Twenty minutes of 2112, all seven parts of it, then the whole of Moving Pictures, Tom Sawyer, Limelight and the ten-minute The Camera Eye included. That is the double bill Geddy Lee has promised for Rush’s Sphere residency in Las Vegas, and demand moved fast enough that the band doubled the run in under a week.
Rush announced five shows at Sphere on 5 November under the title Elevate From the Norm, set for 21, 23, 26, 28 and 30 May 2027. Six days later, on 11 November, the day the artist presale opened, the band added five more nights in June. “WOW! Thank you everyone,” the band said, in a message reported by Loudwire. “Due to incredible demand, FIVE NEW SHOWS have been added to RUSH live at Sphere Las Vegas!”
Ten Nights at Sphere: The Dates and the Ticket Windows
The original run, announced on rush.com, covers 21, 23, 26, 28 and 30 May 2027. The added shows fall on 15, 17, 19, 24 and 26 June, and Ultimate Classic Rock reported them as a doubling of the band’s time in the city. That makes the Sphere residency ten nights in one building across two months, for a band whose previous tour ended at the Forum in Los Angeles on 1 August 2015.
The sale ran in stages. RUSH Backstage and newsletter subscribers got a two-hour window for VIP and travel packages from 10am Pacific on 6 November. Fans who registered through Seated received codes for the artist presale, which opened at 10am Pacific on 11 November, and the general on-sale followed at 10am Pacific on 13 November. The June dates were given their own presale for tickets, VIP and travel packages from 11:15am Pacific on 11 November, Loudwire reported.
Superfan, the official VIP and travel partner, is running three VIP packages based at Fontainebleau Las Vegas, with premium seats and, on some packages, the chance to meet Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson, band-signed merchandise and access to the Xanadu VIP Lounge. Travel packages bundle a Fontainebleau room with concert tickets, merchandise and shuttle transport, and the hotel will host a Rush pop-up shop. Full details sit on the band’s Sphere page.
What Geddy Lee Promised: All of 2112 and All of Moving Pictures
The announcement came with a long statement from Lee, and it reads like a man who had already been sketching the show. Lee put it this way on rush.com: “When I first heard of Sphere, I thought to myself, ‘wow, what a shame that RUSH is no longer touring, because this venue sounds tailor made for the kind of visual attitude with which we have always designed our shows.’”
“Normally we spend months designing the visual effects for our shows and this scenario seemed like the cherry on top of the ice cream for our design team,” Lee went on. The music, he explained, will follow the kind of show the band has played in some of its one-off cities on the current tour. “Meaning playing all of 2112 and all of Moving Pictures along with an array of other songs,” Lee said, adding that the band wants to please fans “both visually and viscerally”.
The Two Records at the Heart of the Show
2112 came out on 1 April 1976. It was the band’s fourth album, and the label wanted shorter, more radio-friendly songs. Rush resisted and built the record around a seven-part, 20-minute title piece, a conceptual suite set in a dystopian future, as the band’s account of the album on rush.com puts it. In the same piece, the band recalls Alex Lifeson calling it “the first record where we sounded like Rush.”
It was written on the road. “We were touring so much that we wrote it mostly in arena dressing rooms, and in the car and the van,” Lifeson said in a quote the band posted for the album’s 40th anniversary. Lee, in the same post, described its impact: “There was a lot of passion in that record, a lot of ferocity and it cut through the static of the music that was out there and it reached people.” 2112 became Rush’s first album to reach the Billboard LP chart, their first gold record in the US, later certified platinum, and their first platinum album in Canada.
Moving Pictures, the band’s eighth studio album, followed on 12 February 1981, recorded at Le Studio in Morin-Heights, Quebec. Its seven songs run from Tom Sawyer through Red Barchetta, the instrumental YYZ, named after the code for Toronto’s Pearson airport, and Limelight, before side two opens with the ten-minute The Camera Eye and closes on Vital Signs, as the band’s anniversary notes lay out. It remains Rush’s best-selling record in the United States, where it reached No. 3 on the album chart.
Rush have played it in full before. On the 2010 Time Machine Tour the band played Moving Pictures in its entirety for the first time, according to rush.com. Doing it again inside Sphere, with the whole of 2112 on the same bill, is a different proposition.
Why Sphere Suits a Band That Designs Its Own Shows
The band’s announcement leans on the building. Rush’s shows will use what it calls the world’s highest-resolution LED display, wrapping up, over and around the audience, and Sphere Immersive Sound, which it describes as the world’s most advanced concert-grade audio system. For a band that, by Lee’s account, spends months designing visual effects for an ordinary tour, that is a canvas no arena can offer.
The audio matters as much as the screen. Records as layered as 2112 and Moving Pictures stack bass, guitar, keyboards and drums into dense arrangements, and a system built to carry clarity to every seat is a better way to hear that tone than a pair of stacks at the side of a stage.
Sphere has also proved itself commercially. In 2024 it grossed $420.5 million from 1.3 million tickets, the highest year-end gross for any venue in Billboard Boxscore’s 50-year history, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported. U2’s 40-show UV Achtung Baby residency grossed $244.5 million from 663,000 tickets over six months, and Phish, Dead & Company and the Eagles have all followed. U2 themselves have since moved on: U2’s Carnaval De Luz ends with Dolly Parton’s final vocal.
The Four-Piece Rush That Will Play It
The band taking these songs to Las Vegas is not the trio that recorded them. Neil Peart, Rush’s drummer and lyricist, died on 7 January 2020 after a three-and-a-half-year battle with glioblastoma, the band announced on rush.com. He was 67.
Lee and Lifeson announced the Fifty Something tour in October 2025, with German drummer, composer and producer Anika Nilles behind the kit. The band notes she has played more than 60 shows as Jeff Beck’s drummer and released four solo albums. In February 2026 keyboard player Loren Gold, who has worked with The Who and Roger Daltrey, joined, turning the old power trio into a four-piece. Lee explained the return on rush.com, writing that “after all that has gone down since that last show, Alex and I have done some serious soul searching”.
Demand has been strong from the start. The initial 22 dates sold out immediately and the tour grew to 58 shows across 24 cities, with more than half a million tickets sold for 2026, according to the band’s February announcement. By November, the band put the total at more than a million tickets across Canada, the United States, Mexico, South America, Europe and the UK.
The reviews have been generous. Rolling Stone’s verdict, quoted on rush.com, was that “Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson make grown men cry, and new touring drummer Anika Nilles absolutely kills.” Each Sphere night, the band says, will celebrate Rush’s music and legacy and the life of Peart, with a set of fan favourites and greatest hits from across the catalogue.
Where Sphere Sits in Rush’s 2027
The Las Vegas shows close a long run. The Fifty Something tour kept adding North American cities through the autumn, with Houston, St. Louis, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh announced on rush.com in August for October and November. Early in 2027 the band plays 24 shows across 13 countries in South America, the UK and Europe, its first European dates since 2013 and its first visit to South America in 17 years, before Sphere opens in May.
Those overseas shows are billed as evenings with Rush, two sets a night, with each setlist built from a catalogue of more than 40 songs. Lee described the preparation in February as “learning around 40 songs which will enable us to keep the shows evolving, playing some different songs on different nights.” His plan for Sphere puts two complete albums at the centre of the set, which is what sets these ten nights apart from the rest of the tour.
Why the Extra Dates Came So Fast
The timing tells the story. The band cited incredible demand and added the June shows on the day of the artist presale, two days before the general on-sale opened on 13 November. U2 sold 663,000 tickets across 40 Sphere shows, roughly 16,500 a night, so ten nights in one building is a different scale of commitment from a single arena stop, and Rush made it before most buyers had a chance to try for a ticket.
For fans, the practical point is choice. Ten nights across May and June give travellers more room to plan around flights and hotel prices, and the Superfan packages put lodging, tickets and transport in one booking for anyone flying in. Ticket and package details are on the band’s Sphere page.
For a band that went more than ten years without touring, the speed of this sale says plenty. Lee is now promising 2112 and Moving Pictures in full, recorded decades ago by a trio and rebuilt by a four-piece, at a Sphere residency built for exactly the kind of visual show Rush always wanted to stage.
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