Review: P!NK, THE SCRIPT At Schottenstein Center

Currently Cirque du Soleil has shows based on the music of Michael Jackson, the Beatles, and Elvis Presley.

They do not have one slated for P!nk, who brought her Trustfall tour Oct. 9 to a sold-out Schottenstein Center. If the 45-year-old continues touring, Cirque du Soleil will have to wait. P!nk is doing just fine by herself, thank you very much.

The Trustfall tour is something much more than a run-of-the-mill concert. Labeled as a “summer carnival,” P!nk’s performance is a true highwire act, complete with aerial gymnastics, neon-light grocery carts, inflatable lips, trampolines, pyrotechnics, and confetti cannons. The two-hour set attracted a wide-reaching group of followers, ranging in age (from eight-year-olds to 80-year-olds), and outfits (from sequined pink cowboy hats to Metallica t-shirts).

Every circus needs a ringmaster and P!nk was a non-stop quintessential performer as she drew liberally from her 25-year songbook. With a nod to the Children of the 80s, the show opened with the singer appearing on massive television screens as a Max Headroom character welcoming the audience to the carnival. Then as her five-piece band launched into “Get the Party Started” (with snippets of Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams” and C+C Music Factory’s “Gonna Make You Sweat” thrown in for good measure), P!nk bungee jumped from the rafters and made it on to the stage. Her entourage of 10 dancers, three backup singers, and four acrobats provided the sideshows with flamingo go-carts, multicolored exercise balls, and feats of gymnastics.

Oh yeah, there was also music, a 20-plus song retrospective on her nine studio album career. She blitzed through the radio friendly “Raise Your Glass,” “Who Knew,” “Just Like a Pill,” and “What About Us?” in the first five songs.

The songster has written so many songs that she occasionally forgets one. Every concert she matches wits with pianist Jason Chapman for an assortment of candies. After a white grand piano rises from beneath the stage, Chapman will tickle the keys of a song and P!nk will have to sing a part of what he is playing. At the Schottenstein Center, Chapman chose “Courage” from P!nk’s “Hurts 2B Human” album (2019). “Damn it! I don’t know what that song is.” she laughed. “I recognize it. I probably wrote it. You really went for a deep cut tonight.”

After tossing the candies to the crowd, P!nk said, “If you see me at a bar, and it’s trivia night, you don’t want me as your partner. I’m terrible at it.”

While she may be horrible at trivia, P!nk encouraged the audience to play “Name That Tune.” She unveiled some of her musical influences, ranging from a flawless reproduction of Pat Benatar’s “Heartbreaker” segued from “Just Like Fire” and Four Non-Blonde’s “What’s Up?” P!nk explained how the latter song  was picked: “When I was 13, I was busy getting arrested for disturbing the peace. I was just singing out a window. It was late. I get that now. I thought I was too cute to be arrested. So now we can disturb the peace together with the same song.”

While she has a penchant for the boisterous pieces, P!nk can deliver heartfelt ones as well. Midway through her set, she sat at the piano and softly performed Bob Dylan’s “Make You Feel My Love.” She said her interest in the song was peaked when she heard Adele perform it.

P!nk’s dazzling alto vocals got a workout during a four-song, mostly acoustic set. After performing “Please Don’t Leave Me,” she informed the audience her “absolute favorite singer” was here tonight and brought her 13-year-old daughter Willow Sage Hart on stage for “Cover Me in Sunshine.” “We call her, ‘One Take Willow,’” she said with a proud parent grin.

Before delivering a soft reading of “When I Get There” with guitarist Justin Derrico, P!nk told the crowd about visiting the gravesite of her father James, who died in 2021. “I told myself I was going to cry so hard today,” she said. “Then I realized, that just to his right, is a person named Fred Krueger (the same name as the main character in Nightmare On Elm Street). It was like, ‘Cool. My dad is hanging out with Freddy Krueger. Why did he wait so long?’”

Even when she was performing in front of nearly 20,000 people, P!nk had a way of connecting with the audience. Her stage runway jettisoned out into the audience allowing her to interact with fans, especially with ones in the younger set. Even in the middle of her angriest ballad, she stopped and waved at youngsters in the audience. At one point, she received a homemade book titled “The Pink, Smart Frog and the Namby-Pamby Wolf” from an elementary school student.

“Did you write this? Did you illustrate it too?” she gushed to the author. “You’re talented as hell.” She started to walk away but turned to ask the girl, “Is the wolf nice? Am I going to cry? I need another reason to cry.”

While P!nk, a former gymnast, was performing her acrobatics, her band of Chapman, Derrico, Brian Frasier-Moore (drums), Eva Gardner (bass), and Briana Balico (keyboards and guitar) and backup singers Jenny Douglas, Vivian Sessom, and Dani Moz kept the show on course.

The concert concluded with the bombastic “So What?” as P!nk was vaulted high above the crowds like a female Peter Pan. If that is the case, let’s hope that she never, ever grows up.

• The Script was listed as the opening act for P!nk, but the Irish quartet could have easily been a headliner on its own. The band was voted the Best Live Performance from the Meteor Ireland Music Awards in 2010.  The Script, featuring Danny O’Donoghue (vocals), Glen Power (drums), Benjamin Sargent (bass), and Ben Weaver (guitar), has sold over 12 million albums and had two platinum singles in the U.S. (“Hall of Fame” and “Breakeven”) and six of their seven albums hit number one in the United Kingdom.

However, the band is one member fewer than when it started out. Lead guitarist and band founder Mark Sheenan died at 46 in April 2023. O’Donoghue thanked fans for “their messages, thoughts and prayers” before launching into “Gone,” a celebration of Sheenan’s life. Its lyrics seem more poignant once a person hears the story behind it: “Why do stars that light up twice as bright/Only burn for half as long? Then it's gone.”

Not all of the Script’s set was as somber as that. At one point in the show, O’Donoghue asked the audience if any of them was going through a breakup. One member raised her hand and the singer asked her to dial her ex’s number and then grabbed the phone.

When the ex answered, O’Donoghue said, “This is not a joke. My name is Danny O’Donoghue and I am with a band called the Script. I have a few thousand friends who wanted to say hello to you. (The Schottenstein Center erupted in cheers.) Your ex wanted me to sing a song to you.”

The band then launched into “Nothing,” a story O’Donoghue wrote about drunk dialing an ex-girlfriend. The singer then asked the audience to serenade her with this lyric: “Susan’s got nothing,
Susan’s got nothing. Susan’s got nothing.”

The ex hung up, but O’Donoghue called her back and said in mock earnestness, “You didn’t give us a chance to say goodbye.” He then goaded the audience into saying,  “Goodbye asshole.”

Before launching into “Hall of Fame,” O’Donoghue found a way to say his own good-bye. He asked the audience to turn on the lights of their cell phone. “We feel like we made so many friends here tonight. How beautiful is that? It’s like there’s a whole galaxy of stars. Each one of those stars is attached to a heart, attached to a person, attached to a story. Tragedies, triumphs, pleasures, and pains. We get knocked down but we get back up again.”

Photo Credit: Greg Bartram/Schottenstein Center

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