Lawsuits, pom-poms and more pyro than a Bonfire Night budget: My Chemical Romance turned the Hollywood Bowl into the loudest, strangest bit of musical theatre in LA La Land…
Words & photo by Felix Bartlett | Oct 27, 2026
Is there anything more cinematic than hopping across the pond to see My Chemical Romance in Los Angeles? Probably not, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. The Black Parade’s 20th birthday bash had already flattened the UK over the summer, so it was finally my turn to take the plunge and catch Gerard Way and co. on home turf, at one of LA’s most iconic venues.
Saturday was night three of five at the Bowl, a run that makes MCR the first band ever to play the place five times. It was also the last hurrah of the Black Parade tour before Devil’s Night and Halloween, and believe me, nobody was saving anything for later.
Lawsuits, cheerleaders, guns and fireworks. Honestly, this thing had it all. It was enough to win over even those of us who haven’t followed the band with quite the same devotion as the black-clad cult they’ve built up over two decades. And yes, before you ask, I’m talking about myself.
The fun starts before anyone’s even plugged in. The walk up the Hollywood hills to the Bowl feels like the opening credits of a film, a slow-moving parade (sorry) of fans in their finest Black Parade gear trudging uphill as the sun dips over the city.
Waiting at the top as we enter the venue is MCR’s own spin on the Stars and Stripes, reworked around the band’s logo and a single rose handed to us to show our allegiance to the MCR army. I’d put good money on half the crowd wanting it run up the nearest flagpole.
Photo: Jesse DeFlorio
From the second you enter the bowl it’s obvious this isn’t your average gig. Masked figures loiter about the stage as the tale of Draag, a fictional dictatorship with a very healthy budget for banners, starts to unfold, and you get the distinct feeling they’re up to no good. Sure enough, later in the show they’re back with guns in hand, charging down the aisles and storming the stage. Proper goosebumps stuff, and clearly fine-tuned to perfection after months on the road.
Gerard, Mikey, Frank and Ray are in character as their alter egos, the Black Parade, a band forced to keep the Grand Immortal Dictator entertained. Think rock concert meets West End musical meets your most chaotic history lesson. The costume department deserves a pay rise too, with soldiers, masked henchmen and a squad of pom-pom-waving cheerleaders all getting their moment.
Underneath all the theatrics, though, sits one of the defining records of its generation, played front to back, and the band treat it with the respect it deserves. After an operatic opener, the stage spins round to reveal the whole band showered in fireworks, and ‘The End.’ lands like the opening scene of a horror film before ‘Dead!’ kicks the door clean off its hinges. Then the story takes a detour, with Gerard hopping down into the pit to talk us through a slideshow on Draag’s invasion of the United States, rounded off with a cheeky rewritten snippet of Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land Is Your Land’. From there it’s a breathless sprint through ‘This Is How I Disappear’ and ‘The Sharpest Lives’. Then comes that piano note. You know the one. ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’ turns the entire Bowl into the world’s biggest emo choir, and I’ll admit I wasn’t immune.
What really impresses is how much they’ve dressed the album up for the stage without losing what made it great in the first place. ‘I Don’t Love You’ gets a stretched-out intro that milks every last drop of heartbreak, before ‘House of Wolves’ snarls its way round the Bowl. Then it’s party time, sort of. The Grand Immortal Dictator gets a rousing chorus of ‘Happy Birthday’, only for Gerard to shoot him mid-celebration. Many happy returns.
Photo: Jesse DeFlorio
With the party well and truly over, ‘Cancer’ is reworked with violin into something even more devastating than the record (pass the tissues), and ‘Mama’ becomes a full-blown cabaret showstopper, with Lucy Joy Altus in character as Marianne and Charlie Saxton as The Clerk.
The back end of the album is where the theatre and the music really lock together. ‘Sleep’ arrives with a brand-new intro, ‘Teenagers’ is pure pom-pom-fuelled chaos (more on that in a minute), and ‘Disenchanted’ gets an extended outro that leaves you hanging on every note. Then ‘Famous Last Words’ still hits like a freight train, building out of a countdown and bleeding into a reprise of ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’ that sends goosebumps up every arm in the place. An acoustic reprise of ‘The End.’ then draws the curtain on the parade, bringing the whole thing full circle.
Once the parade has passed, cellist Clarice Jensen holds the fort with a solo piece before the band return as themselves for a victory lap through the rest of the catalogue. ‘Give ‘Em Hell, Kid’ comes out swinging, and there’s a proper treat for the diehards in ‘Zero Percent’, a Danger Days-era B-side I suspect plenty in the crowd never expected to hear live. ‘The Ghost of You’ and ‘I’m Not Okay (I Promise)’ send the Bowl into full-on 2004 mode, ‘Cemetery Drive’ keeps the Three Cheers nostalgia flowing, and ‘Na Na Na’ is pure technicolour joy after all that dystopian doom. They close on ‘The Light Behind Your Eyes’, a tender send-off, before Roy Orbison’s ‘It’s Over’ plays everyone out. Fitting, really.
Photo: Bryce Hall
Back to ‘Teenagers’, then, and those cheerleaders. Their blue-and-white get-up looks an awful lot like the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders’ iconic uniform, so much so that Pro Silver Star, the trademark owner behind the DCC, slapped the band with a lawsuit the day before. Their lawyers reckon ‘the universe of alternative costume designs is effectively unlimited’. MCR, it seems, are perfectly happy with the one they’ve got. For a show that’s all about sticking it to the man, you’ve got to admire the commitment.
Throw in pyro and fireworks that go off so often you could probably toast a marshmallow from the stands. And the band’s tongue-in-cheek tale of a nation swallowed by a dictatorship hits a fair bit closer to home now it’s playing out on American soil. As a final cheer before the Halloween weekend, it’s a seriously tough act to follow. Whatever they’ve got planned for Devil’s Night, the bar is sitting somewhere up near the Hollywood sign.
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