Hollywood Bowl’s Opening Night Was a Broadway Love Letter to Los Angeles.
Hollywood Bowl's 2026 season opened June 20 with The Best of Broadway — Halle Bailey, Darren Criss, Lea Salonga, Renée Elise Goldsberry, and Brian Stokes Mitchell before 12,000 guests and fireworks.
The Hollywood Bowl’s 2026 season opened on Saturday, June 20 the way all Opening Nights should , with something to argue about on the drive home, in the best possible sense.
“The Best of Broadway” drew nearly 12,000 guests to the Bowl under conductor Thomas Wilkins, with Billy Crystal hosting a lineup that put five of musical theatre’s most decorated voices on the same stage: Halle Bailey, Darren Criss, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Brian Stokes Mitchell, and Lea Salonga.
The evening closed with fireworks. It raised more than $2.3 million for the LA Phil and its learning and community programs. But the numbers, as always at the Bowl, are the least interesting part of what happened.
What the Night Actually Was
The Hollywood Bowl’s relationship with Broadway has always been complicated; an outdoor amphitheatre under the California sky is not, structurally, where show tunes belong, and yet the Bowl has a long track record of making the argument that the setting only amplifies the material. Saturday confirmed that case, sometimes spectacularly.
Lea Salonga delivered “I’d Give My Life for You” , the song she introduced in the original West End and Broadway productions of Miss Saigon, winning both the Olivier and Tony Awards for Best Actress in a Musical. In front of 12,000 people under an open sky, the song’s emotional architecture held completely. She followed it with Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns,” a Mamma Mia! medley, and “Defying Gravity” from Wicked, a set that covered more emotional range in forty minutes than most full productions manage across two acts.
Her duet with Darren Criss on “Suddenly Seymour” from Little Shop of Horrors was the kind of pairing that reminded the audience why casting matters.
Darren Criss, who won two Tony Awards in 2025 for Maybe Happy Ending, brought the specific energy of someone who has been doing this at the highest level long enough to make it look effortless. His “Music of the Night” from Phantom of the Opera and “Something’s Coming” from West Side Story were the most theatrically committed performances of the evening, sung not as concert numbers but as scenes.
Renée Elise Goldsberry sang “Satisfied” from Hamilton, the role that made her a household name and earned her a Tony for Best Featured Actress, followed by “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from Carousel and a medley of “Without You” and “No Day but Today” from Rent. The Rent medley landed hardest. Jonathan Larson’s music does not require a proscenium. It requires exactly the kind of collective presence that 12,000 people in an amphitheatre provides.
Halle Bailey opened with “Part of Your World” and the moving ballad “Home” from The Wiz. Her voice, already established as one of the most distinctive of her generation, carries an intimacy that doesn’t diminish at scale, which is not a given for Bowl performances.
The Moment Nobody Will Forget
The evening included the Bowl’s Broadway at the Bowl Spotlight Competition — an open call for amateur singers competing for a spot on the Opening Night program. More than 500 entries were received. Lucy Acuña of Cerritos won, and sang “On My Own” from Les Misérables on the Hollywood Bowl stage, making her Bowl debut. In a program anchored by Tony winners, that moment carried its own weight. The song is about solitude and longing. Singing it in front of 12,000 people, on a stage that size, on a night that significant, requires a particular kind of nerve. Acuña had it.
The Orchestra and the Room
Under Thomas Wilkins, the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra did what the Bowl Orchestra does best: it made the familiar sound inevitable. Musical director Kevin Stites shaped the arrangements to serve the singers without flattening them. The CSU Fullerton University Singers under Dr. Robert Istad and the musicians of YOLA filled out the ensemble — a reminder that Opening Night is also, by design, a statement about the institution’s investment in the next generation of musicians. Choreographer and costumer Spencer Liff kept the staging from tipping into spectacle for its own sake.
The fireworks closed the evening on schedule.
One of Los Angeles’s most reliable cultural rituals
Opening Night at the Hollywood Bowl is one of Los Angeles’s most reliable cultural rituals, and “The Best of Broadway” 2026 earned that designation without reservation. The lineup was deep enough that any one of the five principals could have headlined the evening alone. What made it work was the sequencing, each performance giving the next something to respond to , and a room that, at nearly 12,000 people, functioned as a single listening body.
The 2026 Hollywood Bowl season runs through September 30.
Tickets at hollywoodbowl.com.
