The chairman of the American Cinematheque, which for 23 years owned and programmed the 101-year-old movie palace, had just spent a few hours inside the freshly renovated theater, and he was beaming.

“I thought it was terrific,” Nicita said, standing in the forecourt of the theater. “I mean, I’ve seen prospective photographs, but that never does the trick.

“It felt right,” he said. “That’s what it was. It’s an imagining of how an old movie palace should be now.”

The Egyptian Theatre reopens Thursday, Nov. 9 with a special screening of “The Killer,” followed by a Q&A with director David Fincher.

That film is a Netflix production, and its arrival at the Egyptian reflects the 2019 purchase of the theater by Netflix and the subsequent $70 million restoration of this cinematic landmark and living piece of Hollywood history.

As Netflix co-chief executive Ted Sarandos explained on stage at the Egyptian for a press preview on Monday, Nov. 7, the streaming giant bought the theater from the American Cinematheque in 2019 but will share its screen with the non-profit.

Netflix will use the Egyptian to release its movies, hold premieres and special events during the week. A Netflix store, selling merch from Netflix shows such as “Stranger Things,” “Bridgerton,” and “Squid Games” has already opened in one of the retail storefronts built on one side of the courtyard with the theater in 1922.

The American Cinematheque, now free of the expense of maintaining the theater, will program its eclectic mix of classic, art, and rare and restored films – often accompanied by in-person talks and Q-and-As – on the weekends.

“Welcome back to the Egyptian Theatre,” Sarandos said at the start of the preview, which also featured as speakers Nicita, Scott Stuber, head of Netflix Films, and Angus Wall, the director of a new Netflix short film on the history of the Egyptian.

“One hundred years ago in the silent film era, it was home to the first Hollywood premiere, the first red carpet,” he said. “Charlie Chaplin, Audrey Hepburn, and Marlon Brando sat in the seats where you’re sitting.”

Even before the renovation, watching a movie at the Egyptian could feel like time-traveling back to the era of silent films, the early talkies, the Golden Age of Hollywood, or the films of one’s youth, depending on which film was screening that night.

Now it feels the same, only it looks and sounds better than ever before.

“As you can see, the Egyptian really was a magical place,” Stuber said at the conclusion of Wall’s film, “Temple of Film: 100 Years of the Egyptian Theatre.”

“We want to make sure it entertains and inspires film lovers for another century, just like it did the last hundred.”

Inside the restoration

Architect Peyton Hall of Historic Resources Group in Pasadena served as the historic consultant on the renovation. After the public presentation, we walked with him from the theater to the forecourt to talk about what it took to bring the Egyptian out of the past and make it ready for the future.

The Egyptian Revival architecture and decoration of the original theater remain, Hall said. The original walls and ceilings are the same, the painted designs have been cleaned and retouched as needed.

“There’s a lot of authenticity,” Hall says. “Both in terms of the original elements and things that have been recreated or preserved in place.”

On the arch above the stage, the most ornate of the original design elements – an Egyptian scarab beetle, a disc that represents the sun above its pincers – gleams brightly. A sunburst design spreads across the ceiling from it, all of it the original precast plaster pieces that artisans fastened to the ceiling more than a century ago.

“The sunburst is a screen that hid the pipe organ,” Hall says, pointing out the circular opens through which pipes from the organ in the theater attic once blasted music over the audiences below. “So your sound was coming from up there. And you were probably having an experience of shaking in your seat.”

Much of the renovation will never be seen by moviegoers. The entire foundation of the building was removed and rebuilt. The concrete-framed walls were filled to strengthen them to today’s earthquake retrofit standards. Those things, while costly and critical to the safety of the building and those in it, don’t change the moviegoing experience.

But the project also replaced much if not most of the audio and visual capabilities of the theater, Hall says. Some of it simple but important – changes to the lobby and entrances to the theater now will block all outside light and sound, such as the sirens that used to be audible inside the theater as firetrucks raced past on Hollywood Boulevard.

Because the Egyptian was built for silent films with live accompaniments its acoustics were never good, Hall says. Now, with speakers suspended and angled on cables above the 516 seats of the theater, the Egyptian sounds better than ever it has.

The renovation also removed the balcony and a small second theater to streamline and restore its layout closer to the 1922 design. The projection booth, while upgraded multiple times over the life of the theater, was rebuilt at a better angle for projecting images on the screen.

A high-tech control room allows projectionists to deliver state-of-the art pictures and sound. The addition of a projector and safeguards to allow the screening of silver nitrate film – an early film stock so volatile it can self-ignite – now makes the Egyptian one of only five theaters in the United States that can show such films.

Outside the theater, its neon sign rises over Hollywood Boulevard, while inside the courtyard, the original fountain has been restored in the exact spot where it originally stood, with water cascading down the original turquoise tiles.

Historically Hollywood

The lobby walls between the doors into the theater now feature displays on the history of the Egyptian and its history in Hollywood. And what a glorious history it was when the Hollywood pictures – and promotional razzmatazz – were big.

The photographs and display placards show the Egyptian’s role in those days.

When director John Ford’s silent western “The Iron Horse” played the Egyptian in 1924, a full-sized steam locomotive from the film was parked on railroad tracks in the forecourt. Two years later, the Douglas Fairbanks silent film “The Black Pirate” brought a pirate ship into the forecourt.

In another display case, a poster of the 1922 film “Robin Hood,” also starring Fairbanks, pays tribute to the film that opened the Egyptian Theatre on Oct. 18, 1922, and in doing so, became the first-ever Hollywood premiere.

At some point early in its history, showman Sid Grauman ordered Egyptian-ish costumes for his usherettes. A hand-tinted photograph of them in front of the hieroglyphics and Egyptian pharaohs on a theater wall is delightful, as are the photographs of Fairbanks and Grauman hamming it up in the theater for publicity photos before it opened.

Some images make you miss what was lost in the decades since it opened. While the scarab ornamentation and sculpted sunburst on the ceiling are spectacular, they once towered over a frame around the stage and screen that replicated the Egyptian patterns and designs that still existed on the walls outside the theater.

Still, there’s a feeling here, Nicita says, that can’t be matched by almost any other cinema.

“I truly think that it’s a sensory thing,” he says. “It’s not just the visual, which is state of the art, but that can be duplicated. Not just the audio, which also is great but that be done.

“What you can’t duplicate is the aura,” Nicita says. “The feeling when you sit down and you look and you listen. Then you kind of go, ‘Oh. Oh. Here I am.’ It’s time traveling.”

Coming attractions

The Egyptian Theatre is located at 6712 Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. It reopens on Nov. 9 with a sold-out screening of “The Killer,” a new Netflix movie directed by David Fincher.

Nov. 10-21: The American Cinematheque Presents: Ultra Cinematheque 70 Fest 2023. Screenings in the widescreen 70mm format including “Alien,” which premiered at the Egyptian in May 1979, “Alphaville,” in a newly restored version of French director Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 sci-fi film, “Spartacus,” “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Boogie Nights,” and “Lawrence of Arabia.”

Nov. 21-Dec. 7: “Maestro,” the biopic on conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, starring and directed by Bradley Cooper with Carey Mulligan.

Dec. 5: “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” a short film by Wes Anderson, and a selection of other shorts curated by Anderson.

Dec. 8-14: A selection of classic films including the Los Angeles premieres of restorations of “Days of Heaven” and “L’Amour Fou,” a 50th-anniversary screening of “Don’t Look Now,” and the world premiere of a new 4K restoration of “Lone Star,” followed by a Q-and-A with director John Sayles.

Dec. 15-21: The exclusive 70mm run of director Zack Snyder’s new space opera “Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child Of Fire .”

Dec. 22-24: The holiday classic “It’s a Wonderful Life” screened in a 35mm print.

For more: See Egyptiantheatre.com for information on the theater, film series and special engagements. See Americancinematheque.com for information on its screenings at the Egyptian as well as programming at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica and the Los Feliz 3 in Los Feliz.

“My research skills as a filmmaker go no further than checking the newspaper,” he says, laughing. “Here’s somebody doing an incredible humanitarian relief effort, but in the United States, where you might not expect it’s needed.

“But he has this incredible backstory, whereby he’s an English public school boy who fled his stuffy school to become an Amazonian cowboy, and was later discovered by U.S. wildlife TV producers.

“And then he has an epiphany.”

Brock, who died in 2018 at 82, was nearing 50 when he realized the rugged life he’d led – cowboying on the massive Dadanawa Ranch in Guyana, cohosting “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom,” and starring in a series of low-budget adventure films – no longer brought him satisfaction.

In 1985, Brock left all that behind to found Remote Area Medical, a healthcare non-profit that brought free medical, dental and vision care to those who might otherwise never have it.

“Medicine Man: The Stan Brock Story,” is the documentary film Angell made over years of filming Brock and RAM volunteers and patients, at pop-up clinics across the United States. It debuts in 700 movie theaters around the country with a special one-night screening on Nov. 14 before it eventually becomes available to viewers on other platforms.

“I straight away realized that this was the sort of person who could carry a documentary film about healthcare, and give it some form of entertainment aspect where he had this incredible story behind him to explain his motivation,” Angell says.

“So after reading the article on Sunday evening, I thought, I’m just going to Google this organization. I’m so buzzed up about this I’m going to call them now,” he says. “I call and somebody picks up the phone like, ‘Hello, Remote Area Medical, Stan Brock speaking.’

“Wow. So what I’d read about his commitment to the cause is not a mirage,” Angell says. “This guy really walks the walk. At that point, I thought I’ve got to get this guy.”

Brock on board

Getting Brock on the phone was one thing. He lived a simple, monk-like life, sleeping on a bedroll on the floor of his office inside a ramshackle former school building near Knoxville where RAM was located at the time.

Getting him to appear in the film was another thing entirely.

“Yeah, it took a bit of persuasion,” Angell says. “The reason he thought about is that he’s an incredibly modest guy who’s a doer, not a talker, and I kind of forced him to talk with to me.

“I think he’s much happier just getting stuff done and making a difference,” he says. “I think the reason he was finally sold on it is because RAM had a kind of DIY startup ethos to begin with. It was just Stan, an old pickup truck, and, I think, two volunteer dental nurses.

“I think he looked at our operation and it was, like, these guys don’t have a penny,” Angell says. “Not that established, clearly want to grow something. So we’re very lucky that he saw some sort of parallel in the way that we did things.”

It’s clear from the film, and conversations with both Angell and Poppy Green, RAM’s marketing manager, that Brock had a knack for spotting talented people who just needed a nudge to join him on his mission.

Green was a student at Hamilton College in New York in 2013, procrastinating on finding an internship. He stumbled onto video clips about RAM, called a friend who lived in Knoxville and headed down to volunteer for eight weeks which eventually turned into a career.

“Stan had this ability to look at you and ask you to do something,” Green says. “The way he communicated, he displayed this trust you would do it. Very hard man to say no to.”

Back at school, Brock would call Green as he put together a new RAM mission.

“The phone would ring and it would be Stan,” he says. “He would say, ‘We’re going down to the middle of Florida, and we need your help.’ It would be Wednesday and I was planning to go to the pub. You need me in Florida, Friday at 9 a.m.? I’d say sure. Put gas in my car and drive down.”

Racoons and anacondas

Angell initially thought his film would be purely observational, and he pitched Brock the idea of living with him at the crumbling old school.

“I remember asking him if I could sleep at the old schoolhouse,” he says. “He said, ‘Oh, absolutely not. It’s too dangerous. We don’t have insurance and there’s racoons falling out of the ceiling.’ I think he had insurance, but there were racoons falling from the ceiling.”

He suggested pitching a tent on the grounds, which Brock also shot down.

“He was never going to let me spend every day with him,” Angell says. “It would have just gotten in the way of his work.”

Then, too, the filmmaker realized there was just too much great material, stories and archival footage, to let the Stan Brock story unspool through the passive medium of observation.

“When I met Stan and heard the true richness and depth of his past, and the stories he had, I realized you can’t get somebody to tell you those kinds of stories on the hoof when they’re washing the dishes, you know,” Angell says. “And say, ‘Oh, let me tell you about the time I wrestled an anaconda.’

“You need to sit down in a chair in a formal setting and really calmly and quietly speak and listen to them. That was the only way to do justice to the drama and all his stories.”

Still photos and old film footage also added context to the story of who Brock was before he decided to serve the underserved. In addition to clips from Brock’s time on “Wild Kingdom” and B-movie action flicks, Angell discovered rarer stuff such as the outtake of Brock, up to his neck in a river, a massive anaconda snake wrapped around him, asking a cinematographer which camera he should look into.

“Can you imagine the moment I discovered that shot existed?” Angell says. “So that’s out of Stan’s personal filing cabinet, an old VHS tape.

“When he’s saying, ‘Which camera? Which camera?’ it really summed up a man getting toward the end of this so-called exciting film career,” he says. “He’s starting to see it’s not that glamorous, but good, old Stan, he really wanted to do a job, didn’t he? He really wanted to get the anaconda in the right position.”

Other bits and pieces he found included film of Brock at home in Guyana, a monkey and cougar wandering through his house, and a pair of early BBC documentaries that predated Brock joining “Wild Kingdom.”

“I remember thinking, ‘Oh, wow, this is golden,’” Angell says of the footage of Brock, reclining in his rattan chair, stroking the head of his cougar. “There’s another aspect of his character which is like Doctor Dolittle, the man who charms the animals from the trees.”

Kindness and dignity

In the film, Brock is a hands-on leader, greeting patients as they enter RAM missions in Tennessee, Virginia, and, here in California, Sacramento and Anaheim. Many camped out overnight to make sure they had a chance to see a doctor, dentist or optometrist. Brock treats all with kindness and dignity.

“I spent years working alongside him,” Green says of what motivated Brock to dedicate the last half of his life to RAM. “I would see him in the morning, going to work out and see him eating out of his single pots that ate from. There was always this element in which he seemed to understand no other way of living.”

Brock lived a solitary life, refusing to take a salary from RAM. He was married, briefly, but it didn’t last due to his dedication to his cause. He had no children.

“I know what excited him in conversation,” Angell says. “It was three things: healthcare, horses, and aviation. Any mention of a horse or a plane on the way to a clinic, that’s like the ideal conversation for Stan.

“I think he was a man looking for a home, and he was very fortunate to find that home in America. And then people, the RAM volunteers who form around him, they become his family. And by extension, the patients. There truly was an emotional connection there.”

Once, when Brock was still managing the remote Guyanese ranch, he was injured badly and realized he was 26 days by foot from the nearest doctor. Another time, one of the vaqueros working with him became sick and died before he could reach a doctor.

Those stories in part motivated the creation of RAM, which originally was intended to work in the developing world before Brock realized there were also many in the United States facing similar difficulties.

“I think Stan was on some sort of journey, whereby he had been forced to be a very macho, tough, and emotionally closed-off person to survive the first two chapters of the Stan Brock story,” Angell says. “But in the following three chapters, Stan realizes that he has to change.

“This what makes the story a beautiful story, he says. “Stan learns to care. Within the passage of this film, he goes from being a tough vaquero cowboy, who needs to be very robust to control the situation he’s in. And later on, he becomes the ultimate humanitarian.

“That’s a lesson to us all. You don’t have to go full Stan Brock. You don’t have to take a vow of poverty, sleep on the floor and never take a salary. But you can steer your life towards being beneficial and doing service to others. And that’s what what he learned.”

‘Medicine Man: The Stan Brock Story’

When: 7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 14

Also: The documentary will be accompanied by a short documentary with updates on Remote Area Medical’s work since Brock’s death in 2018.

For more: To find a movie theater near you and purchase tickets see Fathomevents.com/events/medicine-man. To find out when and where there will be more opportunities to watch ‘Medicine Man’ in theaters or at home see Ramusa.org or see the ‘Medicine Man: The Stan Brock Story’ pages on Facebook, Instagram or X, formerly known as Twitter.

It’s a signal that this film has stories to share about the 82-year-old folk singer and political activist that have never before been told.

That wasn’t the original intent, Baez says with a wry smile on a recent video call.

“It was going to be about the last tour,” Baez says of a run of 2018 farewell shows. “Then at a certain point, I realized I had to let them in farther than just that.

“I literally handed them the key, the three directors, to the storage unit,” she says. “In the film, when I walk into it, that’s the first time I I’ve ever been in there.”

With that key, co-directors Karen O’Conner, Miri Navasky, and Maeve O’Boyle entered a chamber of treasures that Baez had forgotten existed.

“I knew that my mom had kept some stuff,” Baez says. “In the back of my head, I knew that. I didn’t know that she kept everything. All of my father’s footage from moving pictures and stills. Every drawing from when I was five on. So we dipped into all of that and used that to make the film cohesive.”

The home movies show Baez, the middle child between sisters Pauline and Mimi, traveling the world on trips her parents took them on. The drawings are used beautifully in the film, her original work getting animated to illustrate different moments.

And there’s more: Diaries and letters and audio tapes that Baez recorded to send home from her travels.

“It’s different having a 21-year-old say to the mom, ‘I’m going to march tomorrow with probably 40,000 people and it’ll be with Dr. [Martin Luther] King,’” Baez says about how the audio letters gave voice to her thoughts as they were then. “Here’s this 21-year-old whose mind is blown by all this going on, instead of me retelling the tale.”

O’Conner was a longtime friend before she, Navasky and O’Boyle directed the film, and Baez gave the trio free rein to use what they wanted and tell her story as they saw fit.

“I signed on for this, so there was nothing I could do about it,” Baez says, laughing. “They did the film. I wanted to leave an honest legacy, and I was serious about it. So it’s warts and all.”

What about Bob?

Much of Baez’s public life is well known.

At 19, she exploded onto the folk music scene and quickly escaped the confines of genre to become one of the best-known singers of the ’60s. She was with Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington and at countless protests against the Vietnam War. She’s in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, a Grammy winner, a Kennedy Center honoree.

As well, her private life at times broke into the public realm.

Baez’s romance with the then-little-known singer-songwriter Bob Dylan united the two biggest stars in folk in the early ’60s for a time. Her marriage to the anti-war activist David Harris produced her only child, Gabriel Harris, while David was in prison for refusing to report to the military after he was drafted.

The ramifications of both of those relationships are explored in much greater depth in “I Am A Noise.”

Her relationship with Dylan started out like a fairy tale, and the film includes footage that makes their love for each other clear, including one special clip of the two singing Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” when she was already a star, and he still needed to be introduced when he joined her on stage.

“That’s one of my favorite parts of the film,” Baez says. “It was so happy and so innocent.

“I was already established, but as a ballad singer,” she says. “I didn’t write for years. So here we are bouncing around upstate New York, and it was really, really fun.”

Fun turned to sorrow in 1965 when on the trip to England that was filmed for the Dylan documentary “Don’t Look Back,” Dylan casually dismissed the significance of their relationship, essentially ghosting Baez even as she occupied the same room as him. Baez admits in “I Am A Noise” that the relationship was both her greatest love and her worst heartbreak.

“It would be different if I hadn’t had a come to Jesus moment about five or six years ago,” she says of finally reaching a place of peace in how she views her time with Dylan. “I was painting him as a young man, probably a 21-year-old, and I put his music on and I started to cry.

“And everything, all of the animosity, whatever (stuff), just vanished,” Baez says. “It just drifted off me and it’s stayed that way. So that’s a different answer than you would have gotten off me 10 years ago. I was still struggling.

“I mean, I still make jokes about him because he’s nuts,” she says, laughing. “But that’s different from holding a lot of resentment.”

Seeing herself

Baez first watched the film as a rough cut, but has since seen it many times at film festivals and screenings. The journey it takes through her life has been revealing in many ways, she says.

“Part of it was an education,” she says. “Seeing my sisters, for instance, say what it was really like, how I really had affected their lives (with early fame and stardom). I mean, I kind of knew it, but because they knew Karen and trusted her, my older sister, who would never get in front of a camera, was willing to say her truth.

“And then Mimi to say hers,” Baez says of her younger sister, who as Mimi Farina was also a well-known folk singer though never the star that Baez became. “That for me was surprising. I’m grateful for all of it.”

Baez and her son for years had a difficult relationship. She was drawn to the road for concerts and protests, and Gabriel grew up feeling the distance between him and his mother, as the film explains.

“My son, I knew pretty much about what had gone on between us,” she says of Gabriel, who appears in the film both as a member of her 2018 band and in archival footage. “He was so forgiving and so eloquent, talking to Karen also. So I learned the extent of his abandonment issues when he was little.”

Other moments bring nothing but joy, she said. Seeing footage of her first trip to France and the red carpets and photo shoots she was part of was fun.

“And the women backstage in Selma, Alabama, after the end of the concert,” Baez says of a moment in 2018 when several women approached her and thanked her for her civil rights activism. “They were just standing in front of the theater, and I went over to talk with them. That was so beautiful.”

Still, at different moments, other more difficult parts of the film might surface for her, Baez says, forcing her to consider anew the history, visible or hidden, of her life.

“I’m still reacting to new things when I see it,” she says. “There are a couple of things that I’d prefer that they weren’t there. And then I look at it. I think this is part of what knitted this whole thing together, so in the end, I am just delighted with this film.”

Secrets and memories

Early on the film foreshadows the secret life it will reveal. As a young singer, Baez wrote in her diaries and letters about a darkness that came for her at times, delivering panic attacks and depression.

Closer to the end, its source is revealed as Baez talks about the intensive therapy sessions she and her sister Mimi separately started more than 30 years ago, which eventually led them to believe their parents had been sexually inappropriate or abusive to them as children.

The film uses letters between Baez and her parents, and audio tapes from eight years of therapy which the filmmakers pulled from her storage locker, as well as drawings Baez made while in therapy and her own more recent interviews.

“I didn’t learn much from that part of the film because I lived it so fully going through it,” she says. “Nor have I ever listened to those tapes. It’s insane to tell somebody to go ahead and listen to eight years of therapy tapes, but we did.

“I think the answer to that question is I have felt so complete since completing that work,” she says of what has come from mining her memories. “There is one scene in the film, not that it wasn’t true, because it was, but right now it’s very different. That was the scene in Istanbul when I’m having like a mild version of a panic attack, and it’s not representative of me now.”

In a way, the film is a testament to the act of remembrance, and how even in places where solid proof is absent, memories can be true to those who hold them.

“It clearly comes up throughout the film about memory,” Baez says. “Which is why I say even in the film, I can’t prove anything, say, about the dramatic stuff. And all of us, or anybody who writes about their past is going to have their own version of it. I mean, I’ve seen somebody fight about the most petty things. ‘No, I know that dress was blue’ – ‘Uh-uh, I thought it was red.’

“You resist, but those are your distinct memories,” she says. “And so, keeping that in mind, it was a journey through memories, after biting off, you know, what I needed to bite off to get started.

“Those were memories in one way or another that freed me from the darkness of my past.”

The curtain dropped for “Detroit Rock City” to reveal Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons and Tommy Thayer on hanging platforms 30 feet above the stage, fireworks flashing around them, and drummer Eric Singer at the back of the stage as flame cannons blasted around him.

Then “Shout It Loud,” with lasers bouncing inside the bandshell, bright blurs of fireworks shooting off its top, our face-painted, costumed heroes — Stanley the Starchild, Simmons the Demon, Thayer the Spaceman and Singer the Cat – like characters inside a colorful and very, very loud video game.

No complaints at all — and then Stanley started to speak.

“Man, so here we are,” he said as fans whooped and hollered. “And this is the last time we’ll be playing Los Angeles.”

Uh-oh. That definitely was not what anyone wanted to hear, but there — amid well-intentioned boos and shouts of no! — it was: The End of the Road Tour really is the end of touring for Kiss, Stanley and Simmons, the two founding members in the band, insist.

Do you believe them? I mean, this is the third time I’ve seen Kiss on this farewell tour in the last five years. But Stanley is 71, and Simmons is 74, so maybe this night, Kiss’s Hollywood Bowl debut, is it for Los Angeles, Southern California and the entire state.

Before the show began, fans at the Hollywood Bowl, many of whom arrived with faces painted like the Kiss characters, said they hope this ends up like most rock and roll retirements do — a head fake, a misdirection, and prelude to a one-off or reunion show in the future.

David and Judy Flores of Chandler, Arizona arrived at the Bowl costumed as the Demon and Starchild after catching Kiss at Acrisure Arena in Thousand Palms on Wednesday. Friday was the seventh time they’d seen the band on its farewell tour. For David Flores, it was about the 40th time he’d seen the band.

“I’ve been listening to them since I was 7 years old,” said David Flores, resplendent in his Gene Simmons cosplay. He’s heard that Stanley and Simmons both plan to tour with their own bands, and Singer will play in Stanley’s.

“One way or another they’re going to be around,” he said.

“And we’re going to be there,” Judy Flores added.

Back on stage, Stanley tried to cheer up fans like the Flores’, who said they’d be devastated if this is it.

“I know it’s sad but it’s also a joyous time,” he said. “A time to celebrate everything we’ve done together. Kiss Army, we love you!”

That brought the cheers thundering back through the amphitheater, and show rolled on, 22 songs over two hours and 10 minutes, most of them the hits you wanted to hear, with a few odds and ends from the latter-day albums scattered in.

Highlights early in the set included “Deuce” and “War Machine.” Stanley and Simmons taught us our very difficult vocal parts on “I Love It Loud” – “Hey-ey-ey-ey yeah!” – and “Say Yeah” – “Yeah, yeah, yeah!”

If you weren’t there, but had seen one of the earlier Southern California shows on The End of the Road Tour, you’d already seen all the set pieces. Thayer’s guitar solo had him fighting off the UFO-like hexagonal overhead video screens, firing red sparks from the neck of his guitar to knock them out of commission.

Simmons grabbed a flaming torch and breathed a blast of fire during “I Love It Loud,” and later, during the bass solo that led into the ominously fun “God of Thunder,” grinned malevolently as he opened his mouth to let blood run down his flickering tongue and over the kabuki-white face-paint on his chin.

All of this is good and goofy fun, the kind of comic book stylings long a part of Kiss’s showmanship.

And if this was your first show, well, mind blown, right?

“We get to see them live – not a lot of people can do that now,” said Luis Tamayo of Bell Gardens, who came with his friend Larry Jimenez of Downey, both of them for their first Kiss show.

Morgan Cavanaugh of Toluca Lake brought the whole family – wife Juli Cavanaugh and sons Quinn, 13, and Sawyer, 10, with all four made-up like one of the four Kiss characters. He’d been a fan since second grade, though this was the first show for all.

“We all loved the theatrics and the music was good,” he said.

It almost feels unnecessary, or even mean, to quibble over a show like this. But OK, the middle lagged a little with too many solos and a couple of songs – “Psycho Circus,” I’m looking at you – from the later albums that remain less known.

But the show ended strongly, as it has throughout this tour, with Stanley flying on a zipline from the stage over the audience to a remote stage in the terrace boxes. “Love Gun,” with terrific backing vocals by boys back in the bandshell, and “I Was Made For Lovin’ You,” the Kiss-does-disco song were both standouts.

As was “Black Diamond,” which saw Stanley fly back to the stage to close out the main set.

The encore opened with Singer seated at a bedazzled grand piano to sing and play “Beth,” the ballad that is the band’s only No. 1 hit, followed by “Do You Love Me.”

There’s really only one way for a Kiss show to end and with “Rock and Roll All Nite”— confetti cannons at the start, the crowd roaring the chorus as Simmons sang lead — the show ended with the thrilling spectacle Kiss really kind of created in the rock world.

Confetti blasted again midway through it, and after Stanley gave his guitar a goodbye kiss, he smashed it on the stage, triggering blasts of metallic purple streamers over the audience. The stage went dark, five minutes of fireworks erupted from the top of the bandshell, and Kiss was gone, probably, maybe for good.

Kiss

When: Friday, Nov. 3

Where: Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles

“It so good how you describe it – as if I have left it at home and not let it wear a pretty dress for a while,” Phair says. “Like, ‘I’m gonna take you out. I’m gonna show you a good time.’

“I think I’ve just been amazed and humbled by how it keeps being held up by fans as one of their favorites,” she says of the album, which announced her as a bold new voice in indie music. “And the 30th anniversary does feel to me to be significant in a way that previous ones haven’t. I don’t know if I just got older and it sounds more significant, but it felt like the right time.”

The Guyville Tour kicks off in El Cajon on Tuesday, Nov. 7 before reaching the Wiltern in Los Angeles on Friday, Nov. 10. In addition to playing all 18 tracks on the debut album, some of which Phair has rarely if ever performed live before, the show will include songs from the six studio albums she released since then, including 2021’s “Soberish.”

“I was coming back after the pandemic and I wanted to do something big,” Phair says. “I wanted to return with something that I could really sink my teeth into, and that would really make fans surprised as well as happy. So we planned big, and now we’ve got this amazing show.”

In a conversation edited for length and clarity, Phair talked about the new tour, her life in Chicago when she made “Exile in Guyville,” and the fact and fiction of her songwriting.

Q: Some of these songs you haven’t played for a long time. Did you have to relearn things?

A: Oh yes. ‘Shatter,’ I had to sit down and think about because I’m fond of changing my tunings nowadays. I’m like, ‘What was I playing?’ I wasn’t writing the music out back in 1993 as a 24-year-old. I was just sitting in my apartment, probably high, playing guitar, and there was nothing but little scribblings on pieces of paper with pencil, which I’ve since lost.

The good news is I wasn’t as good of a guitar player as I am now, so once you can find it in the tuning and on the neck, I can figure out pretty quickly what I’m doing.

Q: Which have you played the least over the years?

A: ‘Canary’ and probably ‘Shatter.’ ‘Strange Loop.’ I think also maybe ‘Dance of the Seven Veils, although I did play that for awhile on my solo tours.

Q: Of course, some ‘Exile’ songs you probably have to play every show. What do you do to keep those fresh and interesting for yourself?

A: I hear that a lot and I’ve never quite related to it. Because for me, in the moment, with the crowd, it’s always fresh. Like, I haven’t experienced that burnout that bands speak about or that ill-at-ease feeling with hits they have to play so many times.

I didn’t grow up picturing myself on stage, so I am electrified when I’m up there. I’m vibrating and like on another level. It feels like where if you had a whitewater rafting river behind your house – would that get old? It really is so different from my normal life that it’s electrifying.

Q: The story of this album is sort of a legend now – a song-by-song response to the Rolling Stones’ “Exile on Main St.” that you wrote and recorded as a very young, inexperienced artist. What stands out in your memory 30 years later about those days?

A: It was such a special time of suspended reality in a way. I’d graduated from college; I was living on my own. I had a certain amount of savings so I could prove that I was going to be an artist and not have to get a real job.

It was just this amorphous time where I could believe what I was doing as if it was the Blues Brothers on a mission from God, you know. There was no conflicting stimuli. It was pure, like Alice in Wonderland going into the rabbit hole. I believe what I was doing was the most important thing to do, and I had the time and the space to give myself over to it.

Q: Was it difficult when the savings got low and you didn’t have a real job?

A: I was such a grifter. I was desperately poor and I would go pay social calls on people that might happen to be eating [laughs]. I did sell my art. You know how I supported myself? I was a visual artist; that’s what I was trained to do and that’s what I had always planned to be when I grew up.

I had interned for famous artists like Leon Golub and Nancy Spero in New York. And Ed Paschke, an incredible painter in Chicago. And I managed to sell just enough art to make rent and like a tiny amount of food. It wasn’t so dangerous, because I could always admit failure and go back home. But it was pretty, pretty ugly there for a while.

Q: Isn’t that like a rite of passage for the starving artist? You’ve got to go through it.

A: I almost think society says, like, ‘Prove to us that you are serious. Like, prove to us how much this matters to you.’ And it mattered to me a great deal.

Q: I’m curious what kind of memories came back to you as you’ve gone so intensely into these songs and that time and place.

A: I think I’m surprised by how much the courses I took in college [Phair majored in art history at Oberlin College.] show up in little ways. I always thought of my songwriting as both playful and off the cuff, but there was a lot of my education popping in here and there. Like the Salome Dance of the Seven Veils.

I’m struck by how much ‘Guyville’ may have been also the tail end of Oberlin, in a way. I don’t think you realize that because once you’re out of college you’re like, ‘I’m done with that.’ But I can really feel that education that I received in the lyrics. It’s sort of woven through.

Q: I remember when it came out, a lot of people assumed that these songs were semi-autobiographical. In later interviews, you say, ‘No, these are stories I created.’

A: You’re touching on something that has been of interest to people for a long time, but there’s a nuance to it. They were semi-autobiographical but at the same time, I think people did not give me the credit for adding the fictional parts of you. I think they just thought I was a naive person who just confessed these terrible sins into a microphone.

I guess as a young adult that offended me, because I’m like, ‘No, I’m a conceptual artist, and I have used my own life and I have used my own experiences, but I’ve also made them better for you. And I guess I might have been pretty mad about that in interviews early on because it just felt unfair to a woman at the time to just assume she couldn’t take her own life and make fiction out of it, too.

Q: The songs capture your life in your early 20s. How are they and you different 30 years later?

A: I don’t end up in bed with strangers anymore. When I get to ‘(Bleep) and Run,’ I think about that a lot. You know, that early part of your life when you try to find love, or you end up at the end of the night going home with someone that maybe you knew from the bar, but were never attracted to, but the guy you really liked left with someone else.

I love touching that young adult part of myself. Because those things that felt so confusing and almost dark and dangerous probably weren’t. We were all just a bunch of hapless college kids trying to figure out how to be artists in the big city, and there’s a spontaneity and risk-taking that I almost envy. Possibility looms large.

Q: Have you changed in terms of how you approach playing live since you first went out to play the ‘Guyville’ songs 30 years ago?

A: Completely – 180 degrees, actually. Here’s an interesting fun fact. Because I’d grown up intending to be a visual artist, I put ‘Exile in Guyville’ out, and I think I had stood on stage and performed twice, or maybe once, in my life. It instantly started making waves, like, right away. It was a very quick ascent into controversy and praise and damnation, all at once. It was a real zero-to-60 moment.

“You know, Ira Glass, ‘This American Life,’ he came to one of those early performances, so I packed the Metro in Chicago, which is probably 2,000 people. And it was probably my fourth show ever-ever. He just said it was like watching an ice skater fall down. He’s like, ‘I can’t watch.’

It’s just one of those great gifts of taking risks, because the thing that I was most afraid of became one of my greatest strengths over time. I still get nervous before I go out. But once I’m there, it’s just muscle memory. And how many people get to feel that sensation? Very few. And I’m grateful for it.

Q: Thank you for your time today. I hope you do put a pretty dress on ‘Exile’ when you take it out.

A: I’ll order a dessert. You can have some sambuca, ‘Exile,’ go ahead.

Liz Phair plays ‘Exile in Guyville’

When: 7 p.m. Friday, Nov. 10

Where: The Wiltern, 3790 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles

For more: Lizphairofficial.com

“I saw Sting on TV a while ago, and people were asking him about his songs,” Bachman says by phone from his home in Victoria, British Columbia. “He’s one of the great guys, been around forever, and he’ll do songs from every era that he was in.

“And he said to the guy interviewing him, ‘If I asked you what you were doing 10 years ago or 20 years ago from tonight, you’d have no idea,’” Bachman says. “If I asked you, ‘What were you doing the first time you heard “Message in a Bottle” or “Roxanne” ‘ –

– “or ‘American Woman’ or ‘These Eyes’ or ‘Takin’ Care of Business,’” he continues, pivoting from Sting to his own songs. “You would go back to the car, the truck or the tractor you were driving. Or where you were working. Or the girl you were dancing with or making out with.

“That song takes you back there,” Bachman says. “That’s a great thing about the music. It’s kind of like a journey through time.

“When I’m on stage, I feel like I’m 20 or 30 when I wrote and played these songs. You go back to that time when I’m on with (Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s) Fred Turner. When I’m on with (the Guess Who’s) Burton Cummings.

“It’s kind of a weird time-traveling thing,” he says.

Bachman-Turner Overdrive comes to Southern California for concerts at the YouTube Theater in Inglewood on Thursday, Nov. 2, Fantasy Springs Resort Casino on Saturday, Nov. 4, and the Magnolia in El Cajon on Sunday, Nov. 5.

Classically rockin’

At 80, Bachman is the only original full-time BTO bandmember as the group marks its 50th anniversary. Original singer-bassist Fred Turner, also 80, is mostly off the road now. Surrounded on stage by younger musicians, including his son, Tal Bachman, whose 1999 single “She’s So High” hit No. 1 on the adult contemporary charts, Bachman says he’s enjoying live performance as much as ever.

“There seems to have been a turn in the whole music business which affected me and many dozens and dozens of my friends,” Bachman says. “Where classic rock has endured decades and it’s still going. It’s almost become like blues or jazz. It’s its own genre and whoever is alive can carry on that tradition.”

Bachman is blessed, of course, with a deep catalog of hits from the ’60s and ’70s with two bands. A typical set might include songs such as “American Woman,” “These Eyes,” and “No Time” from the Guess Who, and hits by Bachman-Turner Overdrive such as “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet,” “Let It Ride,” and “Hey You.”

“I was so lucky to be in the Guess Who and write a dozen of their hits, and the same with BTO,” he says. “Now I’m finding that we’re getting a lot of BTO fans saying we’ve never heard these songs on stage, and then naming like ‘Little Gandy Dancer,’ ‘Give Me Your Money Please,’ ‘Blue Collar.’

“Almost a third of our setlist is sent in by fans,” he says. “And honestly, we’ve never even played some of these songs on stage. When you’ve done an album, a couple albums, you play the hits everybody likes or the FM cuts, and you never play some of these album cuts again.”

BTO is back

The fact that Bachman is touring now under the Bachman-Turner Overdrive name has its roots in an old family feud and a handful of recent losses.

In addition to Bachman and Turner, the original lineup included Bachman’s brothers Robbie and Tim. While guitarist Tim Bachman was replaced in the ’70s, drummer Robbie Bachman stayed with the band after Randy Bachman left and eventually gained control of the name and its distinctive gear-shaped logo.

“In the last three years, I’ve lost three brothers,” Bachman says of Robbie, Tim and Gary Bachman, the latter of whom served as the band’s manager during the ’70s. “They’ve all passed away from COVID and heart and all that kind of stuff.

“So I was able to get the BTO thing and just kind of tour as it,” he says. “We tried to tour as BTO for years. We always had a fight with brother fighting brother fighting brother and all that stuff.

“Now they’re all gone. There’s no fight. Suddenly, I evolved into BTO. It took me by surprise and Fred by surprise. Suddenly, we started getting called to do gigs.”

Where past tours as a solo act or a duo with either Fred Turner or Burton Cummings played mostly club venues, Bachman-Turner Overdrive is playing medium-sized venues, and nice ones at that, Bachman says.

“It used to be a big downer if you ended up playing Vegas or you ended up playing a casino or on a cruise ship,” he says. “That was like on the way down. Now they’re some of the best gigs you can get. The casinos and the cruises, boom, all the fans go there.

“And the casinos have kind of standardized it,” Bachman says. “They all have rooms that have 3,500 to 5,000 people with a good sightline for everybody, good PA. So to go out and do a concert, it’s really fantastic.”

Traveling on

Not everything Bachman is working on today looks to his past. He and his son Tal started a YouTube series during the pandemic called “Train Wreck,” in which they’d each bring in five songs and challenge the other to play them as best they could without any preparation or advance.

Now they occasionally tour as the duo Bachman & Bachman, bringing live “Train Wreck” shows to fans.

“They call out the songs from the audience,” Bachman says of one such recent show. “They call out ‘Hey Joe.’ We think, ‘Hey Joe, where are going with that gun in your hand.’ And Tal looks at me and goes, ‘What’s next?’”

They might stumble around a bit, guessing at a lyric, a key, or a chord, Bachman says. Often father and son and the audience all end up singing the songs together.

“It’s like a bunch of drunk guys at a barbecue,” he says, laughing.

Bachman & Bachman are also finishing an album, which will serve as a soundtrack to a documentary tentatively titled “Lost and Found,” the wild story of how Randy Bachman managed to recover his beloved orange 1957 Gretsch 6120 Chet Atkins guitar some 46 years after it was stolen.

During the pandemic, a stranger wrote Bachman to say he thought he’d found the guitar by using image-recognition tools to compare the instrument Bachman was playing in a clip of “Lookin’ Out for No. 1” on YouTube.

“Then he googled and found another guy playing the same Gretsch guitar, singing ‘Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree’ in a nightclub in Japan like he’s Brian Setzer,” Bachman says.

The musician, who goes by the name Takeshi, bought the guitar from a Tokyo music shop in 2014, unaware of its history. He agreed to return it for a similar instrument, and Bachman lucked onto an identical Gretsch model made the same week in 1957 and only two serial numbers off his own guitar.

On July 1, 2002 – Canada Day – Bachman and Takeshi met at the Canadian consulate in Tokyo for the exchange, all of which was filmed as part of the 2024 documentary on the story.

“Suddenly, karma after 50 years,” he says. “There’s a magic in my Gretsch guitar because I learned to play on it. I wrote and played every song on it – ‘These Eyes,’ ‘Laughing,’ ‘Undun,’ ‘American Woman,’ ‘Takin’ Care of Business’ were all done on that guitar.

“And then it was gone. To get it back, it’s unbelievable.’

“It was a bit darker because the times were a bit dark then,” Patinkin says. “It was a set that I really loved, but nonetheless it was dark. And then we went to sleep for three years for the pandemic.”

So Patinkin and pianist Adam Ben David went back to the drawing board.

“I said, ‘I don’t want to do what we did before,’” he says. “I really want to welcome us all back to the living. I want it to be fun for me and fun for the audience. So let’s put the other one in a drawer and let’s go over the 14 or 15 hours of material I have in my repertoire, and some new stuff as well.”

Patinkin and Ben David come to the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall on Thursday, Nov. 2 on the Being Alive tour, which takes its name from the Stephen Sondheim song in the musical “Company.”

Patinkin is best known for his work on screen in films such as “Yentl” and “The Princess Bride” and television series such as “Chicago Hope,” for which he won an Emmy, and “Homeland,” for which he was nominated four times.

But his work on stage, especially in Broadway musicals, is even more acclaimed, earning a Tony Award for the original Broadway production of “Evita,” and two more nominations for “Sunday in the Park with George” and “The Wild Party.”

All of that, Patinkin says, is simple storytelling.

“What I do is tell stories,” he says on a call from his home in upstate New York. “I’m not the genius who wrote these wonderful songs, these gifted men and women from Sondheim to Queen to Randy Newman and, you know, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Irving Berlin, Tom Waits. The list goes on.

“They’re storytellers, and that’s what attracts me,” Patinkin says. “I’m very lyric-driven. I’m a story guy. I’m the mailman, I just deliver the mail.

“And it’s great comfort to me to be with company, so that I’m not alone listening to these stories.”

The medium is the mess

Patinkin knows you can go online and see which songs he’s been singing in concert this year. And he kindly asks you not to.

“I don’t like to say it because I do change my mind sometimes,” he says. “I change it literally during the concert on occasion. I don’t want people coming a long way, thinking, ‘Oh, I want to hear him sing that,’ you know. It says he was gonna sing X, Y and Z, and then you get there and he didn’t sing that.”

So just trust him, and enjoy whatever music he and Ben David end up performing, he asks.

“Nothing’s planned,” Patinkin says. “From the time I begin a song to the time the song ends, that part is rehearsed and we know that. But I don’t have, like, a set patter.

“You know, it’s a complete mess,” he says, laughing. “Other than when a song begins to when the song’s over. Then the mess takes over, then another song begins.”

So come, enjoy the music, and the time spent together in the theater, he says.

“We’re a gregarious species and we need to be together, not alone,” Patinkin says. “We’re not supposed to be sitting on the couch alone. You know, you can do that every now and then, but you do it all the time, you’re in the toilet.”

Life and light

Joseph Papp, the late theatrical director and producer and founder of the New York Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theater, was a father figure and close friend of Patinkin.

Patinkin was on the road singing when Papp died in 1991. But Patinkin’s wife, the writer and actress Kathryn Grody, spent time with Papp before his death and witnessed a moment that sticks with Patinkin still.

“Joe was laying on a couch at a friend’s house before he passed, just resting, and friends gathering,” he says. “And all of a sudden he sat up on the couch and everyone got quiet and leaned into him to see what he was going to say.

“He looked around the room, wide-eyed, she said, and he said, ‘I see life everywhere in everything.’ And then he laid back down, and soon after that, days later, I think, he passed on.

“That statement she shared with me, ‘I see life everywhere in everything,’ is a guidepost to my existence,” he says. “It is an action to be taken, looking for that life, fighting for that life and light, in good times and in bad.

“It is what I set out to do when I walk in front of a camera or microphone or an audience, whether it be a television show, a movie or play or a concert,” he says. “I’m looking to find that life in my loved ones, in my community, in my world.

“Sometimes it’s a challenge. But we’re better off when we’re doing it together.”

In the moment

It was thrilling to return to the concert stage in the fall of 2022, a reminder of his long-held feeling that if he could do only one of the things he does, it would be singing to live audiences.

“It’s immediate,” Patinkin says. “It’s in the moment that reflects in the Buddhist way. The moment in all our lives right there in the theater, whether somebody came in late, something happened or a phone rings. Everything’s about that moment, what’s going on in the world, what’s going on in our lives, our hopes, our dreams, our concerns.”

In a way, it nourishes him, fills his cup, and renews him.

“Back when it started, it was sort of like if there’s a certain food that makes you feel energized and alive, and you haven’t had it for a long time, you go like, ‘Oh my God, why wasn’t I eating that?’” Patinkin says. “There are things that you know are good for you.”

Just don’t forget them, he adds, offering an illustration.

“You go ballroom dancing once with another couple you know,” Patinkin says as an example. “You have the time of your life, and then like stupid (bleepin’) humans you never do it again. I mean, we’re like the dumbest people on the planet. Why don’t you do it again? It was so much fun.

“So literally, every now and then, I wake up and I realize, you know, this is fun,” he says. “This makes me feel alive. This makes me happy.”

Hope and light

Patinkin, who turns 71 in November, says at this point in his life his goals are simpler than they once might have been. No longer does he dream of iconic roles yet to be played. Things that make him feel good, like reading or singing to his 20-month-old grandson, are more important now.

Sharing hope and light with an audience, too.

“I want to be of service to my community, to my family, my children, my grandson, my friends, my audience,” Patinkin says. “And I have to say, ‘Well, what do they need? What can I do for them? How can I be helpful? Help me be of service in my prayers.’

“I don’t want it to be dark right now,” he says. “We need to be welcomed back. It needs to be fun. We’ve had enough dark times. We’ve had enough of being isolated and afraid of being next to another human being.”

This tour’s setlist – remember, no peeking – is planned to advance that cause.

“I really did set out to have a certain kind of feeling, which was not just songs that spoke to Mandy, but songs that made Mandy feel good about being alive,” Patinkin says. “Therefore, I hoped I would make my audience feel good because we listen to them together.

“They just go through,” he says. “I’m like a hose, you know, and hopefully the hose has some holes in it so I get a little of it, too.”

Though delight isn’t all that she’s feeling.

“Oh my Lord, all I can think is 30 years ago he set that key,” O’Hara says, laughing about the notes written by composer Danny Elfman then that now seem somehow higher. “That’s all I can think about. Oh boy.”

But it’s fun, adds the actress, an Emmy winner for “Schitt’s Creek,” and always a thrill once she overcomes her offstage jitters and starts to sing.

“I’m horribly nervous; I am, I am,” she says of those moments before the spotlight hits her. “I try, even though the character’s actually up on the screen, I have to imagine I’m the character, you know.

“The first time I did (the live-to-film show) there was no dialogue, and I happened to add the dialogue. You know, ‘Jack, dear, Jack, whatever,’ just to help remind myself and that audience that this a character, not a singer on the stage. Which I don’t pretend to be.

“So as long as I’m in character, and I try to be, then that gets me through the song,” O’Hara says. “Otherwise, it’s a tricky song.”

This year, O’Hara will only perform Sally, and Shock, a smaller part from the film, on Sunday, Oct. 29. On Friday and Saturday, Oct. 27-28, pop-rock singer Halsey will perform Sally while singer-actress Riki Lindholme handles Shock.

The rest of the singers include actor-musician Fred Armisen in the role of Lock and Ken Page as Ooogie Boogie, which he also did for the movie. They’ll be backed by a full orchestra and choir led by conductor John Mauceri.

Becoming Sally

O’Hara had worked with Burton on the 1988 movie “Beetlejuice” five years before making “The Nightmare Before Christmas.”

“I guess it was because we’d worked together and had a good time, and so he very kindly offered me the part of Sally,” she says of how she was cast in “Nightmare.” “Then I went in to record with Danny, and that was exciting and scary. And we also got to do a Lock, Shock and Barrel song with dear Paul. (The late actor Paul Reubens, best known as Pee-wee Herman, played the role of Lock in the film and in past Bowl shows.)

Her work on the film was mostly done in San Francisco where director Henry Selick was meticulously filming the stop-motion animation in which Burton was making the film.

“To go into the studio was a thrilling and mind-boggling thing,” O’Hara says. “In one shot, five seconds of a scene, I think that’s like a week’s work. When you see the movie it’s just so beautiful and fluid and realistic in its own little world. You just forget all that work, but I really do appreciate it.”

The reception that “The Nightmare Before Christmas” received – in 1993 and throughout the following three decades – was never imagined, she says.

“I did not expect it,” she says. “But I guess I don’t ever think of work that way. You try to get involved with good people, work on a good script, and have some fun. You never really know what will happen.

“But this, yeah, I’m shocked and delighted every year when they want to do the live performance again.”

Strike up the orchestra

For O’Hara, perhaps the best part of the live-to-film shows she’s done at the Hollywood Bowl and in Europe in years past, is the chance to experience what feels like to be back by a full orchestra.

“It’s especially cool, I’ve got to say, to rehearse,” she says. “Because when you rehearse, you’re in the room with the orchestra and you can really hear every instrument right there. You know, right there beside you, behind you. You know, it’s not my world, and I never knew that I would get a chance in my life to sing with an orchestra. It’s truly a beautiful gift.”

Onstage at the Hollywood Bowl, the orchestra loses some of the intimate power it carries in the rehearsal room, O’Hara adds.

“You’re getting all the music through the monitors at your feet,” she says. “So it’s almost like doing karaoke at that point. Even though I know, and I keep turning around and there’s a big orchestra behind me.

“I have to remind myself there’s an actual live orchestra right there, but in rehearsal, you really feel that.”

From Sinatra to Sally

“In the show, I didn’t realize they were going to stop the movie and have us come out and sing the song,” O’Hara says of her not-very-actorly hope that no one would watch her onstage. “I thought I could just sort of sneak in and sing the song while the movie played.

“So that amount of focus is a little frightening,” she says. “People have their own little relationships with this character, with all the characters. And with Sally, that song is just so beautiful and tender and sweet, and sad and a little tricky to sing, as I was saying.

“But you know, the audience is so for Sally, so I just hope when I’m out there they’re looking at the screen and seeing the original Sally instead of me.”

Still, O’Hara says she never forgets how wonderful an opportunity this little film has provided her.

“It’s fun to get an opportunity to do something really different, and try to learn how to do something new,” she says. “And to be on the stage at the Hollywood Bowl, where Judy Garland and Jimi Hendrix and Frank Sinatra and all those people played over the years, that’s rich.

Despite the Bowl’s 17,500 capacity, she says, “it’s shockingly intimate.”

A ‘Nightmare’ endures

Thirty years on, O’Hara says she’s come to understand the reason this quirky stop-motion animated film lives on.

“It’s the combination of beautiful art,” she says. “Wonderful songs. And then, you know, sort of the common theme in a lot of Tim’s movies, of the outside character who just wants to be appreciated and loved.

“Jack is another character like that,” O’Hara says. “Kind of a freak, but not a freak. He’s a sweet soul. Like Edward Scissorhands, and so many characters in Tim’s movies. So yes, the art, the music and the sweetness of it.”

‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’

What: Live performance of the score and songs to accompany the film.

When: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Oct. 27-28, and 7 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 29.

Where: Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave., Los Angeles.

How much: $39-$250.

For more: Hollywoodbowl.com.

The festival takes place Feb. 16-18 at the Marina Green Park in Long Beach.

Stefani headlines the Saturday bill with Slightly Stoopid, Sublime With Rome, and Wiz Khalifa preceding her.

Stick Figure headlines Friday’s lineup with Damian “Jr. Gong” and Stephen Marley and Iration before it. Rebelution tops the Sunday lineup with Ice Cube and the Roots leading up to their set.

The rest of the lineup has not yet been assigned to specific days or timeslots, but includes well-known acts including Shaggy, Sean Paul, Sojo, Common Kings, the Interrupters, Too Short, Skip Marley, Action Bronson and the Pharcyde.

Four different Cali Vibes passes are available. The three-day general admission pass starts at $299 while a three-day GA+ pass is $379. A three-day VIP pass starts at $495 while the three-day Beach Club starts at $1,049. All but the GA+ pass increase slightly in price the closer the festival date comes.

Single-day tickets are also available. Single-day GA tickets start at $140. Single-day GA+ are $175. Single-day VIP tickets start at $205 and single-day Beach Club tickets are $545.

Cali Vibes festival passes go on sale at 10 a.m. Friday, Oct. 27. For more details and the complete lineup go to Calivibesfest.com.

Her death was first reported by longtime friend and KLOS-FM/95.5 colleague Geno Michellini on Facebook on Sunday.

“I have been in Eugene the last two days at Dusty Street’s bedside,” he wrote. “The numerous afflictions that she has been so indomitably fighting these last years finally caught up to her. I am writing with a broken heart to say that Dusty left us tonight.

“Tonight I lost one of the best friends I ever had and the world lost a radio and music legend as befitting her starring role in the ‘San Francisco Sounds’ documentary movie that just came out recently,” he continued. “She was all that and so much more.

“There will never be another Dusty Street. The queen is gone, but she’ll never be forgotten.”

Street got her start in San Francisco radio in 1967, working briefly at KMPX-FM before jumping to KSAN-FM, both of them underground free-form stations, where she stayed most of the ’70s. At the time, she was one of the first women rock DJs on the West Coast.

In 1979, Street headed south to KROQ where she stayed most of the next decade.

“Time is a cruel mistress,” longtime KROQ DJ Richard Blade wrote on his Facebook page. “We all lost a dear friend today. It was Dusty who trained me to run the board at KROQ, and trying to emulate her expertise was a tough job. She brought so much of her love of music – particularly Dark Wave like Siouxsie, Bauhaus, and many others, to the airwaves.

“In today’s barren terrestrial radio market, there is no one like her,” he continued. “I’ll so miss her voice, her laugh, her caring for animals, our trips to Hawaii together, and our visits when I’d do a gig in Cleveland, where she did her show on SiriusXM and made her home for the past decade. Your talents will not be forgotten. Fly low and avoid the radar, Dusty.”

Street eventually left Los Angeles, working in Las Vegas and then Cleveland. For the past 20 years she hosted the Deep Tracks and Classic Vinyl shows on SiriusXM.

“We have lost one of our own,” the SiriusXM Facebook page posted. “Dusty Street has passed away after 77 joyous trips around the sun. And yes, Dusty Street was her real name. We are heartbroken.”