Since becoming the toast of the Coachella Festival in April performing his first rock concerts in decades, Danny Elfman has been a little cagey about some of the questions fans had on their minds about future live plans — namely: Might he take that show on the road, or at least repeat it in some fashion? And would there be any “Nightmare Before Christmas” shows in L.A. again this year?
Answers to both those questions came — in conjoined fashion — when Elfman announced Monday that he will be doing two shows at the Hollywood Bowl this fall … on Halloween weekend, when “Nightmare” gigs would traditionally go down, if they were going to. That can probably be counted as a win for everyone, as the Oct. 28-29 timing of the concerts serves as a promise that the singer-songwriter-film-composer will be working some material from the 1993 stop-motion classic into his set list. If Jack Skellington showed up at Elfman’s Coachella gigs (as pictured above), it’s fairly certain he’s a lock for the Bowl.
Tickets go on sale Friday at 10 a.m. PT through Ticketmaster. An American Express cardholder presale begins Tuesday at 10 a.m. and runs through 10 p.m. Thursday night.
The official subtitle for Elfman’s fall Bowl gigs is: “From Boingo to ‘Batman’ to ‘Big Mess’ to Beyond!” The first of those references is to Oingo Boingo, the Elfman-led band that put on fondly remembered annual Halloween appearances at the Universal Amphitheatre in the ’80s on through to the early ’90s. The last of them is to his 2021 double-album “Big Mess,” Elfman’s first rock album since the breakup of Boingo in the ’90s. The mention of “Batman” is an indication of how the film scoring he’s focused on almost exclusively in the 21st century will figure into the shows. A press alert mentions “Alice in Wonderland,” “Edward Scissorhands” and “The Simpsons” as being among the films or TV shows whose scores or songs will be featured in the concerts along with “Batman” and “Nightmare” music.
The shows are likely to closely mirror the hybrid concerts that Elfman put on over successive weekends at Coachella, with a release stating that he’ll be employing the same band, orchestra and choir that he had at the festival in April.
The two concerts are being presented by Live Nation-Hewitt Silva and the Bowl.
Asked by PvNew in a May interview about his “Doctor Strange” score if he intended to continue doing “Nightmare Before Christmas” concerts (for Halloween 2021, he presided over two such shows at L.A.’s Banc of California Stadium instead of the Bowl), Elfman said, “You know, I did reach that point where I go, ‘You know what? This is fun.’ And I only have to do it a couple of times a year, so I’m not sick of it yet. There is that point where I get sick of something, and I’m always looking for my escape hatch, after being in a band for a number of years and going, ‘Where’s my escape door here?’ But I can see doing it, yeah, a few more times. So I don’t think it’s over yet.”
