It's hard to review a concert that turned out to be something completely different then what anyone had expected. This was one of those shows and here's my best effort at documenting what happened. If you weren't there, you should have been. If you were, you'll understand completely.

The night began as expected with an excellent set from the Boston-based band Event. Event plays a style of progressive hard rock in the same vein as Dream Theatre but somehow manages not to sound quite like them. They've staked out their own territory and it's definitely on some interesting ground.

The band consists of Shaun Michaud (guitar & keyboard programmer), Jay Rigney (bass), Dave Deluco (vocals), and Matt Scurfield (drums). Three of the four members are graduates of the Berklee School Of Music so this isn't your typical rock band. This was also the band's first Connecticut appearence.

Event performed several songs from their debut CD "Electric Skies" and succeeded in winning over the small but very appreciative crowd. The guitar of Shaun Michaud is the driving force of the band and he's clearly a talented player. I expect we'll all be hearing more from this band in the future.

Crucible was the headliner tonight and the show began with an excellent performance of their own "Over The Falls". The band followed with scorching versions of Cream's "White Room" and Supertramp's "The Logical Song". Word then came that the wife of the band's lead guitarist, Dan Esposito, was having the baby. Dan left to go to the hospital and Crucible's portion of tonight's show was over.

The show must go on and it definately did here. Event's guitarist, Shaun Michaud, offered to fill in and after seeing which songs they had in common a new set list was drawn up. The band covered Genesis' "Abacab", Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes", Sonny Boy Williamson's "One Way Out" and Bad Company's self-titled song before ended the first set.

Keyboardist and bandleader Tim Horan was next to be called away and lead vocalist Bill Esposito, who had taken medication to try to get through tonight's show, could not continue.

The second set began with Crucible members Tony Cappellina (drums) and Chris Vescera (bass) sharing the stage with Event's Shaun Michaud (guitar). The trio performed instrumentally. Chris Vescera gave his spot to Event's bassist Jay Rigney, who wanted in on some of the jam action. The new trio of Tony, Shaun, and Jay produced some of the most interesting music of the night as they jammed away the rest of the show. Shaun eventually called it a night leaving Tony and Jay to rock through the last jam of the show.

It wouldn't be fair to call this a Crucible show so I dubbed it the Tony Cappellina Prog Jam because he was the only constant member of the various jam configurations. It sounds unorganized, and it definately was, but some excellent music was produced tonight and all these guys deserve credit for going above and beyond the call of duty and rolling with whatever developed. As the saying goes, when God gives you lemons, make lemonade. The crowd at City Limits had some great lemonade on this night.