside the dome, which accommodates an arena’s worth of customers but feels a little more like a stadium tilted sideways.) It’s also easy to succumb to hyperbole after the opening night of the residency Thursday, in which it became abundantly clear that the space can work just as well for other artists — well, probably very select other artists — as it did for U2, who opened Sphere in September.

Thursday’s show joins U2’s first night in a tie for the most visually spectacular gig I’ve seen in untold decades of concertgoing.