101624 Tommy Emmanuel, Moncton, NB

On October 16th, 2024 I went to see acoustic guitar phenom Tommy Emmanuel playing at Moncton’s wonderfully-restored Capitol Theatre, and it was a great night start-to-finish.

To start with, m’lady and I spent the afternoon visiting my mother at her freshly-built bungalow out in the country.  Seeing my mother’s new home was ostensibly the entire point of our trip to Moncton – well, that and the delicious belated Thanksgiving dinner that was baked into the visit – but catching a pair of concerts while we were in town wasn’t such a bad happenstance.  We had witnessed a flashy and manic flurry of musicianship the night before when BEAT (aka Adrian Belew, Steve Vai, Tony Levin, and Danny Carey) rollicked through a smorgasbord of ’80’s King Crimson material at the Moncton casino and while the Tommy Emmanuel show featured plenty of flashy manic flurries it was a whole other thing altogether.

But let me back up a little and talk about the Capitol Theatre for a minute.  This was my first time visiting the theatre since it underwent a massive restoration back in the early ’90’s but it was by no means my first time visiting the Capitol Theatre.  No sir!  I used to go there all the time back when I was a little runt.  The Capitol was one of only three movie theatres in Moncton when I was a kid* so I went there all the time, especially for Saturday matinees.  It made me feel pretty old when I mused to m’lady about the matinee costing just $1.25 for me and my fellow under-twelve years old friends back then.

“Heck, I remember one time there was a promotion where if you brought three Coca-Cola bottle caps the movie was only seventy-five cents,” I reminisced over a fantastic pre-show dinner at an Asian noodle place next to the theatre.  “Crazy to think that I saw my first James Bond movie – Moonraker – at the Capitol for just 75¢!

“The last time I went to the theatre was to see E. T. so that would’ve been what, 1982?”

(Yes, it would have been 1982.  And I bawled my eyes out**.)

I tell you, I never would have recognized the lobby.  As familiar as it felt walking underneath the marquee, once I stepped through the door I was somewhere else altogether.  The faded red carpeting I remembered from the ’70’s was gone as was the snack bar that had lined the left wall, replaced by a busy and efficient bar on the opposite side.  The walls were peppered with information panels and black & white photos of the Capitol from bygone eras as well as a display of children’s artwork.  

In no time at all m’lady and I had extremely reasonably-priced IPA beers in our hands and we made our way up to the balcony, where we were ushered to our seats smack-dab in the middle of the very last row in the house.  

(By the time this show had come to my attention tickets had been on sale for quite a while.  I was in no position to be picky and felt pretty lucky to have nabbed tickets at all.)

The theatre itself was just as I remembered it; large, red, and ornate, with a pair of never-used raised boxes on either side of the stage.  I really can’t be sure if the renovation didn’t expand the size of the balcony.  I know there was a balcony back when I used to go to the movies, but I feel like there were only seven or eight rows up there rather than the twenty or so rows of seats that now reach all the way up to the ceiling.

But don’t get me wrong.  Like I say, I was happy for my seats.

When Tommy Emmanuel stepped out from the wings to start the show I was almost wholly unfamiliar with the man.  Though I suspect I must have come across him here and there along my musical journey, it was only by fluke that I had cause to listen to one of Emmanuel’s arrangements on youtube a few months earlier and well, it’s impossible to not be impressed by the guy’s playing.  But aside from that four-minute internet sojourn I knew nothing.  For example, I had no idea that Tommy Emmanuel was Australian, or that he has been playing guitar professionally since he was six years old, or that he spent his childhood on tour and almost never went to school, or that he has spent over sixty years performing worldwide and won more awards than there are notes in a concerto…

Or that he could play two-and-a-half hours of astoundingly complicated guitar arrangements without a single discernible flaw and keep it all jaw-droppingly engaging until the very last note.

But he could, and he did.

I mean, the dude was astounding.  Whether he was playing originals or brilliantly-realized arrangements of ultra-familiar tunes, whether he was playing instrumentally or adding vocals, everything was just perfect.  Every melody flowed with an impossibly natural feel, every harmony was perfectly conveyed, every bass line remained gloriously intact…it was just wow after wow after wow all night long.

His stories were funny and enlightening too.  During one interlude he mentioned that he had lifted the chords for one of his songs from the music in the opening scene of Moonraker.  Moonraker! 

And while I was surprised at the very mention of a movie that I had seen whilst sitting in the very same balcony, I was downright shocked when Tommy Emmanuel explained that he’d fallen while taking the stage at Massey Hall a few nights earlier and had cracked some ribs.  “So if you hear me suddenly yelp out in pain,” Tommy warned us, “You’ll know why!”

As a result he spent the show alternating between standing up and sitting in a chair*** but like I say, his playing didn’t suffer at all.  My gawd, he was so relaxed, so confident, so, so good.   Tommy Emmanuel is quite simply one of the greatest – if not the greatest – acoustic guitarists alive today.  Maybe Billy Strings, but who else wouldn’t be humbled by Tommy’s playing?

Oh, speaking of humbling, midway through the second set Emmanuel starting a song with a run of exceptionally pristine harp harmonics that made me lean in to m’lady’s ear and whisper-insist that “…this guy has obviously listened to Lenny Breau.

“I wonder if he knows that Lenny grew up right here in this town, and as a kid he probably came to this very same theatre?”  Tommy made no mention of such obscurities so I suspect he had no idea.

(Sigh.  I love Lenny Breau so much.  If you don’t know him please stop what you’re doing and look him up on youtube or something.)

What I didn’t love, not at first anyway, was the wholly unnecessary and very distracting light show that was flashing above and behind Tommy the entire time.  Between morphing the muted hues of the stage lights and twirling blasts of colour out of three or four movable hanging pots, someone at the light board seemed to be having a whole lot of fun.  And it was quickly apparent that this somebody knew the material too – synching the lights perfectly with the song endings and all – which told me two things: the light guy was actually out on the road with Tommy, and Tommy probably played the same set every night.

I was right on the first point – late in the show Emmaneul took a moment to thank his small crew of road manager, light guy, and sound guy – but I was wrong on the second.  I checked the interwebs was really surprised to discover that Tommy switches up his setlist quite a bit night-to-night.  I really thought that he worked up the thirty or so songs we saw so he had them down pat but no, he actually has a legion of songs “down pat” to draw upon.  Amazing.

Oh, and for the record I eventually came around on the light guy; by the end of the show it struck me how much the lights were adding to the variety of the performance, and I ultimately decided that the concert benefitted from them quite greatly.

But the true greatness was, of course, Tommy Emmanuel.  What a thrill to have seen him live.  Oh, and the Capitol Theatre is pretty great too.  They did a fabulous job on the place and the staff were all super.  And I even got a real ticket stub!  It had been a long time since I came home from a concert with an actual ticket stub.

And I do like ticket stubs.

*Well, sort of.  In addition to the Capitol Theatre we had the Paramount Theatre across the street which had two screens, plus there was another two-screen cinema across the river in the Riverview Mall.  So in a way that makes five theatres but Riverview isn’t actually Moncton (though it might as well be) so in a way it was two theatres, with three screens between them.  There were a couple of drive-ins too but we went to those so rarely that they barely count.

**Not because of the film; I had already seen it.  However, at the time I had just arrived in Moncton as a fourteen-year-old runaway after hitch-hiking from Ontario, and during the film I had stolen out of the theatre to the payphone in the lobby and called my mom – collect – for the first time since running away and told her tearfully that I was not going to be coming home.   When I snuck back into the theatre the movie was almost over so I didn’t have to hide my tears; everyone was crying.

***He was actually sitting on two chairs stacked together, leading m’lady to surmise that Tommy Emmanuel is probably rather tall.  He might be, it was impossible to tell from our seats way up high on the back row.