

That Urie had grown up near the Vegas Strip watching stuff like Cirque du Soleil and Blue Man Group made sense that the band’s live act eventually incorporated stilt walkers, contortionists, and ribbon dancers made more: Panic! was here to give you a show. By the maximalist pop of 2016’s Death of a Bachelor, Urie was invoking his passion for Frank Sinatra-with the caveat that one of his first impressions of the singer was the Sinatra-esque sword crooning “Witchcraft” in the animated movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit: A bright, shiny cartoon.įormed by a group of childhood friends in 2004, the band was part of a wave of artists-including My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy, whose Pete Wentz was an early booster-who played what was effectively a pop-punk take on musical theater: dandyish and self-consciously overblown, but with a sense of uplift that made them manna for their fans. Even in their early, post-emo days, the band’s music felt like an ornately tailored garment, every square inch fussed over with a care that verged on obsessive. After all, Panic! had always, on some level, been an excuse for Urie and his bandmates to dress up, to cultivate their inner thespian with as much flair as possible. "When Panic! At the Disco’s Brendon Urie joined the cast of the Broadway show Kinky Boots in 2017, it was like a prophecy fulfilled.
