Easter Sunrise in Need of a Setting

For the second year in a row, the sun will rise Easter morning to an empty Hollywood Bowl because the famed Easter Sunrise Service there has once again been canceled due to unfinished construction, organizers said.

The traditions of doves flying from a lily-adorned stage and children in white robes forming a living cross will have to wait yet another year, said Norma Foster, president of the nonprofit organization that produces the nondenominational event.

The event has been held at the Hollywood Bowl since 1921. Thousands of families have made annual treks to the Cahuenga Pass site for a free program of prayer and music.

The bowl, summer home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, underwent a $25-million renovation last year to replace its deteriorating stage shell with a larger structure.

That blocked the 2004 Easter service. But several hundred people unaware of the cancellation turned up and were directed to a different service up the road at the Forest Lawn-Hollywood Hills cemetery. The same offer will be available this Easter, March 27.

A second round of work at the Bowl, this time on a new concession stand, led to this year’s cancellation said Mark Ladd, Hollywood Bowl assistant director of operations. He and Philharmonic officials said Friday that the construction had been long planned to start in November and continue through June and that the Easter service group was informed about that well in advance.

Service organizers, however, said they still had hoped that some accommodations would be made to safely conduct the Bowl service. They had lined up musical acts and were starting to think about which ministers, special readers and soloists to invite. But by late December, committee members decided to cancel the event when it became clear that construction would block the stage.

During Bowl renovations for five years in the 1990s, the service was held at other locations in Hollywood. There was not enough time to change the location this year, Foster said.

“A theme had been chosen, around peace,” Foster said. “But the way things are going in the world today, it will still be very appropriate for next year.”

Eddie Gibbs, a professor of church growth at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, said he worries that two consecutive cancellations might discourage people from attending future Easter services at the Hollywood Bowl.

“When you miss it twice, it begins to raise the question of whether it will start up again,” he said. “This has been a significant event in the life of Los Angeles for many decades. If we miss it next year it will be very hard to start again.”

The service, he said, “is the one time in the year on an annual basis that a large number of Christians from a wide range of cultures come together to celebrate this large event.”

Norma Oreskovich, 87, of Hancock Park has made the service an Easter tradition as both an organizer and attendee since the late 1950s.

“It is a spiritual inspiration,” she said. “You forget about self and you really have the feeling of your spirit being lifted.”

The event’s cancellation also means her son will not make his annual Easter trip from Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, to Los Angeles.

Maryann Mendenhall, 78, of Granada Hills has been singing with various choirs at the event since the 1970s. Although she looks forward to performing on the Bowl’s improved stage next year, she too is worried about a fall-off in attendance.

“I don’t like that,” she said. “People are going to get out of the habit of going if they go and they find that it’s not happening again.”

Sunrise service organizer Foster said the event will make a triumphant return next year on the Bowl’s new high-tech stage. “The shell and the dressing rooms were really substandard and it was time that it came down,” she said.

Her group has no intention of permanently moving elsewhere, Foster said. “Our name is the Hollywood Bowl Easter Sunrise Service,” she said. “We would never think of going anywhere else.”