by Michael McCarthy
Last Friday night, September 18, 2026, my parents and I saw The Billy Joel Legacy: A Tribute Experience at Lynn Auditorium in Lynn, Massachusetts, and it was a rather invigorating show, to say the least.
The set kicked off with an electrifying rendition of “My Life,” accompanied by video of an animated dancer bouncing around on the screen behind the band. If anyone went into the show thinking Billy Joel’s music was all mellow piano ballads, they probably would have been shaken to their core by this rousing opening performance. It was followed by “Don’t Ask Me Why,” which I would describe as another classic, but the fact of the matter is that nearly every song performed Friday night could genuinely be considered a classic at this point.
I went into the show knowing that I was familiar with a large number of Billy Joel songs, but there only ended up being one song all night that I didn’t recognize: “Vienna.” Otherwise, though, I knew everything they played, and looking at some Billy Joel compilations afterward confirmed that they covered an enormous number of his biggest songs.
Most of those songs have aged remarkably well, something you could also say about the audience. I joked to my parents at one point, “I’m the only guy here who doesn’t have all white or gray hair.” In truth, I did spot one other brunette like me, but otherwise I think it’s fair to say that a large percentage of the audience was retirement age.
That certainly didn’t prevent anyone from enjoying themselves. The crowd remained seated for most of the first half, but following an approximately 20-minute intermission, people increasingly started getting up to dance during songs like “We Didn’t Start the Fire” and “Uptown Girl.” There was usually at least a handful of people on their feet from that point forward, while nearly everyone else seemed happy to sing along from their seats. Also, side-note, I’d never realized it before but “Uptown Girl” seems very much inspired by The Beach Boys with its various singers all singing different parts at the same time. Friday night’s rendition was largely a cappela.
The tender ballad “Just the Way You Are” was accompanied by video footage of happy couples, many of them older couples. Nothing wrong with that, of course. I’m simply making an observation. The multimedia element was used throughout the evening, sometimes illustrating the songs literally and other times simply giving the audience something colorful or nostalgic to watch behind the musicians.
The Billy Joel Legacy: A Tribute Experience is a national production scheduled to visit more than 35 cities across the U.S. The tour launched the night before the Lynn performance, on September 17 at The Palace Theatre in Stamford, Connecticut. The Lynn show ran approximately two hours and ten minutes, not counting the intermission, and it packed an impressive amount of Billy Joel’s catalog into that time.
I honestly can’t think of a major Billy Joel hit that I expected to hear and didn’t. Granted, I’m not a Joel expert, but they certainly covered all of the songs I would consider essential.
I was especially delighted when they played “Pressure,” which has long been my personal favorite Billy Joel song. I wasn’t entirely sure they would do it because it’s one of his darker songs, dealing with anxiety and the feeling of being completely overwhelmed. The original recording also isn’t primarily a traditional piano song; its frantic synthesizer riff is one of the things that gives it such a distinctive personality.
Friday night, “Pressure” was performed with both piano and keyboards, making it sound slightly more like the traditional Billy Joel sound without sacrificing the nervous energy of the original. The video footage accompanying it was borderline creepy and definitely stood out from the generally happy and nostalgic imagery that dominated most of the evening. It was easily one of my favorite performances of the night.
My parents truly enjoyed the show, which I suspected they would, but I have to admit that I enjoyed it every bit as much as they did. I may not have gone into the Lynn Auditorium as the world’s biggest Billy Joel fanatic, but it didn’t take long to be reminded just how many fantastic songs the man has written.
Advance publicity for the tour identifies singer and pianist Ian Benjamin as stepping into the role of Billy Joel, but at the Lynn performance, Spencer Stanley handled lead vocals and piano for the overwhelming majority of the show, while Benjamin played keyboards and sang lead on portions of two songs. When I asked the tour’s publicist about the difference, he explained that Benjamin and Stanley will alternate markets throughout the tour.
Stanley was terrific and had the audience eating out of the palm of his hand. He looked a bit more like Justin Timberlake than Billy Joel, but that didn’t subtract from the experience. In fact, I overheard a few women talking about how handsome he was.
More importantly, Stanley had the audience eating out of the palm of his hand. His performance was rousing and frequently spectacular, and he handled the piano parts with the sort of confidence required for a show built around Billy Joel’s catalog.
The only noticeable mistake he made all night came during “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” when he briefly dropped a few words from its notoriously relentless stream of lyrics. Honestly, if you’re going to forget a lyric during a Billy Joel concert, that’s probably the most understandable song in which to do it. Stanley immediately glanced at the video screen, where the lyrics were being displayed karaoke-style, picked up exactly where he needed to be and carried on without any further complications.
Other highlights included “Allentown,” “New York State of Mind” and “She’s Always a Woman,” demonstrating just how much stylistic territory Joel’s catalog actually covers. Over the course of the evening, the show moved easily between rockers, ballads, character-driven songs and unabashed pop without ever feeling like it was scraping the bottom of the barrel for material.
Ultimately, The Billy Joel Legacy succeeds because it doesn’t require you to pretend that you’re actually watching Billy Joel. Nobody onstage is going to convince you that you’ve somehow traveled back in time and stumbled into a Joel concert from 1982. Instead, the musicians approach the material with enough enthusiasm and respect that you quickly stop worrying about impersonation and simply enjoy hearing an exceptionally strong catalog performed by people who clearly love it. The show was produced by the producers of The Simon & Garfunkel Story, and rather than simply performing Joel’s music, Stanley told little stories about the songs and Joel’s life in between several numbers. The accompanying video footage also included clips of Joel himself. At one particularly amusing point, the screen showed a montage of Billy Joel references from television shows ranging from Scrubs to Family Guy.
If you’re a Billy Joel fan and The Billy Joel Legacy: A Tribute Experience comes to your town, I would highly recommend it. Even if you’re merely a casual fan like me, you may be surprised by how many of these songs have been living in your head for decades. By the time the show was over, I wasn’t thinking about whether I had seen “the real Billy Joel.” I was simply thinking about how many damn good songs he has written.
Definitely one of the best tribute shows I’ve ever seen.
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