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GELFAND’S WORLD - We have a cultural treasure here in southern California that doesn’t get enough coverage. It’s called the Old Town Music Hall. They specialize in the film and music of the 1920s and thereabouts, which includes some remarkably entertaining stuff. Along with that, there is a program of classic movies, both silent and sound. They are now starting to develop a tradition for the New Year’s Eve celebration and it’s well worth a look.
I joined another hundred or so people over at the OTMH to bring in the New Year, and it was a real joy to behold and to hear. It was, for a few hours, a huge relief from all the depression and fearmongering we’ve had to talk about over the rest of the year.
So let’s talk about joy and fun for at least one moment.
You knew that something was up by the sight of all those pretty people dressed up as 1920s era flappers (you’ll have to look that term up) alongside a few of us older folks. If you didn’t have a hat, the ushers gave you a top hat (albeit of the plastic variety) and a noisemaker.
But that was just the audience.
El Segundo is just south of LAX. Back in my day, it was known for its high school swim team and a refinery. Nowadays, it still has the refinery, but it has developed a reputation for its walkable downtown and one particular cultural center.
The Old Town Music Hall is in a hundred-year-old building that was originally a movie theatre back when films were silent (but accompanied by live musicians). Sometimes it was a guy on a piano, sometimes it was an organ, and sometimes (in the kind of large theaters you can drive past on Broadway in downtown L.A.) there were full orchestras. This building is not one of those giant movie palaces, so we can assume that the original shows were of the more constrained variety.
But in the 1960s, a couple of theatre organ buffs by the names of Bill Field and Bill Coffman took ownership of the building, bought a giant Wurlitzer organ from an old movie house in Long Beach, and installed it in their revamped theatre.
All this by introduction to the marvelous New Year’s Eve show of 2026 at the Old Town Music Hall. Just to get to the point, the place has developed into a culture resource that is a whole lot of fun to attend. They specialize in classical movies of both the silent and not-so-silent varieties. One weekend you might see a Buster Keaton comedy, and the next a classic sound film from the 1940s.
The big new thing this NYE was the opening performance by their Jazz Band, which to my ears and their patter was concentrating on ragtime. The piano player was the accomplished Eve Elliot, who does her own one-woman show about three greats of the ragtime era, Jellyroll Morton, Scott Joplin, and Fats Waller. On trombone, we heard John Reed-Torres, on clarinet and saxophone there was Graham Jacobson, and on bass we heard Nathan Rivera. Up front on cornet there was CJ Sams. At the keyboard of the Mighty Wurlitzer organ was OTMH regular Randy Woltz who was accompanied in organ-drum duets by Satoshi Kirisawa. Kirisawa managed to bind together the musical pieces without being overly flashy or painfully loud, a character trait which was music to my ears.
What is becoming a welcome trend in these NYE concerts is that the show mixes highlights of film history with musical pieces, concentrating on recreating and reliving one of the more entertaining and productive eras in American culture. The band played rags by all of the above-named composers, and these were interspersed with film clips, including that Laurel and Hardy laugh riot called Liberty.
What was particularly helpful was that film historian and friend of the OTMH Randy Haberkamp introduced each film and film clip. He concentrated his choices on films that had some involvement with New Year’s Eve, such as the moment in The Poseidon Adventure when – during a NYE celebration – the ship is hit by a giant wave and turns over. There was a clip showing a young Garbo in Flesh and the Devil, which caused me to understand why people wanted (and still want) to see her films. And of course, there was a Betty Boop cartoon from the Fleischer studio, which Haberkamp introduced by way of how different it was from anything coming out of the Disney studio.
It is a curious thing, but some performances just happen to suit the moment in a particularly effective way. I was reminded of a performance of Tannhauser at the L.A. Opera which appeared right after a long period of closure due to the Covid, and the audience responded so enthusiastically that even the performers were surprised. At the Old Town Music Hall, the end of 2025 seems to have inspired much the same sort of enthusiasm. It has been a bitter and fearful year, and the sentiment seemed to flow from a happy sense that we could think of something else, at least for a few hours.
I can’t promise that this attitude can persist in this year of 2026, but I think I can promise that there will be many enjoyable (and even cultural) productions yet to come at the Old Town Music Hall.
For more information, check out their website, which you can find here.
Addendum: The opera Tannhauser includes a scene where the performers joyfully enter their own music hall after a long period without performances, and this seemed to hit the post-Covid audience right where it mattered.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
