Chemical

My Chemical Romance has always had a penchant for theater. Really, it more or less comes with their brand of wildly popular, larger than life emo rock. From their visual aesthetic to their high-concept ideas to the quiver of frontman Gerard Way’s voice, MCR’s popularity in no small part comes from their willingness to throw themselves into angsty, story-driven melodrama, and they perhaps never did it better than on their seminal 2006 rock opera The Black Parade. Cold take, I know, but as their latest run of concerts, the “Long Live: The Black Parade Tour,” proves, the record and all of its accompanying theatrics still resonate 20 years later.

The ongoing tour, which included Friday night’s stop at Chicago’s Soldier Field, isn’t the first time My Chemical Romance has undergone a Sgt. Pepper-esque transformation into “The Black Parade.” Following the album’s initial release, the band embarked on a jaunt that saw them embrace the moniker and perform the record in full. Though “The Black Parade” was canonically killed off at the end of that tour, MCR brought the concept back post-reunion for a pair of headlining sets at the When We Were Young music festival in 2024. As they bring their fictional counterparts back in 2025 for a series of select shows at baseball and football stadiums around the country, they’re following a similar structure, ripping through The Black Parade top-to-bottom before a second mini-set of songs from the rest of their catalog.

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How does such a performance fare in 2025? Remarkably well, actually, thanks to the production value and sheer spectacle of the whole ordeal.

As MCR makes their way through the 13 tracks of The Black Parade (plus a reprise of “The End.” and a pre-recorded playback of the album’s hidden track “Blood”), a loose narrative with themes of fascism, rebellion, and (you guessed it) death plays out in the background. There are choreographed set pieces in between songs, non-band characters like guest opera singers and ever-present dictators who sit in the audience, parodies of propagandistic media, and, by the end, plenty of pyrotechnics.

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Then there’s the headline-making, audience interaction element: the execution by vote. Admittedly, it’s a pretty fun gimmick made all the better by Way’s over-the-top, inconsistently-accented protagonist. For Chicago specifically, there seemed to be some issue when it came to distributing the red and black placards throughout the massive stadium. (I, on the other hand, somehow ended up with a full stack of them — there’s a metaphor about the state of democracy in there somewhere…) Luckily, though, the band was able to improvise their way out of any awkward moments, resulting in no cracks in the show’s immersion.

By the end, Way’s attempts to break out of whatever system he’s trapped within fail, as he’s eventually stabbed to death while the rest of the band is ransacked. Brutal stuff, but what else could a fan expect from The Black Parade themselves?