A Night At The Bowl (or Combining Several Of My Favorite Things)

The Hollywood Bowl doesn’t officially open for the season for a few more weeks, but when it’s not the regular season they do still have lease events. I don’t usually go to the lease events, but when I see something I’m interested in I try to get tickets. So when I heard that they would be doing a screening of “Beauty And The Beast” with live orchestration and singers, I knew that would be a fun event to go to. And of course, I asked my Disney friends if they wanted to come with me and they did! When you mix Disney, musicals, and going to the Bowl you know it’s going to be a great time!

I was in charge of getting our show tickets and found seats in the first row of a section in the very back. I don’t mind sitting in the back but getting seats at the front of a section are the best! You have a concrete barrier in front of you that is perfect to use as a table for the food you bring with you. And we all got lots of random food to have a pretty epic picnic there!

We took the Bowl bus to get there, but because we are used to going on weekdays when there is rush hour traffic we got to the Bowl before it was open! We waited outside the security area for a little while before they started letting people in. This was the first time I got there before we could go in and it was a nice change from feeling rushed to get to our seats. We had to go all the way to the top to get to our section, but they had a few different photo spots and we found one that didn’t have a line so we took advantage of that.

When we got to our section, we were all so surprised about how empty it looked! I’ve never seen it look so empty unless I’m there when they don’t have a show and it was nice not feeling squished as we got to our seats and sat down.

We had over an hour before the show started so we took our time getting out all the food we brought for the picnic and enjoying the food. We had way more than what we needed, but it was all so delicious! We had various types of chips and garlic dip, goat cheese, olives, fruit, veggies, and desserts. We tried to only take out a few things at a time, but we ended up just stacking most things on the barrier in front of us so we could all pick and choose what we wanted. It ended up being perfect and we were all just so happy sitting back, enjoying the food, having good conversation, and getting excited for the show to start.

This show was similar to how “The Little Mermaid” Live was done. The movie played but the orchestra on stage played all the music. And whenever there was a song they had celebrity singers playing the various characters. But what was different and really amazing with this show was how they utilized the venue. There is a border around the stage area and they did projection mapping on that area that matched what was on screen in the movie.

It was so fun to see what they added around the stage and it really did add to the movie. It was just a nice special touch that made this event even more unique that it normally is. This is already one of my favorite Disney movies and getting to watch it in this setting was awesome. And whenever they had the celebrities singing it was even better!

There were a lot of fun and different touches that they did with the songs. You could tell that the cast had a lot of fun and since there are different puns and double entendres they were taking advantage of that. There were a few added jokes that I missed, but all the ones that I caught were funny.

While I’ve seen the movie recently, for some reason I thought there were more songs and the movie was longer. When intermission happened I was pretty surprised that we were already halfway through the movie. And there weren’t as many times that the singers were out and singing live. There were still a lot of times to get to watch the singers and have it be more than just a screening of a movie, but it was much less than I expected. It’s not a bad thing, just something that surprised me (and my friends agreed).

When the show was done, it was the typical madhouse to get down to the area where the buses get us. There is a time limit to how long you can take to get to the buses, but I have yet to miss one. And the worst case is that we miss it and get an Uber or Lyft to take us back to where we parked our cars at the bus pickup. But even with all the crowds and making a stop to go to the bathroom before getting to the bus, we were there with plenty of time.

I don’t have any other tickets for the Bowl yet this summer, but I’m hoping I’ll make it back to at least one or two shows this summer. There are so many times I just get tickets last-minute and I think I need to do that more often. I have lots of evenings free and I could go get a cheap ticket to watch one of the jazz or classical shows. It’s just something different in my routine that makes an evening feel a bit more special.

But I’m glad I made it out for this show because it was a really great night out and helped to get me to feel more like me. I’m slowly busting out of this funk that I’m in (more on that later this week) and I’m glad that I had this show to help out with that!

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