The Chicks Revisit ‘the Incident’ at ‘Taking the Long Way’ Anniversary Shows

The Chicks revisited “the Incident” and compared George W. Bush with Donald Trump during shows celebrating the 20th anniversary of “Taking the Long Way,” according to a Variety concert review. The anniversary performances brought the group’s past and its political commentary into the same frame, although the supplied excerpt does not reproduce those remarks.

Variety’s opening centers on Natalie Maines and the contrast between her reputation for consequential onstage comments and her usual approach to performing. The reviewer describes her as someone who generally does not talk at length during concerts, making the attention paid to her speaking a distinctive part of the coverage.

That observation establishes the review’s central tension: being remembered for speaking onstage is not necessarily the same as making conversation a regular feature of a show. Variety characterizes Maines’ approach as favoring quality over quantity, suggesting that the significance of her comments matters more to the reviewer than their frequency.

The anniversary framing gives those comments a retrospective setting. By identifying the performances with “Taking the Long Way” and its 20th anniversary, the review presents the shows as an occasion to look back, rather than simply reporting a new political remark in isolation. The supplied material does not explain how that retrospective was organized across the performances.

The headline explicitly connects that backward glance with a comparison between Bush and Trump. It does not, however, provide Maines’ wording, the substance of the comparison or the circumstances in which she made it. Without those details, it is not possible to establish whether the remarks emphasized similarities, differences or a broader reflection on the two figures.

The reference to “the Incident” is similarly prominent but unexplained in the supplied excerpt. It signals that the review addresses an episode treated as familiar to its readers, while leaving the actual discussion outside the available text. Any fuller account of what the group recalled would require the passages describing that exchange.

As a concert review, the Variety piece is framed around a critic’s interpretation of the performances, rather than a transcript of the group’s comments. Its opening offers a clear assessment of Maines’ stage manner, but the excerpt stops before developing an account of the music, the audience response or the relationship between individual songs and the spoken reflections.

The available account therefore points to an anniversary presentation shaped partly by remembrance and political comparison, without supplying enough detail to reconstruct either element. The full review remains necessary to assess precisely what was said and how those moments fit within the shows; the supplied material gives no information about subsequent performances or future plans.