Inside Bad Bunny’s historic Super Bowl halftime show

every time Dating back nearly 60 years, putting on a Super Bowl halftime show is getting tougher. Sometimes logistics are complicated by concerns about protecting the turf. On other occasions, some aspects of the show leak online, as happened last year before Kendrick Lamar’s performance. In the lead-up to Bad Bunny’s performance at Super Bowl LX, I wondered if concerns about the potential presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents at the Big Game would be the King of Latin Trap’s biggest obstacle.

It wasn’t. He was trying to fulfill Bad Bunny’s wish to turn the field at Levi’s Stadium into his home in Puerto Rico.

That was Bruce and Shelley Rodgers’ problem to solve. Their company, Tribe Inc., has been producing the show for nearly two decades, and the duo have become virtual experts at how to deliver increasingly complex theatrics during the allotted 26 minutes or so of a halftime show.

For Sunday’s performance, which fell in the middle of the Seattle Seahawks’ rematch against the New England Patriots, the case was gardening. Bad Bunny, whose real name is Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio, wanted his show to have the same look and feel as his recent residency in Puerto Rico, which covered the stages with palm trees and sugar cane to recreate the surroundings of Vega Baja, where he grew up.

In a different stadium, this can be done by rolling carts covered with these plants onto the field. But Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara uses natural grass; National Football League guidelines do not allow that many vehicles onto the field, because they could tear up the turf. The maximum a team could use was 25, and they needed these items for stages and other props.

Bruce Rodgers’ solution was simple: dress people like plants.

As viewers saw at halftime, Bad Bunny, who performed in an all-white outfit bearing a number and the word “Ocasio” on the back like a football jersey, was able to dance around the location he wanted — the casita, the vintage truck, the wedding stage — but the plants were alive in a way he might not have imagined. About 380 people wore costumes that made them look like long stalks of grass. If you’re wondering, the palm trees and static poles were put up in the same way the streetlights were put up in the Lamar Street scene from Super Bowl LIX. On Sunday, they reached the limit of 25 vehicles, equipped with so-called “turf tires,” and got everything safely on and off the field.