Each time in its nearly 60-year history, putting on the Super Bowl halftime show gets harder. Sometimes the logistics get complicated by concerns about protecting the turf. On other occasions, some aspect of the show leaks online, as happened last year ahead of Kendrick Lamar’s performance. In the lead-up to Bad Bunny’s performance at Super Bowl LX, I wondered if worries about the possible presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents at the Big Game would be the King of Latin Trap’s biggest hurdle.
It wasn’t. It was trying to fulfill Bad Bunny’s wish to transform the field at Levi’s Stadium into his home of Puerto Rico.
That one was Bruce and Shelley Rodgers’ problem to solve. Their company, Tribe Inc., has been producing the show for nearly two decades, and the pair have become de facto experts in how to pull off increasingly elaborate stage productions during the allotted 26 or so minutes of the halftime show.
For Sunday’s performance, situated in the middle of the Seattle Seahawks’ rematch against the New England Patriots, the issue was horticultural. Bad Bunny, whose real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, wanted his show to have the same look and feel as his recent Puerto Rico residency, which covered stages in palm trees and sugar cane to re-create the environs of Vega Baja, where he grew up.
In a different stadium, that could be done by rolling carts covered in those plants onto the field. But Santa Clara’s Levi’s Stadium uses natural grass; the National Football League’s guidelines don’t allow that many carts onto the field, as they’d tear up the grass. The max the team could use was 25, and they needed those for the stages and other props.
Bruce Rodgers’ fix was simple: dress people up like plants.
As viewers saw at halftime, Bad Bunny, who performed in an all-white outfit with a number and “Ocasio” on the back like a football jersey, did get to dance around the set he wanted—the casita, the vintage truck, the wedding stage—but the plants were alive in a way he might not have imagined. Some 380 people donned costumes to make them look like tall stalks of grasses. The stationary palm trees and poles, if you’re wondering, were rolled out much in the same way the streetlights were placed for Lamar’s street scene from Super Bowl LIX. On Sunday, they hit their limit of 25 carts, equipped with so-called “turf tires,” and got everything safely on and off the field.
