Thinking upon it, I'd say Eric Gillette would be pretty good to cover some of JP's parts, as well, swapping out with Haken's guitarist. Eric's got some mean chops, and if you've heard either of his solo albums, he's got a JP-esque sound and tone, as well as writing style and chops. I'd be surprised if Mike didn't get Eric to play at least just a LITTLE bit of the suite.
One thing I did just think of, though, is that if we get a nice, high-quality recording of this concert, we'll finally get a consistent, full version of the suite. I had always hoped that somewhere down the line, maybe via YtseJamRecords or even from MP himself, that there'd be a remastered set of the suite, mixed together and done up with proper crossfades and segues and such, but now that he's going to perform it live, at least once that is, we'll get that. Sure, it won't be DT, but it'll be one whole performance, so that's something, right?
Either way, being a career retrospective concert, I can't imagine it being any longer than 3 hours, and so already one-third of that is taken up by the 12 Step Suite, which will likely cover his Dream Theater-portion of his career (although he might throw in The Ytse Jam, The Best Of Times, or even A Change OF Seasons, among other MP-penned tracks).
This leaves me wondering what other portions of his career he will, and won't feature. With Neal on board (literally), he'll likely do some medley of Neal's solo music, and/or a medley of Transatlantic music, not to mention Flying Colors as well (honestly, between Mike and Neal, they could fill out 2 more hours of music just between those three bands).
There's also stuff from LTE and OSI, which would be neat to see, but I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't feature either of them. Then there's also A7X and Adrenaline Mob, for as brief as they were for him, and of course, his "main" band, The Winery Dogs, though I don't know if all three of them will be on the cruise.
It would be neat if Mike managed to play 1 song from each year of his career, though that would mean anything from the 80's to 1997 would all be Dream Theater music, and considering he's already allotted 2002-2009 for the 12 Step Suite, I doubt he'd do that. He could also perform 50 songs, but if that were true, he'd have to pick some VERY SHORT ones if he wanted the concert to be shorter than 5 hours (especially since the suite of 5 songs already reaches close to an hour).
-Marc.