Starting My Bowl Season Early (or The Little Mermaid Live)

Technically the season for the Hollywood Bowl hasn’t started yet, but they have started with their lease events. A little while back, I saw that they were going to do a screening of “The Little Mermaid” with live orchestration and celebrity singers! I was totally in! But sadly, tickets sold out for the 2 dates before I had a chance to buy them (well, technically some of the seats in the $250 range were left, but those aren’t in my budget). They had also announced an extra Monday show, but by then I just figured I wouldn’t be making it to this show.

Then I got an email about tickets on Goldstar for the event. I told my friend Dani about it and she was in! But when I went to Goldstar to look for tickets, there weren’t any. Again, I guessed I was out of luck. But for some reason, I decided to check Ticketmaster for tickets and by some miracle there were 2 tickets close together (but not next to each other) that weren’t totally out of my budget! I got those seats and Dani and I were so excited that we were going to be able to check out this show!

We met up and took the Bowl Bus together. But on our way there, another bus broke down so our already full bus had to fill up with another full bus load of passengers. At least it made the trip there an adventure.

Once we got to the Bowl, there were a bunch of cute photo set ups as you walked up the hill. But those all had crazy long lines, so we skipped those and I got this photo of the posters for the show.

Typically when I go to the Bowl, I bring food in with me. But because this was a lease event, there were extra restrictions on what you could bring in with you. So Dani and I decided just to order food there instead of bringing stuff in (we did bring in unopened water bottles because we didn’t want to spend $4 on a bottle of water). We got some burgers and fries and headed up to our seats.

We were about halfway up and over to the side, but being on the side was fine because the movie was screening on the big screens and we had a great view of those. And the people who had the seats between Dani’s seat and my seat were very nice and moved over so we ended up sitting next to each other.

The open act for the show was Susan Egan (the original Belle on Broadway) and Brad Kane (the singing voice for Aladdin). Brad Kane sounded exactly how he sounded when he recorded “Aladdin”. And Susan Egan was amazing and ended up singing “A Whole New World” with Brad Kane which was pretty awesome!

For the Monday show, Jodi Benson who did the voice for Ariel in the movie was performing as Ariel. For the other 2 shows, she did appear at the end for a special encore, but someone else performed as Ariel during the movie. It was pretty crazy to hear Jodi’s voice from when the movie was made in the speaking parts and then to have her come on stage to sing the songs. She sounded almost exactly the same as when she made the movie and I was just in awe listening to her.

The other main parts had a pretty all-star cast. I got to watch Darren Criss as Prince Eric, Tituss Burgess as Sebastian (he was having so much fun with the part!), Rebel Wilson as Ursula, and John Stamos as Chef Louis.

While the orchestra was playing the score when the movie was playing, I forgot about it because they sounded just like the movie sounds. They did such a perfect job and their performance was flawless (and as Dani mentioned, they had awesome stamina because they played for a long time!).

At the end of the show, they had fireworks. I’ve never been at the Bowl during fireworks so this was something pretty special for me to see.

Overall, it was a pretty amazing night! The show was so much fun and it was really a special event to get to see. I really wasn’t thinking I’d get a chance to see this show when it sold out so quickly originally, but I’m glad that not all the tickets were gone when I randomly looked online!

I’m planning on enjoying a couple of shows during the regular summer season of the Bowl too, but I haven’t gotten those tickets yet. But this was a pretty perfect way to kick off my summer show season!

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