Thursday, June 9, 2011

Star Wars in Concert, Hollywood Bowl



Last night Joe and I surprised Audrey and Carter and took them to see "Star Wars in Concert" at the Hollywood Bowl. I saw a commercial for this back in April and it looked really cool. I got tickets and was able to keep it a surprise until we got there. Lisa had told the kids they were going to a concert outdoors but that was it. I kept telling Carter that we were going to a Disney Princess concert and he was not happy at all. He kept telling me that he thought we were going to a Star Wars Concert because he saw a commercial about it...GREAT!!!??? Well, I played it down and acted like I had never heard about it and told him that I wish I had known and it sounded really cool. As we drove up to the Hollywood Bowl, Audrey read the sign and said "We are going to the Star Wars Concert!!!" I acted like we still weren't going and told them how sorry I was that we were going to the same place as Star Wars but were seeing something else! I told them that maybe we could swap our tickets for it but Audrey said the sign said it was sold out so we wouldn't be able to!!! They kept seeing all these kids dressed up in Star Wars with their light sabers and it was killing them. Finally, Joe told me I had to tell them because they couldn't stop talking about the lucky kids. I handed them their tickets and Audrey read them and said "YES!! We are going to Star Wars"!!! They were really excited!!!

Before we got into the concert, they had all the characters there that you could take pictures with. The kids were really excited!! Carter was pretty bummed that he didn't have his light saber, so Joe bought him a little green one and Audrey some Star Wars dog tags...Joe of course had to get himself a pair of dog tags too!! We also got this huge Concert book that has really cool pictures in it.



















We got in our seats and couldn't wait for the show to start!! It started almost a half an hour late, but it was worth the wait!! They had Anthony Daniels be the narrator. He is the actual person that played C3PO in all the movies. He was pretty cool and funny!! So basically how it worked was he would go movie by movie and explain what happened and then they would show clips from the movie on huge flat screens and the Orchestra would be playing the music. It took me a while to realize that the music was live because you are so used to just hearing it from the movie. It sounded AWESOME!!! It was pretty cool when it got dark because you could see all the light sabers glowing!!! After about 10 minutes of it, Carter asked me when the "movie" was going to start!!! I explained to him that this was how it was going to be and after a little bit, he got it! He was really cute waving his light saber around during the battle scenes!! I think he and Audrey both liked it!!























The best part was when it was over, they announced a surprise guest was there. All of a sudden John Williams walks out and the place goes NUTS!! It was soooo cool!! Of course he had to conduct a song and it was AMAZING!!! Not many people can say they have seen the actual composer of Star Wars live...but we can!!!



I video taped most of the concert, but they took too long to download so I didn't download them all. The first is mine and the rest I got off of Youtube, so here are some of my favorite moments...

Opening Song...



A Recap of the whole concert...check out all the light sabers glowing at night, pretty cool!!!



John Williams Conducting...



MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU......