We doubt anyone had gettin’ jiggy with Will Smith on their bingo card for 2025, but there we were, reveling in the flows of the Fresh Prince at the House of Blues on March 20.
An intimate evening with Will Smith feels about as rare as you’d expect. The superstar actor, rapper and alien ass-kicker from Independence Day all but vanished after the Academy Awards slap incident of 2022. But Smith has since emerged with a new lease on his famous life, announcing a headlining tour in support of his first rap album in 20 years, Based on a True Story.
At Mandalay Bay’s House of Blues, he set the stage for a comeback, delivering an emotional, nostalgic and exceptionally fun ride.
“The word for tonight is joy. That’s what we’re here for tonight,” Smith said. “We gon’ leave the world outside. We making our own space in here.”
Opening with the signature Bad Boys theme song, the 56-year-old Smith flexed the finesse of his pen and songcraft, blowing through tongue-twisting bars that set the crowd ablaze with screams and palpable hysteria. Classics like “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It,”“Boom! Shake the Room” and “Switch” have never sounded better than with a live band, which backed Smith up with some of the nastiest bass lines imaginable.
“Seems like we got a couple of people in the house tonight that mess with that old school hip-hop,” he said approvingly before launching into a casual spat of rhymes over a layer of boom-bap beats.
Smith’s goofy Fresh Prince persona also popped up frequently throughout the night. With a roomful of fans mirroring his moves, he broke out into the Carlton Dance. And his knack for beat-boxing shined alongside guitar riffs and wickedly sharp violin solos. Smith, to a charming degree, embraced all his varied eras, salsa dancing to a lively rendition of “Miami” and donning a cowboy hat for “Wild Wild West.”
That said, the mood shifted slightly when he paused to pay tribute to his late mentor, James Avery, who played Uncle Phil on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
“James Avery was a father figure to me. He was like a father figure to a generation,” Smith said. “He set the standard of what a responsible man is supposed to be. On Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, I was there under James Avery just like, crafting myself as a man.”
Smith also confided that he fathered his first child while working on the popular 1990s TV show. “I’ve never been more scared than the night I brought that baby home,” he said, adding that he wrote the first verse of ballad “Just the Two of Us” that night. In a heartwarming display, photos of his children and wife aired on screen as he performed it.
Those anecdotes alone would’ve been worth the ticket, but then Smith addressed the infamous Oscars incident.
“I had a couple of really powerful years of soul searching. There was a Will Smith that was perfect. There was a Will Smith that was flawless, and it was the image of everything I wanted to be. But there was a reality of emotions and things that I pushed down and put away because I thought people wouldn’t like me if they knew I had sadness in there,” he said. “I thought people wouldn’t like me if they knew I was scared sometimes. If I was confused. If I was angry. I took the last couple of years, and I really looked at myself honestly. And what I realized is, really, I’m just like y’all. … Every single person is going through something.”
The rapper revealed he started working on Based on a True Story shortly after he assaulted Chris Rock on the Oscars’ stage, and he shared some of the new tracks over the course of the evening. “You Can Make It,” a gospel-inspired epic featuring Philly-born singer Fridayy and the Sunday Service Choir, has topped the gospel music charts. It also made for one beautiful start to the finale of this show. Smith also performed the redemptive spoken word track “Work of Art,” which sums up exactly where this icon has landed in his healing journey.
“When I wrote this verse it was like I tapped into a sense of acceptance of myself. The good, the bad and the ugly,” he said. “‘Work of Art’ is the realization that I’m all of it. You don’t have to be perfect to deserve love.”
