'Joker' Live Concert Event Begins Touring The World In April

Todd Phillips' Joker is coming back to theaters to incite cinematic chaos yet again – but this time, it will be part of a special touring event in which the film's award-winning score will be performed live along with the movie. The international event kicks off in London on April 30, 2020, and you can get the details below.

According to Deadline, Icelandic composer Hildur Guðnadóttir's score will be performed using a full orchestra. Several of the performances will be conducted by Jeff Atmajian, who served as the conductor and orchestrator of the movie's original soundtrack, while Dave Mahoney will step in to round out the UK tour dates. The concert event kicks off at London's Eventim Apollo and then goes on to tour the rest of the UK until July, before moving on to "expand to European and further international locations, with dates and venues to be announced."

Joker is a bit of an odd movie, and it's a particularly odd awards movie: it's a stylish piece of homage that clearly resonated with Academy voters, since it earned more nominations than any other film this year. It somehow earned 11, if you're counting at home, and only Joaquin Phoenix seems to be a lock in his category. But if there's one thing about the film that's deserving of praise aside from that lead performance, it's Guðnadóttir's excellent, haunting score. So this should be a cool opportunity for people to experience the movie in a new light, with her score front and center. I've attended several live concert performances where the score is played along with the movie, and they're always fun affairs that make me appreciate how scores contribute to and enhance the overall film experience.

"I'm thrilled to get to see and hear Joker in the cinema with a live orchestra. When we recorded the music, the orchestra brought such depth and detailed attention to the performances that we were all literally holding our breaths during most of the recording sessions. It was a beautiful trip. I'm so happy to get to go there again and for an audience to experience that too," Guðnadóttir commented.

"I speak for the entire Joker team when I say how thrilled we are to be working with Senbla and Ollie Rosenblatt on Joker – Live in Concert. I think it's a wonderful way for audiences to experience Hildur Guðnadóttir's haunting and immersive score while bearing witness to Joaquin Phoenix's descent into madness as Arthur," added director Todd Phillips.

Here's Joker's official synopsis, as well as a few select tracks from Guðnadóttir's score:

Forever alone in a crowd, Arthur Fleck seeks connection. Yet, as he trods the sooted Gotham City streets and rides the graffitied mass transit rails of a hostile town teeming with division and dissatisfaction, Arthur wears two masks. One, he paints on for his day job as a clown. The other he can never remove; it's the guise he projects in a futile attempt to feel he's a part of the world around him, and not the misunderstood man whom life is repeatedly beating down. Fatherless, Arthur has a fragile mother, arguably his best friend, who nicknamed him Happy, a moniker that's fostered in Arthur a smile that hides the heartache beneath. But, when bullied by teens on the streets, taunted by suits on the subway, or simply teased by his fellow clowns at work, this social outlier only becomes even more out of sync with everyone around him.

Directed, co-written and produced by Todd Phillips, "Joker" is the filmmaker's original vision of the infamous DC villain, an origin story infused with, but distinctly outside, the character's more traditional mythologies. Phillips' exploration of Arthur Fleck, who is indelibly portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix, is of a man struggling to find his way in Gotham's fractured society. Longing for any light to shine on him, he tries his hand as a stand-up comic, but finds the joke always seems to be on him. Caught in a cyclical existence between apathy and cruelty and, ultimately, betrayal, Arthur makes one bad decision after another that brings about a chain reaction of escalating events in this gritty, allegorical character study.