At last, it's time: Warlords.

Here's what separates Lord of the Dance from everyone else, what sells out stadiums and grosses over one-billion dollars: the willingness to unapologetically be the greatest -- and prove it.

This show isn't about austere technical dancing to polite applause. This show is a raw title fight fused with a rock concert, painted in BIG, LOUD PRIMARY COLORS.

Lord of the Dance dares to *go* for it.

You either understand this or you don't.

Matt Smith understands this. To be the Lord of the Dance, the most high-profile role in commercial Irish dancing, you have to have exactly the right combination of swagger, charm, and jaw-dropping technical skill. This is not a role you play; this is something you *are.* When you step out onto that stage, you *are* the man that an entire stadium paid money to see.

The audience didn't pay to see "Sort of the Dance" -- they paid to see LORD of the Dance. And when you are the lead dancer in the most successful dance show of all time, with a 15,000-seat stadium *expecting* to be blown away, *you* are the greatest Irish dancer in the world.

That's not ego. That's confidence. To quote Yoda: "Do or do not. There is no try."

It's not enough to just perform the steps. The steps have been nearly the same for over twenty-five years. Before there was even a show, there was this number; Warlords was the first glimpse the world got at Michael Flatley's mysterious new stage production, seen for the first time in 1995 on the Des O'Connor Show. By this point, Warlords is to commercial Irish dancing what a traditional set dance is to competition Irish dancing: it's something that everyone has seen. Thus, the bar is set stratospherically high, because *anyone* stepping onto that stage is automatically compared to Michael Flatley.

And Matt Smith pulls it off.

He ought to. He was handpicked by Michael himself to star in the Impossible Tour video.

Obviously, the energy that Matt Smith brings to the role is not the same as Michael's. When Michael first performed in Feet of Flames, he was forty years old, already a global celebrity and universally acknowledged as the king of the ring; Matt Smith, meanwhile, is in his late twenties -- a hungry supernova of a dancer, up against a quarter-century of nostalgia, out to prove to you that what you really want to see right now is more of *him.* As a result, Matt's performance is more brash and youthful: the boy next door coming into his own.

But it is here, in Warlords, that you see that boy become a *man.*

That raw feeling you got from the legendary 1996 video? That *urgency,* right under the surface, making you hold your breath? It's back. Because in twenty-five years only a handful of lead dancers have ever been immortalized on film in Lord of the Dance, and Matt Smith literally fought his entire life for this title shot.

So here it is.

That swagger is real. That command of the stage is real. That smoldering sexuality, so critical to the show, is real. Here, in Warlords, the point is driven home: Matt Smith is the Lord of the Dance.

Read it again: Matt Smith *is* the Lord of the Dance.

Now watch an entire stadium discover this truth for themselves.

This is Feet of Flames: the Impossible Tour.

This is Warlords.

And this is the New Generation.

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