A Thomas and Friends Live Review
Rating: 3 Stars - Fair

I watch my daughter as she waits in anticipation. Squirming in her seat. Looking out the window. Getting impatient by the minute.

“I can’t wait for it to move!” She kept chanting. We were aboard the Lnyx Train service in Charlotte and riding it for the first time. We were on our way uptown to see Thomas and Friends Live at Time Warner Cable Arena. I had the free tickets months before courtesy of Mom Select and we’re excited that we can finally see it! So, what’s the best way to make the entire experience memorable? Ride the train of course! And that we did.

We arrived at the Arena with throngs of families already lined up at the check-in gate. Not bad. The only bad thing at that point was the moment the Security guard saw me and my husband carrying water bottles in hand. “This fella was downright obnoxious! He barked at us like a mad person, demanding we drink up all our water before entering the gate. Seriously. How do you down 1 liter of H20 in one gulp? Ignoring him after the nth time he barked wasn’t much of a help either. The more he barked. Time Warner should do a better job training their employees. That one person gave them a bad Customer service reputation.”

Now the Concert. Without any plausible comparison to how the concert did the first day, I can only surmised that the attendance at it’s second day was not that great. There were lots of empty seats. Some of them were next to us.

Overall, the show was not bad but not great either. I was yawning the whole time. Neither was my 5 year old daughter as ecstatic as I expected. A little boredom sat in. Some of the older kids around us weren’t paying attention to the show either. The show just didn’t have enough power to generate constant excitement on the kids or stimulate a stable audience participation.

The problem was that, the show lacked the main ingredient. The show was of Thomas and his friends but they were mostly left out of the scenes the entire time! Though Thomas and Percy had an active role in the story, the execution of each scenes were not up to par. None of them did the musicals. And on some scenes, they used cardboard cutouts to portray a part of the story, like you were watching a puppet show. This kids were better off watching the TV show!