Forget celebrity homes. This Hollywood bus tour haunts the city instead

There are fewer things a Los Angeles section is little apt to bash than instrumentality a Hollywood sightseeing circuit connected a big, garish bus. Only rush-hour postulation and $20 tacos animate the aforesaid level of dread.

Yet astir everyone aboard the open-air autobus for a Tuesday nighttime accumulation of “California Gothic: A Bus Tour” was an L.A. resident. The show, which is produced by the aggressively hep New Theater Hollywood, precocious wrapped its 3rd “season” aft debuting successful February and returning for an April encore. Set connected a moving bus, the 1.5-hour-long acquisition is portion esoteric Tinseltown past lesson, portion immersive theater. The communicative conjures meaning from the Los Angeles cityscape by fusing a hodgepodge of textbook theories astir the sprawling metropolis onto the gritty world of regular life.

“We primitively organized this reasoning determination would beryllium much radical coming who aren’t from here,” said Oliver Misraje, the show’s writer and superior circuit guide, arsenic the autobus pulled distant from the curb astatine Santa Monica and Wilcox. “But this conscionable goes to amusement however overmuch radical emotion the metropolis and are from here, contrary to fashionable belief.”

In lieu of celebrity-hungry tourists, “California Gothic” has been packing its autobus doubly a nighttime with rowdy young scenesters and in-the-know locals anxious to sorb its heady premix of California history, nationalist intellectualism and show artistry.

While the amusement wrapped its latest tally successful mid-June, it volition reopen its automated doors during the past week of October for a peculiar “ghost tour” variation co-written by Misraje and New York it miss Ruby McCollister.

The autobus arrives for New Theater Hollywood’s “California Gothic: A Bus Tour.”

My circuit was acold little steeped successful irony than I feared. As the autobus coiled its mode done the streets of Hollywood, starting astatine the New Theater’s doorstep earlier yet circling the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Misraje led the assemblage done his instrumentality connected the decease of the “California dream” and the rotting carcasses of bare buildings and breached promises near successful its wake. Along the way, we encountered a haunted-eyed Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Brooks Ginnan), a masked Hollywood fable known arsenic the Duchess of Argyle (Shauna Frente) and a singing, swaggering “Rat Czar” with a batch to accidental astir existent property developers (Loren Kramar).

Yes, it’s whimsical, and yes, it references Mike Davis’ “City of Quartz” much than immoderate of the TMZ-type excursions it mildly parodies, but it’s still, astatine its heart, a autobus tour.

In a motion to classical Hollywood circuit advertisements, the show’s winkingly all-caps poster declares, “You Will See: The Hollywood Sign, Marilyn Monroe, the Schizo City State.” There is besides a stash of BuzzBallz ready-to-drink cocktails for trivia winners, but Misraje and his formed bash not present their performances with smirks oregon smarm. They perpetrate full-throatedly to playing retired Misraje’s imaginativeness of a Hollywood haunted by the dreamers it’s wronged and the secrets it’s plastered over.

“Ultimately, we are trying to wage homage to the autobus circuit format, which is intrinsically ‘carny,’” Misraje said, likening himself to a carnival barker espousing aesthetic doctrine aboard an ever-changing “Ship of Theseus.”

Before the performers infiltrate the ship, “I’m trying to intentionally acceptable up assemblage expectations to deliberation they’re going to get this run-of-the-mill Hollywood decease tour,” helium explained. “I see myself a benignant of impish person, but inactive fundamentally sincere.”

Given the show’s monologue-heavy format and bevy of literate references, it’s nary astonishment that the conception began arsenic an essay. Misraje, a 27-year-old writer and self-described “Hollywood hustler” raised chiefly successful the Inland Empire, was inspired aft the 2025 Palisades and Eaton fires to signifier a portion helium had written bridging his emotion of Gothic lit with his “welfare class” upbringing successful a household of 7 raised by a azygous mother, which helium considered gothic successful its ain right.

“We were successful the Inland Empire and it was the 2008 fiscal crisis,” helium said. “There was each this imagery of things famously California-coded, similar the suburban house, the pool, the portion mall, and erstwhile we were there, it was just, like, destroyed. There were abandoned lodging subdivisions rotting successful the sun.”

The cleanable setting, helium explained, for the benignant of “literature that emerges aft the nonaccomplishment of a humanities project.”

After reaching retired to New Theater co-owner Calla Henkel and conceiving the project, Misraje and his producers elected to crook the funhouse reflector onto Hollywood, framing the vicinity with humanities discourse and Freudian mentation but yet letting it talk for itself.

The autobus passes the TCL Chinese Theatre.

The highly mutable quality of thoroughfare beingness and the participatory quality of the amusement means its code tin displacement drastically from circuit to tour, adjacent wrong the aforesaid night. Sometimes, the streets look glittering; different times, seedy and dangerous. Once, determination was a showdown with different circuit autobus — 1 presumably not carrying theatergoers. At a antithetic show, a drunk pedestrian tried to committee the autobus during faux-Monroe’s speech. One peculiarly harrowing night, idiosyncratic circled the autobus connected an electrical scooter, shouting homophobic slurs astatine the all-queer cast.

“It’s astir similar surfing,” Misraje said. “There’s truthful overmuch chaos you’re confronting, and you person to find a mode to thrust it and fto it beryllium a portion of the show.”

The show’s precocious accumulation costs marque bringing successful a nett difficult, but Misraje said helium and the New Theater Hollywood squad program to revive it periodically, with an evolving communicative and formed of characters.

On my tour, nary performer amended represented the blurred enactment betwixt theatre and thoroughfare beingness than the Duchess of Argyle, a.k.a. the Mysterious Masked Lady of Hollywoodland, a.k.a. Shauna Frente, a busty Blanche DuBois fig successful an eyeless flapper disguise and gartered stockings. Just 3 days before, she had been evicted from a location connected Argyle Avenue that erstwhile allegedly belonged to Cecil B. DeMille. This happened aft a lengthy ineligible battle, during which the amusement helped rise wealth for impermanent housing.

As the Duchess spilled vicinity secrets, our autobus repeatedly passed an Extra Space Storage installation painted with images of aged Hollywood behemoths: Lucille Ball, Groucho Marx and the like. The intermingling smells of sizzling blistery dogs, urine and marijuana wafted done the unfastened windows.

Hollywood whitethorn beryllium ghostly, the Duchess told us, but it was hers to haunt.

Duchess of Argyle (Shauna Frente) tells Hollywood stories during the tour.

(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)