CONCERT REVIEW: Weird Al | Star Lake Pavilion | Burgettstown, PA | 8.01.2026 

The Pavilion at Star Lake in Burgettstown, Pennsylvania has hosted countless shows over the years, but nothing quite prepares you for a lawn full of giant Amish hats, bright Hawaiian shirts, and curly wigs with mustaches. You might expect to see this sort of thing on the men of a certain age in the crowd, but by the eight-year-olds riding their parents’ shoulders right next to grandparents who probably owned the cassette the first time around? That’s a blast. And of course all of them, eventually, are screaming the lyrics to a song about grammar rules or eating some sort of food. That’s a Weird Al Yankovic show. Anywhere else it would be a bit bonkers, but here it felt right. Al has been on his aptly named “Bigger and Weirder tour” for quite some time now, and the show on Saturday was just one of his many stops along the way, and the show lived up to the name.

Puddles Pity Party opened. The towering, silent “sad clown” act with a surprisingly powerful voice, setting a strange, albeit sweet, tone to kick off the night. By the time a “Fun Zone” video intro rolled, the pavilion was primed, and the eight-piece band launched straight into “Tacky” with Al out in the loudest outfit in the building. He started from somewhere deep back stage and sang directly into the camera as he passed by staff who were pretending to not pay any mind as to what was happening.

But that “Tacky” outfit was just the teaser. It became clear quickly that this was not a show with a couple of costume changes sprinkled in. Almost every song brought a new one, and not just for Al. The backup singers, guitarists, and drummer were all swapping wardrobe right along with him. The engine behind it was a steady rotation of old video clips between songs of vintage “fake interview” bits where Al grills celebrities, plus a clip from his own “biopic” running just long enough for a small army of quick changes to happen behind the curtain.

The opening stretch didn’t let up: “Mission Statement” (still an absurd feat live, try tracking all those corporate-jargon syllables in real time), and a breathless “Polkamania!” run. Then “Everything You Know Is Wrong” into “One More Minute.” Somewhere in that pair, Al went full Elvis, working the crowd, purple scarf in hand, wiping his face and handing it off to someone in the crowd.

A clip from Weird: The Al Yankovic Story covered the change into “Smells Like Nirvana” Al reemerging in a full Kurt Cobain getup and another quick cutaway brought him back out as Devo for “Dare to Be Stupid.” The crowd ate up every minute of it. Just in those first six songs there were fan favorites spanning four decades. It’s parody of course, but not many musical acts can claim that sort of arsenal.

Then came the real back to back to back hits with the medley, which consisted of sections of eleven songs. Songs like “Party in the CIA,” “It’s All About the Pentiums,” “Bedrock Anthem,” “My Bologna,” “Ricky,” “Ode to a Superhero,” “I Love Rocky Road,” “Eat It,” “Like a Surgeon,” “Word Crimes,” and “Canadian Idiot.” And there were costume changes in those as well. Every time it seemed like it had to be winding down, it woul pick right back up again. Every time you thought the band was steering toward the outro, another one started. Then he closed it out with the fat suit, via another quick video-clip cover, for “Fat” (still gets a bigger reaction live than it has any right to).

Before bringing Puddles Pity Party back out for a cover of “Happy Together,” Al said, “If you haven’t traveled across the country in a bus with a seven-foot clown, you haven’t lived.” This is the only true cover song in the set, and it changes every night of this tour. I’m not sure Puddles even comes out for most of the covers either. “Skipper Dan” followed and hit harder live than on record, a rare quiet, almost melancholy beat in a show built on chaos, before a second “Drum Solo” showed up as a pure joke: a few comically short beats and done.

“eBay” and “Stop Forwarding That Crap to Me” kept the laughs coming, and then the two biggest hits of the night closed out the main set: “White & Nerdy” turned the whole pavilion into one shouted chorus, as Al rode around on a Segway on stage. All you could think was, he’s still got it. Then “Amish Paradise” brought every felt hat and set of suspenders in the crowd out for one last singalong before the encore, which was preempted by a James Brownesque ushering of Al off stage.

The encore opened with a quick “We All Have Cell Phones” that ran just long enough to get every phone light in the pavilion into the air. The real encore was the pair of personal favorites, “The Saga Begins” straight into “Yoda,” back-to-back, the all-ages singalong that sent the lawn out still humming on the walk back to the cars.

Whatever “bigger and weirder” was supposed to mean going into this tour, Star Lake got exactly that. It was a night of nonstop banger after banger.