Hollywood Bowl – October 26, 2025
I have been avoiding this show for years because I knew it would be teeming with kids. I wasn’t wrong. But I got $30 tickets, so it was a risk I was willing to take. I took the Culver City bus as usual and the only problem I had was that I bought a ticket for Saturday’s show by mistake. Oops! At least that was only a $12 mistake. When I mentioned it to the Bowl staff guy, he laughed and said they probably wouldn’t have even noticed. I had played it safe and bought a ticket for the correct night, so I didn’t need to take that chance. Julie got there pretty early and was craving a burger so we actually bought food at the Bowl. We NEVER do that. The burger was $19 which is actually a pretty fair price for a burger. Fries were another $7.50 and I got a $16 grilled cheese sandwich. It came with grilled onions, but still $16 seemed excessive. The fries were really good. The burger and grilled cheese were meh.
We were two seats in from the aisle. At some point I realized that the reason I didn’t get the aisle seats is that they were more expensive. No one else wanted to pay extra for aisle seats so no one was sitting next to us. That was pretty nice. The show began with Greg Proops hosting a costume contest. There was a little girl maybe 4 or 5 years old dressed as Sally Patches who won on cuteness alone. It was kind of sad for the others because there were some spectacular costumes. One group came as characters from the movie (the mayor, the scientist, etc.) and did an excellent job. And there was one kid who came as Danny Elfman. We were both rooting for him. When he didn’t win, I suggested we take solace in the fact that he was on the stage at the Hollywood Bowl so there was a chance that when they led him offstage he was able to meet Danny Elfman and maybe even take a selfie. How fun would that be?
The orchestra took their places and conductor John Mauceri led them through the Carl Stalling composition accompanying the Skeleton Dance cartoon. Then onto the overture before the performers made their way to the stage. They showed concept art while the overture played. The townsfolk parts were sung by Randy Crenshaw, Angie Jaree, Greg Proops, Fletcher Sheridan and Baraka May. They were all fantastic. When Danny Elfman took the stage the 10 years he’s been doing Nightmare live really showed. It’s been honed to perfection – the projections, the orchestrations – everything just worked together so well. This is his show and he runs it really, really well. He hand selects the singers for Lock, Shock and Sally. This year it was John Stamos, Riki Lindhome and Janelle Monet. Janelle Monet was the weakest of those three but was still very good. Because Ken Page passed away in 2024, Keith David sang the part of Oogie Boogie and he was wonderful.
There was an intermission and at the end of it, Sandy Cameron performed a violin solo, which was interesting. It made the kids in my section a little fidgety. At the end Nightmare we stuck around for the special encore that had been built up several times throughout the night. I was pretty sure that would be Dead Man’s Party. It was, and then was followed by No One Lives Forever.
Despite “those people” who always seem to be at the Bowl, it was a fun evening. The people in front of us would have done well to stay home and watch Nightmare in their living room. They brought their 2 kids who would not sit still and were constantly switching seats and needing to go to the bathroom. One of them got a nosebleed. Good grief. And the people behind us kept kicking our seat. At one point I turned around to ask the kid to stop kicking my seat and at that point realized it was the mother who was the kicker.
Am I glad I went? Absolutely. Would I do it again? Probably not.