DANNY ELFMAN – Live @ Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles (10/28/2022)

Danny Elfman Has a Very Happy, Sweetly Menacing Homecoming at the Hollywood Bowl: Concert Review – By Chris Willman, Variety, October 30, 2022

The film “Smile” has nothing on Danny Elfman. Back in the day of Oingo Boingo, he’d frequently adopt a demonic grin that you could easily imagine having become a belated inspiration for the horror movie hit. He hasn’t had much opportunity to show us those choppers in the 27 years since he wrapped up a Boingo farewell tour and took to movie scoring stages full-time. But when he released a music video for his rock comeback single “Happy” last year, there the smile was, back in action and distorted into something even creepier for the new digital age.

When he played at Coachella over two weekends this past April and doffed his shirt, onlookers took note of his buffness and how he’d been, well, taking care of himself, to say the least. Fortunately, maybe even more importantly, he’s taken good care of his evil grin, too.

At his two sold-out Hollywood Bowl shows over the weekend, Elfman started out the 115-minute set shirtless, after previously characterizing his mid-set stripping down at Coachella as a spontaneous act that occurred as he got revved up in the manic energy. And so, as he frequently appeared in closeup on the Bowl’s big screens — although not as often as you might expect, given how extensive the show’s sorta-scary visual companion pieces were — there was a good chance you found yourself hoping for edits long enough to study a full torso’s worth of  tats, many of which were in the macabre vein he visually favors, along with… wait, was that a lovely collie tattooed on his left pec? Yes, sure enough, a collie. Elfman’s not all about the skeltons, or the Skellingtons.

During Saturday’s set, there wasn’t much time or need for distractions, with nary a breath taken between most of the 32 selections and thrill-ride hypertension characterizing nearly all of them. But if you did allow your mind to wander, you might have let yourself remember how long it’s been since did anything like this — at least for his contemporaries in town, versus the kids who saw the first ineration of his comeback out in the desert last spring — and how unfamiliar some of the film industry folks he works with must be with his distant past as a rocker. Had he guest-listed some of the string players and other musicians he employs in his symphonic film work? (That is, the ones who were not already on stage as part of his mini-orchestra and choir?) Now that they were seeing one of Hollywood’s busiest and seemingly friendliest composers reborn as a maniac… were any of them scared of him now, just a little? [+]

0:00:00 [01] Sorry 0:05:19 [02] Insects 0:08:20 [03] Main Title (from Spider-Man) 0:11:01 [04] Native Intelligence 0:15:19 [05] Nothing to Fear (But Fear Itself) 0:18:39 [06] Breakfast Machine (from Pee-wee’s Big Adventure) 0:20:37 [07] Just Another Day 0:24:59 [08] Grey Matter 0:30:59 [09] Jack’s Lament (from The Nightmare Before Christmas) 0:32:00 [10] This Is Halloween (from The Nightmare Before Christmas) 0:35:02 [11] What’s This? (from The Nightmare Before Christmas) 0:36:14 [12] Devil Take Away 0:39:28 [13] Insanity 0:43:30 [14] The Batman Theme 0:47:45 [15] True 0:51:48 [16] Dance With the Lemurs 0:56:06 [17] Main Titles (from Beetlejuice) 0:58:22 [18] Main Titles (from Mars Attacks!) 1:00:39 [19] Everybody Loves You 1:06:57 [20] Kick Me 1:09:09 [21] The Simpsons Theme 1:10:56 [22] Only a Lad 1:14:14 [23] Ice Dance / The Grand Finale (from Edward Scissorhands) 1:17:38 [24] In Time 1:21:54 [25] Wild Sex (In the Working Class) 1:25:12 [26] Main Titles (from Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness) 1:27:11 [27] Ain’t This the Life 1:30:39 [28] Happy 1:34:14 [29] Alice’s Theme (from Alice In Wonderland) 1:38:12 [30] Dead Man’s Party 1:43:26 [31] Who Do You Want to Be 1:46:27 [32] No One Lives Forever