What Price for That Big Day? : Culture: The “theme” bar and bat mitzvahs of the ‘90s are productions, with entertainers, lavish settings and budgets to make parents swoon.

The bat mitzvah girl was not alone. There were nine of her, dancing like a bat mitzvah-girl chorus line across nine--count ‘em, nine--television sets.

“This is broadcasting television technology that we’re making available to the bar mitzvah market,” said Vince Doyle, a bar mitzvah professional, as he hovered before his flashing “video wall” at Los Angeles’ first bar mitzvah planning show Sunday. “You can turn it into the ‘Arsenio Hall Show.’ ”

Oy. So you want to do a bar mitzvah? How about hiring a man with a giant Elvis head? Why not do it at the Hollywood Bowl? Have you considered a giant cake shaped like a Torah or a Hollywood-theme reception, with the bar mitzvah boy’s name on a marquee? Or elephants or Laker girls or chocolates shaped like baseball bats?

“I want M. C. Hammer at my bar mitzvah,” Eric Grossman, 9, said of one of America’s most exuberant rap stars.

Can’t touch that, kid. Your dad says he has limits. But even a man with limits is looking at an ever-expanding tab of a good 15 grand or so these days.

“Everyone’s spending their life savings for a bar mitzvah,” said Eric’s dad, Marvin, 44. “Everybody tries to keep up with everybody else. It’s a real rip-off.”

When it comes to the bar mitzvah of the ‘90s, everyone’s keeping up with the Schwartzes. Or so said some of the startled buyers and sellers at the bar mitzvah show at the Warner Center Marriott Hotel in Woodland Hills, which drew about 2,000 parents and children, along with 65 caterers, photographers, florists and other party people.

Bar mitzvahs “have gotten outrageous,” said Jill Herzig, a show organizer and proprietor of Lip Sync Inc., which videotapes small bar mitzvah guests lip- syncing, with sponge guitars, to “The Beverly Hillbillies” theme, “La Bamba” and other memorable tunes.

“People spend incredible amounts of money,” Herzig said. “That’s why party planners and caterers and photographers are so happy to be here. We’ve done bar mitzvahs where they spend $150,000. You get rented palm trees. You get the child delivered for a grand entrance on top of a Ferrari.”

Or as one dismayed parent, Shelly Sherwin, put it: “When you live in Southern California, the sky isn’t even the limit.”

A bar mitzvah isn’t just fun and games anymore. It’s serious business.

“One guy said he wanted a clown parachuting into the party, and he said he wanted a flight pattern onto the beach,” said Kristy Patterson, whose company, Hollywood Bowl Catering, happily happens to do bar mitzvahs both at the Bowl and the beach. She wasn’t up on the flight pattern situation, however.

Yes, you did just read the words Hollywood Bowl. But don’t get too excited. That’s really the Hollywood Bowl restaurant, although it should come as no surprise that Patterson did get a number of inquiries about renting the very expensive stage. “A lot of kids have an orchestra theme and they want to be a conductor of the Philharmonic.”

The operative word here is “theme.” Bar and bat mitzvahs, for boys and girls respectively, are no longer mere receptions capping a child’s virtuoso display of Torah reading and celebrating their step up to adulthood. They are theme events, much like the proms of their parents’ youth. The difference is, picking up the tab for a tux and an orchid is, in comparison, getting off cheap.

Take the bar mitzvah with a broadcast sports theme that Teri Smolar of Reigning Parties is putting together. Each table will have a centerpiece with fluorescent tubing spinning up to a blurb that says something like “You’re out!” “We’re doing stadium seats, binoculars for place cards.” No Laker girls for this one, but that’s only because no one asked.

“Sometimes they will script cheers” for the bar mitzvah boy, said Smolar, 37. “You can be as elaborate as you want. There’s the peanut man who throws out peanuts, but that’s already overdone. Five-and-a-half-foot trophies, marble-ized. We work very high. We work very aerial.”

Don’t think parents are so busy kvelling over their kids that they haven’t noticed what’s going on.

“It gets expensive, but everyone does it, so if you don’t do it, you feel like you’re cheating your kid. I’m forced into it,” said Rosalie Hiller, an Encino mom who recently forked over $20,000 for a relatively modest bat mitzvah with a piano theme and is looking at a second one.

That makes Hiller worry about the message she is sending her children about money. And she worries because family members are at each other’s throats during the last weeks leading up to the event.

But these days, Sweet Sixteens are falling by the wayside and bat mitzvahs are picking up the slack. And Hiller, with two girls, is ready to do it all over again: “When you’re 13, you do it big. It was her party. It was her coming out. On balance, when you close your eyes and don’t think about the money, it’s something very special.”

Special? How about special effects--with theatrical lighting and smoke and people in giant Barbara and George Bush heads and the bar mitzvah boy arriving in a silver spaceship? How’s that for special?

“This is weird,” said an unimpressed Michael Bernstone, 12. “It’s all adults with adults. A bar mitzvah is nice, formal. You dance. You eat. You say, ‘Goodby.’ That’s it.”