Dropkick Murphys To Play Empty Fenway Park, Bruce Springsteen To Appear

Courtesy Dropkick Murphys – Boston Streamers
Dropkick Murphys perform to a mostly empty room during Streaming Up From Boston on March 17.

Boston heroes Dropkick Murphys announced Streaming Outta Fenway, a special livestreaming event from the city’s iconic Fenway Park, on Monday.

The unprecedented event, slated for May 29 at 6 p.m. ET, will take place before an empty Fenway Park – and with a beamed in performance from none other than Bruce Springsteen, who will join the band remotely for a special “double play” of one Dropkick Murphys song and one song from his own catalog.

Moreover, with baseball season currently on hold, Dropkick Murphys will be able to perform on Fenway’s baseball diamond, an impossibility during normal times.

The show will livestream on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Twitch, and will raise money for three non-profits: Boston Resiliency Fund, Feeding America and Habitat For Humanity, Greater Boston.

Like the band’s Streaming Up From Boston livestream concert on March 17, Streaming Outta Fenway will be presented by Boston-area tech company Pega.

That show, which took place as the coronavirus pandemic exploded in the United States, set an early bar for the production possibilities of livestreamed shows without audiences. Peak combined viewership for the gig between Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Twitch exceeded 322,000, and within 24 hours, the show had been viewed 9.44 million times across platforms.

“At moments, to be totally honest, you get in your head” playing to a camera crew, singer Ken Casey told Pollstar at the time. “You’re like, I wanna look in the camera, because I wanna look at the people in their living room, but I don’t wanna look at the camera being some – thinking you’re Mick Jagger. We’re just a punk band!”

In normal times, both Dropkick Murphys and Springsteen have headlined Fenway Park. The former played two shows at the stadium in September 2011, for which Pollstar lacks box office data, while Springsteen most recently played the venue during a sold-out two-night stand in August 2012, where he moved 59,644 tickets and grossed $5.6 million.