Having a Blast at the Bowl

It’s remarkably quiet in the fireworks command center of the Hollywood Bowl. No booms. No bangs. Just the inaudible depression of a little red button.

Few people walking past the window of this concrete bunker lighting booth would suspect that the gentleman with the neatly trimmed white beard is triggering the pyrotechnics. But he is. And from here, Gene Evans can finally see what he’s been working on for days, weeks, months: an exploding display of light and color coordinated with live music.

Fireworks have become a hallmark of the Hollywood Bowl--particularly on the Fourth of July--in no small part because of Evans, the Bowl’s fireworks designer. He’s been blowing things up at the Bowl, in one capacity or another, since the first days of the Ernest Fleischmann era 29 years ago.

In the early days, showmen like Tommy Walker were the visionaries. “My place was to physically make it happen,” Evans said, even if that meant climbing 200-foot towers to place the fireworks or saving scaffolding from a wind storm.

In the decades since, Evans has developed a pyrotechnic vision all his own, and a repertoire that extends far beyond “Stars and Stripes Forever” and the “1812” Overture. Last year he choreographed fireworks to Ravel’s “Bolero,” for instance, and in 1994 to Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition.” This season he’s working on four brand-new programs, set to such music as the overture to “Gypsy” and Tchaikovsky’s “Marche Slave.”

The process begins in early spring with a wish list from John Mauceri, conductor of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra. He looks for music with obvious rhythmic components, especially ones that suggest visual images. “The fact that it should be loud most of the time goes without saying,” Mauceri said.

Mauceri and Evans comb through the choices to select points at which fireworks would be fitting. “He’s a really serious guy,” Mauceri said. “When we talk, we talk like two serious artists who are looking for a successful collaboration.”

All things being equal, Bowl marketing director Michael Buckland said, the fireworks do add up to success. Tacking fireworks onto a program usually puts an additional 1,000 people in the audience. But all things are rarely equal. Fireworks are restricted to weekend performances, when attendance is already higher, and accompany traditionally popular programs. The 17 concerts that will have fireworks this year--out of 66 total--include pops concerts such as Broadway ’98 and popular classical programs of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky.

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It’s up to Evans--who doesn’t read music--to translate the works into Roman candles, sparklers or whatever else he can come up with.

“I’ll listen to literally hundreds of hours of the same music,” Evans said. “Sometimes they come very quickly and other times they don’t. I may get the bulk of a show in a week and then the rest--a one- or two-minute segment--may take another couple of weeks.”

As the ideas form, he jots down notes--hieroglyphics, he calls them--to convey what type of pyrotechnic device matches up with what kind of sound. Arrows, squiggly lines and miniature fountains stand in for technical names.

He works to match visuals to sounds, not just cymbal crashes. If he can’t find a firework to do what he wants, he’s been known to have one built. It’s such details and accents, he says, that make a show appear perfectly choreographed.

The results have paid off--not only in higher attendance. “I have caught competitors here in the Bowl. That happened more than once,” he said. “I think everybody agrees that I really concentrate on details. That’s what make the difference here at the Bowl.”

Much of that detail work is in the timing, a process that starts with Evans using a stopwatch against the recording he used for inspiration. He compiles a list of exact times when the fireworks should be ignited and wires the explosives to go off in that order.

If orchestras were as predictable as compact discs, his work would be nearly finished. Computers and specialized software have made synchronizing fireworks to recorded music an automated process. But the tempo of a live performance will inevitably be different from the recording.

Enter Laura Spino. As the artist liaison for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, she’s the one who follows the musical score and keeps Evans on track. They tape-record Friday’s rehearsal--as close as they can get to the real thing--and then mark the score with the specific cues, which she will call out during the performance. Everything must correspond precisely. A dropped cue will throw the whole program off.

It’s not that Evans doesn’t know the music backward and forward by now. But, he says, he has a tendency to tunnel vision. And if something goes wrong--sparks from one pyrotechnic set off another one prematurely, for instance--Spino keeps Evans’ firing finger going while his brain works out a solution to the problem.

Unfortunately, the Hollywood Bowl is the kind of venue that’s prone to problems--primarily because there’s very little space. All the devices are launched from cramped platforms attached to the convex backside of the Bowl, and they explode right away, not when they’re high in the air. Those two factors increase the risk of premature ignition. Evans has to keep the explosions low, first, so the patrons in the front of the Bowl can see them and, second, to keep burning debris from landing in the dry brush surrounding the Hollywood Bowl.

Even if the fireworks detonate without a hitch, another problem can descend in the form of smoke--thick, gray choking smoke. Two giant red fans flank the stage to steer the smoke away from the audience. But, Evans said, if Mother Nature wants the air to move into the Bowl, the smoke will follow.

Given all that, the members of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra have to be extremely good sports, Mauceri said. “We have fires close to us and smoke and it’s hard to hear,” he said. “Wind instruments and brass have to breathe in a controlled way, and if the air is mixed with gunpowder, it’s hard to keep playing. And since the string instruments are made of wood, there’s always that fear of being close to fire.”

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On the day of the show, Evans, who will concede only that he is of “retirement age,” is at the Hollywood Bowl before 7 a.m. Along with his crew of fireworks junkies--who are everything from firemen to elementary school teachers in their real lives--Evans hauls canisters and set pieces up the long ladders and stairs to the Bowl’s peak.

“I’m of the school that if you don’t do it, you can’t expect the troops to do it,” he said. They won’t finish cleaning up until nearly 1 a.m. Only in recent years has Evans opted for a night in a local hotel rather than drive an hour home to Anaheim.

An hour before launch, the crew hauls out green and white tarps to drape over cars parked close to scaffolds that hold the fireworks.

They pull out the fire extinguishers, just in case.

In the lighting booth, Evans and Spino don headsets so they hear the music without the delay caused by the distance from the stage. She opens her score. He pulls out his list of explosions. And when Mauceri gives the downbeat, they are ready.

Said Mauceri: “It is one of the technical wonders of the world that we can do that at an amphitheater in the middle of the city.”