Two days east of Fort Lauderdale: Ship cruising is aimed at older people, there’s no point in denying it. It is a form of low-impact travel that is easy for those of us on the sunset side of life, with our sore knees and stiff joints, our special diets, finicky digestion and deficient hearing. Young people do cruise, but they’re a distinct minority and likely feel out of place.
That said, the music played on cruise ships is calibrated to appeal to their audience. When we first started cruising nearly 20 years ago we heard a lot of big band music. Frankly it was too old for us.
This new ship is the first I’ve sailed on with a dedicated rock venue, we caught a set last night and it was a serviceable, if uninspired group: three guitars, a keyboardist and a drummer. The ship also has a dedicated blues venue with a black group playing. Princess ships usually have a string duo or trio playing classical music.
Your typical cruise ship has a big theater where the ship’s singers and dancers put on a singing-and-dancing show twice nightly 3-4 times during a cruise. Interspersed among these are various guest entertainers who join the ship, perform once or twice, and leave at the next port to be replaced by more who’ve flown in to join the ship. These entertainers might be singers, jugglers, magicians, instrumentalists, ventriloquists, or acrobats.
This ship is unique in that it has a dance company which isn’t accompanied by singers. They did an all dance show last night that was darn good, in the big theater which uniquely on this ship is more-or-less theater-in-the-round and combined dance with light show. It used canned music, which may mean this ship has no ship’s band as such, also unique in our experience.
If cruise ships stop having a group of singers and a ship’s band, a whole bunch of talented but unknown musicians will be out of work. There must be over a thousand such on the briny tonight. You know what they say, if you want to guarantee your kid a life of poverty, buy him or her an instrument and teach them to play.
