18 minute read
FEATURE
YEARS OF SPECTACLE
DANCERS FROM THE 1926 JULIUS CAESAR PRODUCTION POSE IN COSTUME (top) AND PERFORM ON STAGE (bottom)
Celebrating this historic season, the newly published Hollywood Bowl: The First 100 Years—written by Derek Traub and edited by Julia Ward and Robin Rauzi— draws on first-hand accounts and rarely seen photographs to answer the deceptively simple question: What makes the Hollywood Bowl, the Hollywood Bowl? The following has been edited for space and excerpted from the book’s fifth chapter, which explores the venue’s legacy of grand, over-thetop productions.
The Hollywood Bowl—a venue dedicated to music and democracy— ironically was inspired by a play about the fall of a democracy. Although its founders disagreed about many of the details of the Bowl’s origins, to a person, they all cited a spectacular 1916 production of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar as the event that sparked their dream for an outdoor venue in Hollywood.
Julius Caesar was performed on Friday, May 19, 1916, in Beachwood Canyon. An intensely ambitious group of theater lovers turned the Hollywood Hills into the Seven Hills of Rome for a one-night-only performance. Their production spared no expense, calling for a total of 5,000 actors to embody the armies. The Roman leaders were played by leading stars of the day. The entire complement of 35,000 tickets sold out in advance. It was the production’s jaw-dropping scale that encouraged the Bowl’s founders to seek out a space large enough to inspire a similar sense of wonder, which they eventually found about a mile west in Daisy Dell.
That 1916 production was almost certainly the most epic performance in the history of the city. An article in the Los Angeles Times set the scene: “The hills have been cleared of brush, the stage leveled, the seats laid out, the roads for the passage of troops of Caesar and Brutus have been built… Rome itself has been reproduced, as nearly as possible…Dancing girls, to the number of 500, will stand behind Caesar’s attendants when his army passes in review. It is intended that elephants, camels, and other animals be used in this procession. Actual combats between armies numbering into the thousands will be staged upon the hillsides. The mob scene will employ more than 1,500 men.”
All the characteristic features of a Hollywood Bowl spectacle can be traced back to Beachwood Canyon in 1916: the mixing of elaborately built sets and natural landscapes, casts composed of both professional and amateur performers, large troupes of dancers, choral singers numbering in the hundreds, and even the use of large and exotic animals. Julius Caesar inspired the Hollywood Bowl’s leaders to think big. They’ve been doing so ever since. When the 10th anniversary of that memorable Julius Caesar came around in 1926, the Hollywood Bowl’s leaders decided to re-create the grandeur of the 1916 production with a new Julius Caesar that would close the Bowl’s summer season.
H. Ellis Reed, intrepid builder and superintendent of the Bowl, led volunteers who constructed massive sets designed by architect Lloyd Wright (son of Frank Lloyd Wright). They stretched for more than a city block in length, centered around a Roman column that towered 75 feet into the air. Behind the stage, Reed built arches, colonnades, and bridges into the hillside, where armies would march and meet in battle. Advance notices in the Los Angeles Times warned patrons that there would be no parking available at the Hollywood Bowl that night. The Times stated, “Unshackled by traditional stage limitations, the production will utilize to the utmost the natural facilities offered by the Hollywood Bowl. … This novel method of Shakespearean stagecraft is made possible by the type of architecture and lighting that is being employed for the play.”
Longtime Hollywood Bowl lighting designer Otto K. Oleson mounted two bright spotlights to illuminate the sections of the hillside where the action was taking place. Wright’s stagecraft included an elaborate rigging system, enabling the sets to be dismantled and moved without long pauses for set changes. The cast included hundreds of high school ROTC students dressed as Roman warriors participating in the battle scenes, a choir, an orchestra, and 60 dancers from Russian-born choreographer Alexander Oumansky’s ballet school. Once again, Hollywood stars filled the leading roles, with Lon Chaney, then at the height of his fame, portraying the villain Cassius.
At the time of the Bowl’s founding, Los Angeles did not have a purposebuilt opera house. For nearly 30 years, the Bowl was a place where Southern California opera fans could focus their energies. They realized early on that the Bowl was in many ways an ideal venue for them—the natural acoustics were perfect for unamplified voices; the huge number of seats meant they could sell thousands of tickets, defraying the cost of what is normally a prohibitively expensive endeavor; and the idyllic setting lent itself perfectly to many canonical operas.
A SET FOR CARMEN UNDER CONSTRUCTION IN 1922
Early-20th-century productions of Aida performed in front of the Great Pyramid of Giza had sparked a global interest in outdoor, site-specific opera. Because of Spain’s cultural influence on Southern California, the Hollywood Bowl Association chose Georges Bizet’s Carmen as the first opera to be produced at the Hollywood Bowl. A community chorus of 350 singers was assembled, many of them of Spanish descent. The set’s Spanish-style buildings of plaster with tiled roofs were as reminiscent of California’s missions as they were of Seville, Spain, the setting of the opera.
Carmen was a collaboration between the Hollywood Bowl Association and the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, which put up more than $40,000 to get the one-night program off the ground. In addition to signing the artists, hiring creative leaders, and constructing sets, the Chamber’s investment went into re-grading the hillside and adding new bench seats to accommodate larger audiences. Carmen was scheduled for July 8, 1922 (three days before the first orchestral concert of the opening season of Symphonies Under the Stars), to coincide with a full moon, for ideal natural lighting to augment the rudimentary stage lights. The Pacific Electric Car ran special “Excursion” trains to bring patrons to and from the Bowl.
Three grand opera stars took the leading roles: tenor Edward Johnson, bass Henri Scott, and superstar soprano Marguerita Sylva, who was greeted as if she were a movie star by fans, reporters, and musicians from the American Legion Band when her train rolled into Union Station.
PERFORMERS ON STAGE AND ORCHESTRA BELOW FOR THE 1922 PRODUCTION OF CARMEN.
PORTRAIT OF THE CAST FOR THE 1934 PRODUCTION OF A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.
With Carmen as the starting point, the Hollywood Bowl Association continued to dream bigger and bigger. They also filled the opera void in Los Angeles by producing shows year-round at the Shrine Auditorium and Philharmonic Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles. Their greatest achievement would, however, occur at the Hollywood Bowl in 1934.
Once again, Bowl history was made with a production based on a Shakespearean play: renowned Austrian auteur Max Reinhardt’s staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, featuring the music of Felix Mendelssohn. Reinhardt was a leading director and theater manager of spectacle performances around the world who had founded the renowned Salzburg Festival with Richard Strauss in 1920. The Austrian thought the Dream was perfectly suited to the film capital of the world. “The theme is quite modern,” he smiled. “Oberon and Hippolyta think they are in love, so do Titania and Theseus. But they have a change of heart and an exchange of partners. That is like Hollywood, no?”
After the Symphonies Under the Stars season ended, Reinhardt and Weissberger’s team had less than three weeks to transform the Hollywood Bowl into his conception of the city and forest of Athens. His crew began at midnight after the last concert, first by removing the Bowl’s bandshell, which could be moved aside on railroad tracks at the time.
The stage—all 2,500 square feet of it—comprised a pond, artificial hills planted with grass, and a dozen oak trees brought from the forests of nearby Calabasas. Pacific Electric Car wires on Highland Avenue had to be temporarily taken down to move the mature oaks into the Bowl. A bridge was suspended from an adjacent hillside, 350 feet behind the stage. Court processions (with hundreds of extras) walked down it to enter the stage by torchlight. Thirty thousand electric lights were strung above the stage, the audience, and the hills to simulate fireflies.
Reinhardt’s casting was no less ambitious. He said he “struck gold” when he found Mickey Rooney, a 14-year-old actor who was perfectly suited to play Puck. When Gloria Stuart and her first understudy left the project just a week before the opening, second understudy Olivia de Havilland (age 18) became Hermia. Her love interest was played by movie star William Farnum, who had performed in the 1916 Julius Caesar.
Total attendance for the eight performances was 103,000. A who’s who of Hollywood celebrities were in the seats: Joan Crawford, Jean Harlow, Gloria Swanson, Mae West, William Powell, Theda Bara, Adolph Zukor, Harry Cohn, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Cecil B. DeMille, Darryl Zanuck, Dolores Del Rio, Sid Grauman, Samuel Goldwyn, Jack Warner, Ernst Lubitsch, and Marlene Dietrich.
The reviews of Reinhardt’s Dream were glowing. Critics cited not only the scale of the production, but the intimacy Reinhardt was able to create through the Bowl’s natural setting.
The Bowl was home to many spectacle-driven opera, ballet, and dance performances in the 1930s and beyond, but possibly the most thundering sounds yet heard at the Hollywood Bowl came in 1964, when The Beatles’ first Los Angeles appearance inspired screams so loud “they were like standing in a jet stream,” according to one fan in attendance.
With Beatlemania exploding across the country, the Fab Four’s concert sold out in an instant and drew 18,000 frenzied fans. The Beatles’ concert was seen and not heard, as the screams of fans drowned out the band’s instruments and voices. The noise could reportedly be heard echoing in the hills above the Bowl and down on Hollywood Boulevard below it. The symbolic importance of the Beatles choosing the Hollywood Bowl over the much larger Los Angeles Coliseum had a lasting impact. John Lennon said, “It was the one we all enjoyed most, I think, even though it wasn’t the largest crowd— because it seemed so important.”
The show was also important for the Hollywood Bowl itself, as it
MEMBERS OF THE BEATLES RUNNING BACKSTAGE AT THEIR 1965 CONCERT
(Photo by Otto Rothschild, courtesy of The Music Center)
JIMI HENDRIX REHEARSING ON STAGE IN 1968
(Credit Los Angeles Philharmonic Archives)
ovpened the door to the venue for the biggest names in rock and roll: Bob Dylan played there shortly after going electric in 1965, the year The Beach Boys also made their debut. Sonny & Cher, The Rolling Stones, Peter, Paul and Mary, and The Who all performed at the Bowl over the next few summers.
Jimi Hendrix brought a wall of amps so loud that their fabric covers peeled and ripped from the strain of the volume. The raucous concert led to one of the Hollywood Bowl’s most talked-about incidents. Bruce Geary, former drummer of The Knack and Los Angeles native, was there. “When [Jimi] Hendrix started playing “Purple Haze,” about 2,500 people rushed down to the front,” said Geary. “It got so crazy that I got pushed into the pool, and my camera was ruined. There must’ve been a hundred or more people in the water. At one point, someone was tugging on a microphone cord, and the microphone nearly fell in the water. Just as it was falling, Hendrix stopped it with his foot. I believe everyone would’ve been electrocuted, so he saved our lives."
Chaos continued to take hold at the Hollywood Bowl’s rock shows for the next handful of years, drawing the ire of county officials, the Bowl’s leadership, the venue’s neighbors, and its ushers, who were on the front lines. When The Doors made their debut at the Bowl in 1968, at the peak of their fame, the show was unfortunately scheduled for July 5. Music critic Pete Johnson wrote: “There were firecrackers left over from the previous day, so the evening was punctuated with detonations and pyrotechnics from self-appointed entertainers in the audience.”
The scale and spectacle of rock shows at the Bowl grew in the 1970s, but the growth was unsustainable. Because bands could break the Bowl’s rules and then leave without facing consequences, eventually the residents and civic stewards of the Bowl pushed back. If rock and roll was going to find a permanent home there, it would need to find promoters who would value the place, understanding its history of spectacle but also respecting the need to balance that level of production with the limitations of putting on concerts in a public park in a densely populated community.
In 1991, the LA Phil’s leaders formed a partnership with producers Bill Silva and Andrew Hewitt, who were given an exclusive, long-term contract for rock and pop shows at the Bowl. Hewitt and Silva developed a model for “lease events”—in which the LA Phil would sublease the venue for a certain number of nights each summer to Hewitt and Silva, who could produce popular concerts that were outside the purview of the LA Phil’s usual offerings.
The model worked. Hewitt and Silva, now Live Nation-Hewitt Silva, produce between 15 and 20 shows each summer, bringing to the venue top-tier acts from across the music world. Beyond the size of the venue, Bill Silva noted the Bowl’s “cachet” as its biggest draw for artists, saying, “What we find is the desire of artists to play here is so high that they’ll route their entire tours around it. They’ll set the L.A. show at the Bowl, then book the rest of North America. That happens frequently. I remember the first time Carlos Santana was here. At sound check he asked everybody to leave the stage, and he just walked around for ten minutes by himself. After, he said, ‘I could feel Miles out there.’”
In the last two decades, rock and pop performances have been by no means limited to lease events. Weekend spectacular shows frequently feature popular performers sharing the stage with the Bowl’s resident bands, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra. That dichotomy—which brings together close to 20,000 screaming fans and a symphony orchestra—is not a contradiction. It is the Hollywood Bowl’s signature. Then-Chief Operating Officer Arvind Manocha helped drive the expansion of the LA Phil’s offerings at the Bowl in the early 2000s, recalling,
“The breadth of the place is really the thing that I remember the most, and what I think makes the community’s relationship with the venue so vastly different than any other venue. You don’t feel like it’s really a classical music venue, and, once in a while, I get to go there for my thing. I think if you’re an indie rock person, you think it’s the greatest indie rock venue in L.A. If you’re a classical person, you’d think, ‘I love hearing the orchestra there.’ If you are a jazz person, you’d think ‘I love the jazz story of the Bowl.’ That’s clearly their focus. Everybody can feel that way because there’s room for everybody under that tent.”
In the 21st century, the Hollywood Bowl continued to grow as a locus for performances on a grand scale. When the Bowl’s shell was replaced in 2004 with a structure 30 percent larger, it became a state-of-theart venue and the possibilities for new types of performances were an invitation for creative minds. LA Phil Chief Executive Officer Chad Smith— who was responsible for orchestral programming at the Bowl that summer—collaborated with thenMusic Director Esa-Pekka Salonen on a production that kicked off the Bowl’s new future by looking into its past with a performance of Felix Mendelssohn’s incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, staged by the theater company A Noise Within.
Today’s stage directors at the Bowl, including Susan Stroman, Neil Patrick Harris, Kathleen Marshall, Adam Shankman, and Michael Arden, hail from the worlds of theater and film. They also must find creative ways to work around the busy schedule of the Hollywood Bowl’s summer season of concerts. Tech time is limited to Tuesday and Thursday nights. After the classical concerts end at about 10:15pm, the crew rushes on stage, working right up to a midnight deadline.
Costumers, choreographers, and lighting and set designers also work on an abbreviated timetable, doing the careful geometry of how to use the limited stage space to create a musical that will fill the Bowl’s amphitheater. Described as a mix between “summer stock and summer camp,” the rehearsals happen within an intense two weeks leading up to the show. Because the commitment is brief, film and television stars and in-demand Broadway actors are able to take on roles they had dreamed of playing but previously hadn’t had the time to do.
Brian Grohl began working with Bowl musical producer Steven Linder in 2004 and has watched as the scale and scope of the musicals has expanded. “When we started,” Grohl said, “we were doing the classic mid20th-century musicals, but in the 2010s we became more ambitious with the titles we selected, doing more modern musicals, building more extravagant sets, and casting a wider net to draw the incredible talent that we brought in both on stage and off.”
Oscar-winner Jeremy Irons starred as King Arthur in Camelot in 2005; a decade later Craig Robinson donned the crown as King Arthur in Spamalot. Reba McEntire and Brian Stokes Mitchell headlined South Pacific. Sutton Foster and Cheyenne Jackson went Into the Woods in 2019. In 2002, The Who’s Roger Daltrey heard about the Bowl’s upcoming production of My Fair Lady and immediately called his manager. The character of Eliza Doolittle’s father, Alfred, had always reminded him of his grandfather, and he knew this was his opportunity to play the part. He came in to meet with producers and, unprompted, sang the complete lyrics to “Get Me to the Church on Time.”
CAST MEMBERS LOOK ON AS ROGER DALTRY'S ALFRED DOOLITTLE IS KISSED IN THE 2003 PRODUCTION OF MY FAIR LADY
A CAVALCADE OF MUPPETS JOIN HOST BOBBY MOYNIHAN IN SONG WHEN THE MUPPETS TOOK OVER THE BOWL IN 2017.
The Hollywood Bowl’s artistic leadership also engineered a whole new kind of spectacular show starting in the 1990s—a Bowl “takeover” by the likes of the Looney Tunes, Sesame Street, The Simpsons, The Muppets, and Blue Man Group. These complex, elaborate productions are mounted in a performance space with no backstage, minimal wings, and a full orchestra taking up most of the stage.
To make it work, Grohl explained, “It’s about the music. Everything else, all the other production on top of that, is kind of icing on the cake. The Simpsons or The Muppets [had] not done a lot of live stage shows—for obvious reasons—but by getting them to focus on their music, we were able to go places they had never thought to go before.”
When The Simpsons came in 2014, the entire Bowl campus was transformed into Springfield—with characters spread throughout the Bowl, poking fun at the Bowl’s difficult parking or the indignity of a “high art” venue being taken over by cartoon mayhem. On stage, the stars of the show portrayed their characters for a live audience for the first time. Illustrious alumni of The Simpsons’ writers’ room, including Conan O’Brien, performed songs they’d penned. The Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles appeared as the iconic Stonecutters (a parody of the Freemasons). Audiences were dazzled by a flame-throwing sousaphone, and Hank Azaria’s beer-shilling character, Duffman, brought out the first T-shirt cannon army in Hollywood Bowl history.
True to form, The Muppets brought an even zanier energy to their 2017 weekend spectacular. Disney invested more than $1 million to create firstof-their-kind live performances, including showstopping numbers by Miss Piggy and Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem. Show writer Kirk Thatcher explained how they used the Bowl’s size and video screens to create a layered experience for the audience: The biggest question is, how do you hide the puppeteers? Because the Hollywood Bowl is so big, most people will watch it on the huge television screens they have set up around the stage—especially The Muppets. “Kermit is the size of your elbow to your hand, so basically you have a star who is 18 inches tall [and] the closest people will be to him is at least 25 feet away. … It’s a very involved type of live show with live music and pre-taped music, live video, and pre-taped video, live talking and singing plus pre-recorded elements, all coming together with Muppets and people who are dancing and singing and performing along with them. It’s insane. I mean it’s probably the hardest thing in some ways we’ve done, because it’s all done in real time. If there’s a mistake, you’ve got to keep going.”
Fortunately, the show went off without a hitch, from the opening with patriotic Sam the Eagle leading the audience in “The Star-Spangled Banner” to the fireworks finale set off by pyromaniac Muppet Crazy Harry.
As a performance space, the Hollywood Bowl is a challenge in every sense of the word, but one that artists continue to rise to, innovating as they go. After a century of showpieces, the Bowl continues to evolve, limited only by the imagination of the next generation of performers who bring their vision to it.
Excerpted from Hollywood Bowl: The First 100 Years by Derek Traub @ 2022 Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, reprinted with kind permission of the author.
Images from the Los Angeles Philharmonic Archives, except as noted. BLUE MAN GROUP TOOK OVER THE BOWL IN 2013
CONAN O´BRIEN PERFORMING AT 2014 SIMPSONS CONCERT
(Photo credit Greg Grudt/Mathew Imaging)
