Benson Boone Turns Crypto.com Arena Into His Playground on the Wanted Man Tour

Four days before Benson Boone was supposed to play Los Angeles, there was a real question of whether the show would happen at all.

His voice began giving out midway through an Aug. 7 concert in San Jose, forcing him to cut the night short. The next day, Sacramento was postponed for the same reason. That left two back-to-back shows at Crypto.com Arena sitting uncomfortably close on the calendar.

By Aug. 11, the second of those two Los Angeles dates, that uncertainty felt pretty far away.

Boone spent the night moving across a stage that seemed designed around the fact that he does not like staying in one place for long. A runway stretched deep into the floor, the screens behind him often made his movements look even larger, and the quieter songs eventually brought him back to the piano. Ashe opened both Los Angeles dates as the special guest on the Wanted Man Tour.

There is a slightly ridiculous amount happening at a Benson Boone concert, but that is also part of why it works. The huge vocals and emotional piano songs are still there, but they now share the show with the physical side of Boone that has become just as recognizable. Even the tour's own promotion leaned into the promise of “backflips & magic.”

What keeps all of that from feeling like a distraction is that the songs can usually handle the scale.

Across the Wanted Man Tour, the set has mixed American Heart tracks like “Sorry I’m Here for Someone Else,” “Mr Electric Blue,” “Wanted Man,” “Mystical Magical” and “Young American Heart” with earlier favorites including “In the Stars,” “Slow It Down,” “Cry” and, inevitably, “Beautiful Things.” The tour also arrived with something genuinely new: “The Time of My Life,” Boone’s first single following American Heart, released in June before the summer run began.

That contrast was probably my favorite part of the night.

From the floor, Boone could look almost tiny against the entire production, especially when he came down the runway with the full stage lit behind him. Then he would sit at the piano and suddenly the same arena felt much more focused. It is an easy trick to describe as “big moments versus intimate moments,” but in person the difference was more noticeable than that. The show actually needed both.

That is also where Boone has changed the most as a live artist. Ahead of his previous arena run, he talked about finally rehearsing a full show rather than simply learning the music with his band and figuring out the rest once they got onstage. He also said that writing more energetic songs gave him somewhere to put all of the energy he naturally has while performing.

The Wanted Man Tour feels like the next step of that idea. It follows the much larger American Heart tour cycle from 2025 and keeps Boone in American arenas through the summer of 2026. At Crypto.com Arena, he looked comfortable with that scale rather than overwhelmed by it.

The timing made that confidence more noticeable.

After what happened in San Jose and Sacramento, it would have been understandable for the Los Angeles shows to feel restrained. Instead, Aug. 11 still felt like a Benson Boone show: theatrical, constantly moving and just a little excessive in the way an arena pop concert should be.

And yes, “Beautiful Things” is still the song everyone waits for. But the more interesting part of seeing Boone now is realizing that the rest of the show no longer feels like something built around one enormous hit.

Crypto.com Arena felt like his stage long before he got to it.