Remember back a few months ago when I was debating whether or not to go see Steve Martin and Edie Brickell in concert at Wolf Trap? Well I decided to do it, and last night was the concert. Despite the horrible traffic getting down there it was totally worth it. Wolf Trap (well technically the concert was at The Filene Center at Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts, but who’s going to say that mouthful) is a national park outside Vienna, Virginia. The land was donated to Congress back in 1966. It’s a beautiful venue. There are two performing arts spaces in the park. The Barnes is open year round and The Filene Center holds performances from May through September.

I’ve never seen any shows at the Barnes, but The Filene Center is my favorite place to see a concert. I prefer to sit on the lawn because if you have lawn seats you are welcome to bring in a picnic. I like that their website says that the only limitation on what you can bring in is no kegs. I love to sit outside in the beautiful summer weather enjoying a picnic and listening to some live music. I’ve sat in the pavilion a couple of times though. Once because I wanted to see a show where the lawn tickets had sold out and once because my husband’s company has box seats there and he won tickets in their ticket lottery to see Mamma Mia. That was fun though because in addition to sitting in the fancy box seats we got to go to some pre-show reception for people who are donors to the park or something like that. We could have gone to a dessert reception after, but it’s a long drive home so we didn’t.

Despite my love for Wolf Trap I don’t get to go as often as I would like. It’s about an hour drive from Baltimore if you hit no traffic and given that you have to drive the DC beltway to get there that’s generally not something that happens. I usually limit myself to concerts on the weekends because going on a weeknight means we have to drive down in rush hour traffic. Thus it’s been a few years since I’ve been to Wolf Trap since there haven’t been any shows I’ve been dying to see playing on a weekend.

Since last night’s show was obviously on a weeknight I debated for awhile about whether it was worth the hassle and finally decided it was. First, I really wanted to go to Wolf Trap in general as it had been a long time since I had been there. Second, I really wanted to see Steve Martin and Edie Brickell. Since they are touring now to promote the album they collaborated on and there’s no guarantee that they’ll ever make another album together I figured this might be my only chance to see them perform together.

I’m really glad we decided to make the trek as the show was marvelous. Despite a few thunderstorms in the afternoon and forecasts of more throughout the night, the weather wound up being absolutely perfect. It was a beautiful summer night with a nice breeze. The stars were out. Fireflies were flitting about. It was lovely.

The music of course was fantastic too. The show was a lot funnier than I had anticipated as well. I felt like I had always heard that Steve Martin was really serious about his music, so I wasn’t anticipating the amount of comedy that was built into the performance. He introduced a good number of the songs with sort of a mini-stand-up routine, so it was actually a quite hilarious night. The music ranged from Steve playing with Grammy award winning bluegrass band The Steep Canyon Rangers, the band playing a few songs by themselves, and then of course Edie Brickell singing with them on songs from their new album.

I found this video that someone loaded on YouTube of the encore from last night’s performance. It actually gives a very good snapshot of what the entire show was like.

It was a wonderful evening and I’m glad I went.