Every summer I say that I’m going to try to get out to the Hollywood Bowl more often but it usually doesn’t happen. Typically I’ll make it to one show a season, which is still awesome and I know how lucky I am to do that. And when I went to the “Beauty And The Beast” show I thought that might be my one show this season. Of course I had my eye on a few other shows I might want to check out, but I never made any plans for anything.
Every summer at the Bowl they do one musical. I usually see when those are announced and try to find anyone who might want to go with me. This season they announced that they would be doing “Annie” and I thought it would be a fun show to check out. I’ve seen the different movie versions but I don’t believe I’ve ever seen the musical staged. But after asking around when the season was announced, I didn’t think too much of it again because I had other things on my mind.
But then an acquaintance of mine announced on social media that they had been cast in the show and I was motivated again to see if I could find someone to go with me. My friend Dani was free and I looked online for tickets. It was so close to the date I figured we’d have some not-so-great seats. I was looking in the back sections since we wanted to look at the cheap seats and I happened to find 2 seats in the first row of one of those sections! The first row is the best since you have the concrete barrier to use as a table and I was so excited to find those seats at the price level we wanted to be at!
The day of the show we met at the Bowl Bus location and we each brought different things for our picnic. We had cheeses, meats, crackers, fruit, veggies, desserts, and water. I think we might have brought too much food, but that’s ok. The ride to the Bowl wasn’t too bad, it’s so much easier doing the bus there so we don’t have to think about it and we can just goof off and catch up on the ride. And traffic wasn’t that bad either considering it was rush hour. We were at the Bowl pretty quickly and went up to our seats.
We were in the very back, but our seats were very centered and we were excited about that!
As you can see from my photo, the section in front of ours was almost empty. It was weird, almost all the sections at that level were empty. We thought about just moving down and hoping those seats would stay empty, but we decided to not do it since it would be annoying if we had to move again and for all we knew a ton of people would show up late. We would regret that decision.
Our section seemed to be filled with a student group from a foreign exchange program. They were loud and many of them were playing noisy games on their phone before the show started, but we figured they’d quiet down when the lights went down and the performers came out. We were wrong. A few of them were quiet, but most of them kept talking and it was difficult to hear the performers. We could hear the songs ok, but the dialogue was harder to hear because of all the people around us talking. There was another group sitting in our row who was just as annoyed as we were with the talkers and they tried to quiet them down too. But nothing helped and the frustration just kept building. But as soon as intermission started, we grabbed everything and went down to the empty section in front of ours.
The second half of the show was a much better experience. Not only were we away from all the chatty and rude people, my acquaintance was in the second half! I tried to take photos of him singing, but it was too tough to do that with how far back we were and I wanted to focus on his performance and not on taking photos. But it was so exciting to see someone I know on the stage at the Bowl! I’m pretty sure this was the first time I knew someone in a show there!
Excluding the rude people in the section we sat in for the first half, I had a really great time at the show. It was a slightly different take on “Annie” than I expected. Some of that could be due to it being the staged version versus the movies. But also the closing song this time was actually the opening song to the sequel to “Annie”. The only reason I knew that was when I was in high school I thought I bought the CD soundtrack to “Annie” when in fact it was the soundtrack to “Annie Warbucks” which is the second show. It was crazy that I recognized the song since it probably had been at least 18 years since I had heard it.
When the show was done, we made our way back down to where the Bowl Bus picks us up. It was much easier leaving this time compared to other times I have been there because the section was empty and there weren’t a ton of people trying to leave through the same walkway at one time. And as always, the ride home was easy and stress-free.
There are still a few shows I’d love to go to before the Bowl season is over, but I’m not totally sure I’ll make it to any of them. But maybe I’ll luck out with another last minute purchase like I did this time!
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