Review: TWICE’s K-pop spectacle lands in Charlotte — but does it translate?
Long before the lights went down and the sold-out crowd leapt up to welcome the night’s stars, uptown Charlotte’s Spectrum Center was already glowing.
Thousands of synchronized, TWICE-approved light sticks pulsed in a soft orange as fans settled into their seats, with a smattering of off-brand ones flashing in competing hues. Each time a promo for JYP Entertainment’s lineup of K-pop artists filled the massive overhead screens, a fresh wave of cheers rippled through the building.
So when TWICE’s seven touring members (down from nine, with Dahyun and Chaeyoung sidelined by injuries) finally arrived on the sprawling 360-degree stage just after 8 p.m. Tuesday, the reaction wasn’t explosive so much as sustained: a steady, knowing roar from a crowd of die-hards that seemed to know every lyric — even those sung in Korean, and even if many didn’t know exactly what the words meant.
Personally, it was a pretty surreal way to process jet lag.
Less than 72 hours earlier, I’d returned to Charlotte from a family trip to Seoul, South Korea, where K-pop doesn’t just exist — it saturates daily life. And during my visit, the group doing the saturating was BTS, whose March 21 live-on-Netflix comeback concert had effectively turned parts of the city into a living, breathing promotional campaign — the kind of takeover where even non-fans start humming along whether they want to or not.
In Seoul, it had felt unavoidable. In Charlotte, the latest stop on TWICE’s “This Is For” world tour, it felt like a kind of test:
How well does the meticulously constructed world of big-budget K-pop translate to the U.S.?
Over two-plus hours Tuesday night, the answer proved to be both impressive and occasionally uneven — a spectacle that felt at times immersive, at others strangely diffuse.
But there’s no denying the tour’s ambition.
Eschewing subtlety, the expansive setup took up most of the floor, encompassing a square main stage at center court, with long catwalks stretching to secondary platforms on opposite ends of the arena. Above it all hovered a massive four-sided video display that functioned at times like a traditional jumbotron, but also descended to the floor to conceal entrances or broke apart into a constellation of smaller cube-shaped screens.
At its best, the theater-in-the-round design worked as intended. Members rotated constantly, spreading out along the catwalks and onto the B stages, waving to fans and making eye contact in a way that suggested no seat was too far away.
But the same design also exposed its limits.
The staging swung between extremes, either crowded with nearly 30 performers when the full army of backup dancers was deployed; or sparse, when just the seven members spread themselves thinly across the expansive footprint. At times, it felt like trying to watch three performances at once ... and not quite catching any of them in full; in other moments, the visual similarities between TWICE members and their backup dancers made it difficult for the focal point to stand out.
It also had many of the trappings of a typical big-budget American pop spectacle, from tightly choreographed dance numbers to vocals that frequently seemed to be supported by backing tracks (although a live band — which, I’ll admit, I didn’t even realize was there until midway through the show — added a welcome layer of muscle once it revealed itself).
Still, there was one member who consistently cut through.
Whether anchoring group numbers or stepping forward for her solo turns, Jihyo — the group’s leader and main vocalist — brought a level of energy and natural charisma that gave the show some of its most genuinely spontaneous-feeling beats. And where others were more reserved, occasionally reading as overly focused on execution rather than commanding the space, Jihyo seemed more relaxed, more expressive, and the most like she was genuinely enjoying herself.
Still, when TWICE leaned into its biggest songs, those distinctions mattered less.
“The Feels,” “What Is Love?” and “Fancy” landed as clear high points, moments where the arena felt fully unified, where the scale of the production and the scale of the response finally aligned.
And a mid-show performance of “Takedown” — Jihyo, Jeongyeon and Chaeyoung’s contribution to Netflix’s “K-Pop Demon Hunters” — offered a different kind of highlight: a looser, more swaggering moment built less on precision and more on attitude, thanks largely to Jihyo, even with Chaeyoung sidelined with a back injury.
In contrast, the closing song “Doughnut” felt like a noticeable dip in momentum. The relaxed, free-form staging — with members spread across the stage and interacting casually with fans — seemed intended as a breezy sendoff, but after two hours of tightly choreographed precision, it read as somewhat anticlimactic.
But to a certain degree, the concert itself felt secondary to what the night represented.
As cultural-music genres go, K-pop is not yet — and might never be — on the level in the U.S. of Latin music, a force that drives a steady diet of arena tours through Charlotte. (TWICE was the first Korean pop group to fill Spectrum Center in more than a year, since fellow girl group aespa sold it out in February 2025.)
And yet, if you looked around the room, you saw the possibilities.
The crowd skewed young and predominantly female, though not exclusively so — and more notably, it was one of the more racially diverse audiences to fill the building in recent memory. Within a few feet of where I sat: a Black woman bounced to the beat wearing a TWICE jersey with “Jeongyeon” and the number “96” on the back; a Latina teen in front of me had on a freshly purchased “This Is For” shirt; and off to my left, a young Asian man in a banana costume danced to song after song, slightly off-beat but fully committed.
For a Korean American who grew up during a time when that identity rarely carried much cultural cachet — when, in many places, it barely registered at all — the scene on Tuesday night felt striking.
The mid-show banter delivered in Korean and translated into English by an unseen but peppy interpreter. The Hangul decorating fans’ signs. The extensive cast of Asian performers and musicians.
Striking not because it was unfamiliar, but because of where it was happening: in a packed arena in a city better known for NASCAR and vinegar-based barbecue, in front of fans who largely did not share the group’s cultural background but embraced it anyway.
It may not feel like Seoul.
But it no longer feels quite so far away from it, either.
TWICE’s setlist
Act I
1. “THIS IS FOR”
2. “Strategy”
3. “MAKE ME GO”
4. “SET ME FREE”
5. “I CAN’T STOP ME”
6. “OPTIONS”
7. “MOONLIGHT SUNRISE”
Act II
8. “MARS”
9. “I GOT YOU”
10. “The Feels”
11. “Gone”
12. “CRY FOR ME”
13. “HELL IN HEAVEN”
14. “RIGHT HAND GIRL”
Act III
15. “Run Away”
16. “STONE COLD”
17. “MEEEEEE”
18. “FIX A DRINK”
19. “ATM”
20. “DECAFFEINATED”
21. “MOVE LIKE THAT”
22. “TAKEDOWN”
Act IV
23. “FANCY”
24. “What is Love?”
25. “YES or YES”
26. “Dance the Night Away”
27. “ONE SPARK”
Encore:
28. “Feel Special”
29. “Doughnut”
This story was originally published April 1, 2026 at 9:38 AM.
