All the Park’s a Stage : Amusement meccas are greeting the summer throngs with strolling entertainers and new shows

Pat Moloney, director of entertainment at Universal Studios Hollywood, had a problem: To come up with a compelling performer this summer to entertain visitors waiting in line for “The Adventures of Conan,” an attraction featuring stunts, sword fights and special effects.

The lute players and Renaissance bands previously hired had not set the mood that Moloney wanted for the “Conan” sword-and-sorcery spectacular. After some thought, he remembered a man named John Stevens, whom he had first encountered at Venice Beach, swallowing swords and breathing flames. Now, Stevens is holding court at “Conan,” evoking the “oohs” and “aahs” that Moloney was after.

Whether it be a one-person act such as Stevens’ or the roller-skating musical, “Rollin’,” at Knott’s Berry Farm, the people responsible for live entertainment at Southern California’s theme parks take special care in hiring summer acts. Tourist attendance is at its peak in the summers--60% of Knott’s 5 million visitors come between Memorial Day and Labor Day, for instance, and Universal Tour’s 25,000-a-weekday draw is more than double its winter count.

With the intense competition for recreation dollars in the Los Angeles area, staffs sometimes spend as much as three years developing a show.

Almost every theme park representative maintains that each park has its own niche and therefore its entertainment complements rather than competes with that of the other parks.

Some executives admit to making “research trips” to see what other parks are up to. And while Sea World’s entertainment vice president Don Ludwig espouses the “complement-not-compete” theory, he also believes that “all the theme parks are always looking at Disneyland as the king of the mountain. We have to set our sights high, and have high-quality entertainment, to meet those standards.”

Bob McTyre, marketing and entertainment vice president at the granddaddy of theme parks: “(Disneyland is) differentiated from the other parks in the consumers’ minds, fortunately for us. So we think of ourselves as competing not specifically with them, but with disposable income: the Dodgers, Angels, VCRs, movies.”

Disneyland may have its new Splash Mountain attraction, Magic Mountain its new Tidal Wave and Sea World its new Baby Shamu, but theme park philosophy holds that customers expect diversity--things that will please people of all ages and interests.

Accordingly, Olympic figure skating champion Scott Hamilton and other Olympic medalists appear in Sea World’s “Odyssey on Ice” show; dolphins and sea lions cavort in Knott’s Berry Farm’s “Splashdance ‘89,” and a 12-member cast performs production numbers to compositions by Michael Jackson and the Beach Boys in Magic Mountain’s “California Dreamin’.”

Other musical programs include big band sounds in Disneyland’s Carnation Plaza Gardens and at the Queen Mary/Spruce Goose Entertainment Center, Jan and Dean and Kingston Trio concerts at the San Diego Wild Animal Park and an appearance by the Menudo singing group at Knott’s.

There are also costumed characters who greet guests, stilt-walking jugglers, puppets, magicians, celebrity look-alikes, even a breakdancing Frankenstein (at Universal). This street entertainment is called variously “walk-arounds,” “atmosphere program” and at Sea World, “putty” (“To fill in the gaps,” says Sea World’s Ludwig). The acts are designed to alleviate the boredom of waiting in line for rides, attractions and refreshments and provide tired customers a few minutes’ respite from their daylong bustle.

“The entertainment is alive and real--guests can touch it,” explains Joe Meck, vice president of entertainment and operations at Knott’s Berry Farm. “There’s nothing better than the face-to-face, one-to-one interaction with a guest that the street entertainment provides, where there’s no stage as a barrier. It adds charm and excitement. There should be an equal balance between entertainment and rides.”

Similarly, at Disneyland, McTyre says: “The core reason people come to Disneyland is the attractions. Yet where atmosphere is concerned, it’s important to try to make the park a place where things come alive, not just a place full of architecture. We’re pretty proud of the amount of entertainment we put out.”

In general, planning for each summer’s entertainment begins a year in advance. Ideas originate in a park’s entertainment or operations division and progress to discussions by marketing, production and other staff before being presented to the park president for approval or veto.

Most parks try to create one major new show each year, which then becomes a useful marketing tool for advertising and publicity campaigns and can set the tone for the rest of the season’s entertainment. Existing smaller shows, which may be performed year-round, are usually given a make-over to keep them fresh and pique the interest of local residents; McTyre says that Disneyland’s venerable Main Street Electrical Parade is aimed primarily at area residents and tourists from the region.

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There are exceptions to the summer-show hubbub. The Queen Mary/Spruce Goose Entertainment Center eliminated its stage shows in favor of celebrity look-alikes because, says publicity and public relations manager Rich Kerlin, “People here are on a tour--they’re not stopping from their walking around. So the entertainment that interacts with guests is what works best for us.”

Also notable is the San Diego Zoo, the city’s No. 1 tourist attraction in terms of attendance, which offers its three animal shows year-round and makes only one concession to summer--a costumed koala bear character named Sidney. “We used to have big band concerts and at least one show each summer,” says public relations director Jeff Jouett, “but 85% of the people they drew were members with year-long passes, so we weren’t making money. The last four years we’ve been concentrating on exhibits, which we’ve found are as big or bigger a draw and are more in line with what we feel our mission is as a zoological society.”

Over at the Wild Animal Park, which is also run by the San Diego Zoological Society, a series of four concerts starring headliners of the 1950s and 1960s was instituted this year, after a hiatus last summer, in response to research that showed that members wanted some kind of summer entertainment. The park also has summer “walkabout” musical acts and a magician. All three San Diego attractions offer what Sea World’s Ludwig calls “edu-tainment”--animal and bird shows that entertain but also educate audiences about wildlife behavior, roles in nature and preservation needs.

Factors in deciding on a concept include expense, suitability for the family market and timeliness. “We have to be flexible,” Ludwig says. “If something new and innovative comes along, we may shift gears mid-stream. We’re in the ‘80s now--you can’t do what worked in the ‘70s. We could do pretty basic things until the late ‘70s, when people were exposed to high-tech films like ‘Star Wars.’ ”

For the high-concept shows, park management will often request proposals from outside producers and choose the idea they deem most audience-grabbing. Such was the case with Magic Mountain’s “California Dreamin’ ” and Knott’s Berry Farm’s “Rollin’,” billed as an “extravaganza on wheels,” which features ramps and runways soaring over and into the audience, lasers and a roller-skating cast of 17.

Once a show concept is chosen, the production elements come together within a month or two. Auditions are held perhaps three months ahead of opening, with rehearsals beginning the month before the first performance.

For the major shows, the parks place casting notices in the trades and newspapers; Magic Mountain this year also sent flyers to college theater arts departments, and Universal’s Moloney visited gyms in search of bodybuilders for “Conan.”

Recruitment for street entertainment include the traditional trade ads and viewing unsolicited videotapes, and less conventional means, such as Moloney’s practice of scouting Venice Beach, the Magic Castle and San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf.

“I’ll look at anything,” he says. “I’ve seen everything from strippers to people who’ve said they’d build a space ship and have aliens come. We have a guy who plays a synthesizer for our ‘Star Trek Adventure’ pre-show, kind of a futuristic one-man band. He has an MBA from Harvard but he’d rather do this.”

The special nature of theme parks dictates that such street performers bring more than mere talent to their roles. “They have to have personality, not be afraid to get out there,” stipulates Mary McLoughlin, show operations production coordinator for Magic Mountain. “They are the show--there’s no lighting or whatever in the background.”

Robert McClure, general manager of the Wild Animal Park adds: “We pride ourselves on being family entertainment. So they can’t tell off-color jokes. Every entertainer has an ‘A’ show for nightclubs and a ‘B’ show for family. They do their ‘B’ show here.”

The number of performers trying out varies from the 50 or so vying for two to six openings at Sea World to the thousands of hopefuls whom Disneyland and Magic Mountain see. Some entertainers move from one park to another, though not always in the same job. “We have a roller-skating waiter who does paddle ball and Hula-Hoop tricks in our ‘Streets of the World’ diner,” says Moloney. “At Disneyland he was in the (Frontierland) Golden Horseshoe Revue.”

Some of the parks have extra added attractions for nightfall, such as Disneyland’s Electrical Parade and Sea World’s ice show and a sea lion show that spoofs daytime offerings. Most also feature aerial or water fireworks, some with lasers, which are choreographed to music and can be several months in the planning. This year, Knott’s Berry Farm replaced its Reflection Lake fireworks with the $1-million “Incredible Waterworks Show,” a sound, water and light show whose fountain has 1,200 nozzles that can direct streams of water up to 100 feet high. (The show plays during the day as well, but without benefit of colored lights.)

The price tag for all of this daytime and nighttime fun is not cheap. Company policy at most parks forbids discussion of spending. Only Knott’s is not shy about revealing its summer expansion program cost: $4 million.

“We use our ability to bring entertainment to our guests,” says Knott’s Meck. “Whether it’s Mom and Dad from Iowa doing our country hoedown or two 10-year-olds watching a street show with cameras rolling. So in a way, the whole park becomes the stage.”