CORTIS Opens Its First North American Tour Tonight. Its Korean Shows Left a Question Hanging.
CORTIS opens the North American leg of its first headline tour Tuesday night in Toronto, at a venue that holds roughly 5,000 people for a run where every date sold out within minutes of going on sale. Resale prices for the Toronto show have climbed past $560 a ticket. What's less certain is whether the show will answer complaints that followed the group through its Korean tour opener last month.
When CORTIS kicked off "Put Your Phone Down" at Incheon's Inspire Arena in July, fans who paid 143,000 won (about $96) got a show that ran an hour and 40 minutes - well short of an initially advertised two hours - with a setlist that repeated "REDRED" four times and "YoungCreatorCrew" five, according to the Korea Times. Attendees also noted a lack of costume changes and no encore. The issue traces back to arithmetic: CORTIS has released 12 songs since debuting last August, amounting to less than 30 minutes of original music, leaving the group to stretch a short catalog across a full concert run. Some fans defended the stripped-down approach as consistent with the tour's minimalist title; others compared it unfavorably to how similarly new groups have padded shorter setlists with rearrangements or cover songs. CORTIS made adjustments for its second Incheon date, and member James later thanked fans on Weverse for sticking with the tour "with this momentum."
None of that has slowed ticket demand. CORTIS added a San Francisco date to the North American run after every other city sold out, and the tour now covers nine cities across the U.S., Canada and Japan, including stops at New York's Theater at Madison Square Garden and Atlanta's Fox Theatre through mid-August. The North American run follows a run of festival dates, including CORTIS's spot as the only K-pop boy group booked at Lollapalooza Chicago this year.
Whatever happens in Toronto tonight, it's the first chance to see whether the changes made after Incheon travel with the tour - or whether a five-member group with a year-old discography runs into the same math everywhere it plays.
