L'Olympia — Attraction in Paris

Saw Patti Smith here on her Horses tour in October 2015. Absolutely, positively amazing venue. Not a bad seat in the house.

There are 3 ticket levels for this venue. General admission means arriving at the venue 2-3 hours before the show, standing in a roped off line, and then being admitted onto the first floor standing-room only area. When I was in my 20-30's, standing for hours to see bands was no big deal. Nowadays? I want a comfortable seat, so.... I paid for the second level theater seating.

The second level seating is horseshoe shaped. If you can get a seat in the first row or on the ends of the horseshoe, do it. Those are the best seats. We were on the side, 4th row and it was fine, too. 3 seats cost me around $450 US direct pay on Songkick. The tickets were actual first-round purchases, not second-seller.

The third level of seating is stadium-like, rising into the back of the theater. I'm glad we didn't sit there - it looked crowded and not as comfortable.

My 9-year old son was with us. They made us sign a waiver to bring him into the facility, which was fine with me. We had brought him noise-cancellation headphones, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that they were selling similar headphones at a small kiosk inside the theater.

If you were a fan of the wonderful old venues of NYC and Chicago, this place will bring back...

I went there for an Apocalyptica concert.

The good: Apocalyptica was amazing! Entry into the building is easy, well organized, professional staff. Ushers lead you to your seat, you don't need to search for it.

The bad: For previous reviewers, if you think that hall sounds good, you really need to go to somewhere else. It's just okayish. Perhaps for a less demanding style of music, but for metal, it's very constricting of sound. The music comes only from the stage area, and the technicians did everything to overpower the poor acoustics of the room, but haven't really succeeded. The opening act, Arctis was really shafted by the bad sound setup, you could barely understand the singer, it came out muffled and way underpowered. The music was also very muddy with lots of harmonic distortion. The people who came late, when the opening act was already playing, and everybody has to stand up in their row so they can get to their seat in the dark. They should wait outside in the lobby until the opening act finishes.

The ugly: For every row, the folding seats at the end are horrible, just as everyone is complaining in the reviews. Come on L'Olympia, stop being such money hungry assholes and take out those seats. It's torture. I was lucky, the venue wasn't sold out and I moved to another seat once te...

NF's concert almost made me forget how horrible the organization at Olympia was. But as "almost" isn't enough, I'll leave my review here and emphasize that it's 100% directed towards the venue and not the artist.

I waited in line since 3:30 PM for a concert that started at 8 PM and opened its doors at 6:30 PM. They even wrote our arrival numbers on our hands, but it was useless because when they opened the doors, they let the 2nd row, which had arrived last, go in first. Some of them had been there for less than 30 minutes and ended up in the front.

Then, when they finally called us in, it was in a completely disorganized manner, with people rushing in and pushing to see who could get in first.

Once inside, we stood for an hour with nothing happening. After that, they put on a DJ who stood still for half an hour playing various songs that had nothing to do with the musical style that was supposed to be presented.

Later, they called her directly to the stage and told us to wait another 20 minutes while they prepared the stage and did smoke and light tests right in front of us.

Finally, the concert. All I can say is congratulations to the artist exclusively because, as far as Olympia was concerned, it was just disorganization and disrespect...