This Weekend: Rod Stewart Brings the Whole Songbook to the Beach — and Richard Marx Opens
Some tours you preview for the surprise. This one you preview for the certainty. Saturday night, Rod Stewart plays the Veterans United Home Loans Amphitheater, and there is zero mystery about what you're getting: six decades of raspy, feather-cut, unkillable hits delivered by a man who has turned "professional good time" into a life's work. Bring the parents. Bring your own. Everyone leaves happy.
Stewart is one of the last of a specific breed — the pure entertainer, the guy who came up through Faces bar rooms and never lost the pub-singalong instinct even after "Maggie May," "Forever Young," "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?" and a Great American Songbook detour made him a stadium fixture. On a 20,000-capacity lawn on a warm Virginia Beach night, that catalog is essentially a loaded weapon. He knows it. You'll know it by the third chorus.
The genuinely fun wrinkle is the opener. Richard Marx — yes, "Right Here Waiting," "Hazard," "Endless Summer Nights," a run of soft-rock monsters that soundtracked an entire era of slow dances — is not your average warm-up act. On most bills he'd headline the theater down the road. Here he's the appetizer, which means the sheer density of hits per hour on Saturday borders on unfair. Get there early. The undercard is a greatest-hits set of its own.
This is what the big Virginia Beach shed does better than anywhere else in the region: the wide-open, lawn-chair, sing-until-you're-hoarse summer show. The amphitheater opened in 1996 and has cycled through four corporate names, but the assignment never changed — it exists for exactly this kind of night, when the pavilion fills, the lawn spreads out behind it, and the ocean breeze does the air-conditioning for free.
A few logistics, because the amphitheater rewards a plan. The lawn is general admission, so a low-back beach chair and an early arrival are your friends. Traffic on Princess Anne Road backs up hard before big shows — leave a cushion. And this is a crowd that spans grandparents to grandkids, which is precisely the point: Rod Stewart shows are one of the last reliable places three generations willingly stand in the same field and yell the same words.
Elsewhere this weekend the free Oceanfront series keeps rolling midweek — Orlando's The 502s hit 17th Street Park next Wednesday — but Saturday belongs to the lawn. Two catalogs, one ticket, and a frontman who has never once in his career phoned it in.
Wear something you can dance in. You'll think you're too cool for "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?" You will be wrong by 9:15.
Sources: Veterans United Home Loans Amphitheater concert history (Concert Archives); Veterans United Home Loans Amphitheater (Wikipedia)