Bear McCreary performs at The Vic Theatre in Chicago on May 31, 2025.
By Nina Tadic
Seeing a composer on tour poses plenty of questions – will it be a formal event? A more casual one? Will there be a full orchestra? Will the performances be solo? Backtracks? All of it boils down to “what will it be?”
What Bear McCreary’s Themes & Variations Tour boiled down to, above all else, was a hell of a performance from start to finish. McCreary, known for writing the scores of television shows like Amazon’s Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Starz’ Outlander, and video games like the God of War franchise, knows what his fans want to hear, and he’s playing it all and then some.
Performing for well over two hours, McCreary does not stop for a second. Accompanied by a six piece ensemble composed of a vocalist, an electric violinist, a drummer, bassist and guitarist, and even one person solely manning the digital percussion and synthesizers, he is a force of nature onstage while recreating the theme songs of many shows and video games he’s worked on. His long locks of hair whip around him while he shreds on his guitar with a video screen behind him taking the audience through time and space with a million different visuals, each so far removed from the last.
As a composer, McCreary clearly knows how to move an audience, and he knows how to carry a performance from one piece to the next. The entire set is spent with Bear sharing stories about each project he’s worked on, how they came to be, the processes behind them, and his experiences as a composer. About Masters of the Universe, he says that when he was approached by Kevin Smith to score the series, he said “I’ll score this under one condition” to which Smith was shocked and puzzled ,and asked what the condition was. “It has to sound like Metallica scored Conan the Barbarian in 1982 – if that’s what you want, I’ll score it.” And he did.
McCreary’s Metallica mention might come as a shock to those who have only heard his more “traditional” scoring – those pieces in Outlander, Rings of Power, etc. But for those who’ve heard his work for God of War: Ragnarok, The Walking Dead, Battlestar Galactica – or his personal projects (see: epic rock concept album The Singularity) it makes complete sense. Regardless of what concept he’s working with, what story he’s portraying, McCreary is capturing emotion in epic proportions, and that is why he is able to perform such a versatile, multi-faceted body of work live, and captivate every person in the room in the process.
Bear McCreary performs at The Vic Theatre in Chicago on May 31, 2025.
His set moves in waves – McCreary breaks up his projects into sections of the night, and revisits some more than once, while he is sure to sprinkle in pieces from The Singularity between each to keep the energy in the room high. Seeing this man move from headbanger metal songs like “Type III” into “Dance of the Druids”, a Scottish-folk string-based piece from a period-piece fantasy series, and seeing the way the crowd embraces both, is amazing. Each audience member knows Bear for a different piece of his work, and it is easy to tell what they’re there for by the way their faces light up and their body language changes. The pouring out of cheers, whistles, and hollers are deafening for every track, though, not just the fan favorites. Of course jaws drop and cheers are ballistic for the theme of The Walking Dead, but the response is equally as intense for a Bob Dylan cover near the end of the night, or for a Rings of Power piece that “has to have a hurdy-gurdy solo.”
Bear McCreary lets the crowd into his world (and the many worlds he writes for) in a way that is dynamic, vibrant, and full of life, and seeing it on a stage is something worth experiencing a thousand times over.
(Photos and review by Nina Tadic – follow Nina on Instagram at @ninatadiccreative)
