A couple of quick updates. I’m going to be out in Los Angeles for a few days to catch the Immersive Invitational and a great piece by friend-of-the-show Jessica Creane, Tea Party at the End of the World. These are both events LA residents and visitors should make time to catch. I have two nights free while I’m out there to catch other immersive things, so if there’s something I shouldn’t miss, tell me and I’ll try to see it.

I’m also going to be in London at the end of May for a LARP called Valour Manor by UK-based design team Omen Star — I like their work a lot. I’m looking for at least one other immersive thing to do as I’ll be there for a night before the LARP begins.

I’m definitely going to see all of the upcomings I’ve listed below and I’m always on the hunt for new immersive, so please do reach out if you want to join me on an adventure or noticed something I should see.

Upcoming Immersive

Melting Plot - Do you remember that Theaterlab immersive festival I was telling you about? It’s official now. It’s called Melting Plot and it’s featuring five incubated immersive works by different creators. I’m biased as I’m helping out with this one, but I think it’s looking like an excellent set of shows, including a new piece by emerging immersive artist Katy Murphy. I’ll also be leading a TBA panel on immersive on a TBA day. Tickets are available for individual shows for $35 (true cost/TC1: $70), a flexible festival of five shows for $135 (TC: $358.50), or all access including parties and talks for $500. Festival runs May 18th-31st.

(Embarrassingly, I previously miswrote the name of the festival I am personally working on — chef’s kiss to me there. It’s been fixed. Thanks to Andy for the correction.)

Chalk Portal Outline - Another Theaterlab presentation, this is a new interactive dance piece by the Welcome to Campfire team who made the awesome Subject project. This danceplay features live sound mixing, real-time video feeds, and a gaming component that manipulates the show. I really like this group, so I’m definitely going to see it. $50 (TC: $150) for audience, $90 for player, May 14th to 22nd

73 Seconds - The world premiere of Jared Mezzocchi’s multimedia exploration of his family’s past, staged in a 64-seat planetarium. It’s described as a live documentary using low-fi technology. I can’t guarantee anything here, but who am I kidding — this is the kind of art I live for. We’re seeing it on May 14th. $70 (TC: $140) , April 29th - May 18th

Motion Picture House - Tickets are now available to this multimedia experience of Radiohead’s Kid A and Amnesia (i.e., the best Radiohead albums - yeah, I said it, fight me). I’m not sure how profound a big projection mapped visualizer to one of the greatest bands of all time is going to be, but you have to admit it’s at least the right ingredients for something cool.This is the second show we’re seeing on May 14th, if you want buddies. Seats seem to be moving pretty fast so I would act quickly here. $72, May 6th - June 28th.

Aether: Awakening Annabellee - A live exploratory experience over two floors, Aether is set in 1988 and concerns the disappearance of a woman named Belle. You wander the space interacting with actors and installations that are all fragments of her memory. I don’t know — this one’s expensive and it’s connected to the Fairyland property that I didn’t love the last incarnation of. Still, these things can surprise you, and I’m going to see it at some point I’m sure. $129, May 6th - June 10th

2026 Field Guide to Imaginary Birds - A coming work by the Experiential Orchestra, praised below, this is a free family-friendly music listening tour through Prospect Park featuring seven musicians. Each takes the role of a unique imaginary bird with its own song which are then combined to create scores as you wander the park. It’s tied to a creative workshop where you draw the birds you heard. That sounds cute, right? Tickets aren’t up yet, but as it’s a free event, I’m not sure it’s even going to be ticketed. I’ll keep checking the site. June 1st and 3rd.

Whisperlodge - A 90 minute ASMR experience for 10 guests that’s a classic work in immersive circles. I actually don’t know much more about it than that, but it’s one of those pieces veteran immersonauts regularly reference. I’ve never seen it, but I’ll be damned if I miss it this time. I don’t have any real information other than the fact that tickets for September shows in NYC go on sale on May 1st @ noon. Sign up on the site for more info.

This is your regular reminder to go see Masquerade if you haven’t already.

Immersive Reviews

Apologies again for delaying in getting these reviews to you. The vast majority are quite old and long gone, but I’ve put an asterisk (*) next to the thing you can still see as of April 29th, 2026.

Lunch Dances - A longer review is coming, but the short version is Lunch Dances is a truly amazing dance/storytelling work that runs inside the New York Public Library. A meditation on the role of the library in ordinary lives, the audience dons a silent disco headset and follows a porter through the reading rooms and hallways during active hours as they deliver research to patrons, hearing the stories of those patrons and watching short dance pieces. It’s a stunning tribute to the library and deeply moving in both the narratives and the performance. It’s one of my favorite things so far this year. I’m hoping it will return, and you should definitely catch it if it does.

Down and Out - An interesting montage of performances set in a dance club. Different club goers enact moments from evenings out that show the more prosaic, depressing aspects of nightlife, reflecting on relationships, financial struggles, and rage against politics. The performers were generally strong. The scenes themselves were of varied quality. The best ones were the more poetic that expressed emotions through abstract word-poems and movement; the more literal scenes were sometimes too blunt. This is a multi-volume work (I saw part 2) and I would likely check out another chapter.

Out of the Shadows - An Experiential Orchestra performance in the crypt of St. John the Divine, a group of about a dozen musicians played five contemporary and classic pieces, including some amazing work by Caroline Shaw and Jessie Montgomery. The immersive here was the audio environment — the acoustics of the crypt transformed the sound and at one point we were asked to don blindfolds to isolate our auditory experience. I found this concert both moving and intellectually captivating. I’m not sure that I’ve given enough credit to what immersive audio environments are, but I’ll be following more of EXO’s work to see what I can learn.

The Listening - A live theater performance about seances and ghost experiences where the audience hears the actors along with sound effects through silent disco headsets. This piece simply did not work. The stories were not that interesting or scary, and the frame tale containing them was thin and pointless. The headset was not a considered part of the work. Audio effects were tacked on and cheesy (there were, for example, two different instances of a fizzy soda being poured into a glass) and having the actors speak through the headset added nothing to what they could have brought with a normal delivery. I just don’t understand what the point of this piece was.

Rasputin’s Cult Circle - I have a longer review of this coming with the always-great Allie Marotta. Artemis is Burning teamed up with the upscale sauna Othership to give a glimpse into the Death of Rasputin universe with a spa-based ritual. My short take - this was an interesting experiment that didn’t work. The ritual here was not very thought out and I couldn’t buy into it. The spa itself was a cool location, but the interactive components were either over-explained and didactic or too hackneyed (I heard “take a breath in and out” at least four times) and meaningless. Where the piece excelled is when the actors stopped asking me to do things and just embodied the cultist aspects of the story. I liked Death of Rasputin and I applaud their attempt do to something new with it. The spa implementation didn’t land, but I’m definitely going to watch for the next iteration of this work.

Off the Record - Off the Record is an interactive theater piece that’s a darkly parodic look at the American criminal justice system. Given how colossally evil that system is, it’s an important topic to discuss and I give the show credit for being very informed about the issue and featuring pointed critiques of it. I was impressed at how fluent the performers were with the critical facts and arguments. But while the comedy itself was solid and cutting in places, the interactivity just didn’t work with this audience. The piece was leaning into a gotcha style of learning where they asked you to vote or offer ideas only to reveal that issues were more complicated or much worse than you thought. As interactions, these polls were not really thought through and felt tacked on. That said, if this were an audience that knew nothing about the topic, these moments still might have been powerful. But I already knew 80% of the facts they mentioned and I was likely the least informed person in the room on the topic. Maybe if I were a high school student who never thought about the unfairness of prisons before I could have gotten more out of it. It’s not a bad show and the issue is critical, but as an immersive piece it’s not doing anything interesting.

Footnotes - My longer review here. A second piece where the content was interesting but the interactivity was not. Footnotes was a puppet show meditating the concept of walking. It was most effective as a display of different styles of puppetry. It didn’t all land, but there were moments of interesting innovation and the presence of a live narrator and band helped lift the piece. However, the basic interaction design was off. The show took place on multiple stages and you were directed to them by blunt commands from the house announcer during full breaks in the performances (e.g., “Please turn around now and move to the second stage”). Given the long history of immersive techniques to direct people, and the affordances already at work in this show, there were literally dozens of ways they could have moved us in a diegetically or aesthetically interesting way. That they didn’t is embarrassing. If you’re going to have an immersive structure, you have to actually do the immersive design.

Silk Society - My longer review here. Silk Society was the immersive frame for Women Who Cut, a new dark comedy play. The play itself was pretty good, with a very strong lead performer, but the immersive components were what really interested me. The performance started with a salon set in the play’s story universe that had interesting commentary on wealth and privilege, and the play then expanded into new parts of the space in an effective way in terms of immersive staging. Silk Society was an experiment that I’m not sure will be repeated, but it continues to demonstrate that RJ Theatre Company is a group to watch.

Provenance - Provenance was an interesting interactive installation that told you a story as you blindly manipulated a desk-sized puzzle box. The piece begins in the dark as you are placed in front of the desk with no instruction, and as you manipulate it, you begin to hear a young woman’s tale of spiritualism, colonialism, and responsibility. The puzzle had some confusing bits to it that I think could be smoothed out with clearer interface design, but I found the material objects beautiful, the story interestingly nuanced, and the experience of solving it satisfying. It was in a prototype form when I saw it, but I think the final version of Provenance will be a quite powerful work.

Soul Paint - A VR experience exploring the art-therapy technique of body mapping, Soul Paint uses a virtual painting tool to allow you to color and create shapes around your avatar to reflect your current emotional state. A narrative by Rosario Dawson walks your through the process and helps you reflect on what you’re feeling. This is a surprising effective experience. I found myself able to use the visualization to check in with myself in a more focused way and the comfortable virtual environment made me okay with the vulnerability that required. One place where I think VR hype has been real is in its psychological and health applications, and I can say at least my experience of Soul Paint tells me that virtual body mapping is an interesting thing to try.

*Art Bath - A salon featuring a few different musical and performance artists, Art Bath is a running series by what seems to be very friendly group of founders bringing talent they like to their community. The performances I saw that evening were all pretty good (notably vocalist Lisel), but what I really liked is that the room seemed welcoming and genuinely into promoting the artists. Bonus points for it being hosted in a quite cool space. Art Bath is hosting salons about once a month, and I intend to go back to see more of what they are curating.

Professional Development - A comedy spoof with some improvised elements about a self-help seminar. The interactivity was light here as you mostly just watch the performers as they do a variety of darkly crazy mantras and exercises, but I will give credit to the piece that it was hilariously absurd at moments. The immersive part that interested me was that it was set in a workroom that you would expect for this seminar and everyone at the show was just milling around having snacks at the beginning. It was impossible to tell who was a performer and who wasn’t, and I thought that was a sharp set-up technique that immersive pieces should use again.

We Have No Need of Other Worlds - An interesting bunch of components that didn’t quite become a great whole, We Have No Need of Other Worlds was a combination one-man storytelling event and holographic visual experience. The narrator spoke of sitting with his dying father while reading a journal of his adventures as a number of volumetric LED displays created images and vignettes related to the story. The narrative was interesting and the visual effects of the LED were striking, but I never felt like the two were in effective conversation with each other. There was something slightly out of sync between what the narrator was talking about and what we said around him; I never felt like the elements cohered. I appreciated the experimentation of this piece, but I just felt like the technology wasn’t integrated into the work to move it beyond a gimmick — a shame because as technology, it was quite beautiful.

It’s nice to be back in a more regular saddle again, so I’ll try to keep up the pace I’m on and bring you more reviews and thoughts soon. Have fun immersing.

Sorry for the delay, immersonauts. Those of you who have seen me recently know I’ve been dealing with some family health stuff that has sucked up all of my spare time for a while. I’ve still been doing immersive stuff, but not so much writing. I’m going to try to use this post to get back to the intended cadence of at least once-a-month and ideally every couple of weeks, but your patience is requested as I navigate the health care system. That too is something I’m going to write about at some point.

Enough of that stuff. On to the immersive. There are some things to look forward to that I’m posting here. Given how long this would be, I’m going to follow this up in a few days with my back catalog of reviews. I will tell you right now that The Listening was not good; you’ll know more when I post my review, but there’s a reason it’s not in the Upcoming list below.

In terms of stuff for the future though, I will be in Los Angeles at the beginning of May for the Immersive Invitational. It’s a collaboration of After Hours Theatre Company and The Immersive Experience Institute (sister organization to NoPro) in which a handful of curated immersive creators do a 48 hour jam and show off their material. This is previously produced some pretty acclaimed work, so I’m looking forward to seeing the ensemble. If you’re going to be in the area, you should too. I’m also looking forward to catching some more immersive in my brief stay, so share if there’s something I shouldn’t miss.

And there was an immersive meetup in NYC on March 17! Hosted at Brooklyn Art Haus by the aforementioned Immersive Experience Institute, it was a chance for the immersive community of NYC to reintroduce itself, hang out, share news, and generally be the very charming, very fun people we are. I have strong feelings that there will be more of these in the coming months and I will be certain to spread the word as it becomes open to the public.

Alright, on to the stuff you can see, with thanks again for your patience as you wait to hear what I’ve vicariously experienced for you.

Upcoming Immersive

Off the Record: Acts of Restorative Justice - An examination of the American Criminal Justice System in which one woman decides to question the game itself, enlisting the audience to help her fight against the forces of capital. I’m sympathetic to the theme and it’s at HERE Art Center, where I’ve seen interesting political work previously. Also, it’s by James Scruggs, a play maker with some good interactive pedigree. I’m seeing it this Friday the 10th. Runs until April 19th, $31.50

Music in the Crypt - Friend of the show Alex brought this one to my attention — call outs always welcome here. St. John the Divine regularly puts on some interesting performance events, and now they are throwing their hat into the music-in-a-mausoleum format with this new string quartet performance in their very own crypts. It’s pricey, but not crazy for this kind of music, and I’m curious about what St. John the Divine is going to try with immersive work, so I’m seeing it. It’s only up April 10th and 11th, $100.

Anotherland - Hendrick’s Gin is hosting a 90-minute immersive multi-room experience of roving performers and interactive discoveries. I have to say that I’ve found these brand experiences to be of high quality generally, so even though I’m straight-edged, I’m interested in checking this out just to see what they do. Tickets are going fast (it’s free), so act quickly if you’re curious. April 18th and 19th at various points through the day and night.

Motion Picture House - So maybe you heard that Radiohead did a virtual experience to commemorate the release of Kid A Mnesia. Well, they are now bringing it into a real-world immersive space. It’s a 75 minute Radiohead environmental audio-visual experience — what more would any immersonaut want? It launches at Coachella and comes to NYC May 6th to May 31st, as well as other cities after. You can’t buy tickets yet, but you can pre-register to get access to buy them at the link above until Sunday April 12th. Don’t sleep on it — this is really happenin’.

Theaterlab Festival TBD - Theaterlab, a venue which regularly hosts really interesting small immersive content, is working on a festival of small works featuring a number of emergent creators — a collection of five small shows that you can catch on multiple nights. (Full disclosure: I’m helping to organize this, although none of my work is in it.) I’ll provide more details as it’s made public, but it’s going to run at the end of May and the true immersonauts out there will recognize at least one of these performers. Be ready to stop by Theaterlab in a little over a month.

Keep in mind you can also still catch a few older things: a top-shelf, Broadway musical immersive with Masquerade and less expensive white-magic, ritual narrative with The Haven. Both of them are interesting and quite good, with Masquerade being well-nigh ummissable.

And one of the announcements of Immersive Meet-Up was that a NYC version of the Immersive Invitational will be coming later this year. The rest of the details aren’t public yet, but rest assured I will get them to you as soon as I have them.

Alright, that’s your quick hit while I tidy up my reviews. Larger post soon with the praise and snark you’ve come to expect.

Festival Season Go-Sees

Drinking Brecht - An interesting look at history, theft, and genetics from Sister Sylvester, the artist behind the brilliant The Eagle and the Tortoise. You can go see the installation at Techne Homecoming, but get a ticket to the performance if you can. The show is a combination of a slideshow narration and an interactive bit where you play around with chemistry with the other two audience members. Along the way, you get an essay about the history of Brecht’s theater group, the science of gene analysis, and interesting questions about what the silent parts of things are for. It’s a very tight, very thought-provoking piece, and maybe my favorite thing so far this Under the Radar. Runs until the 18th.

Techne Homecoming - This is the gallery the previous piece is hosted in and it contains a few other interactive works. It’s free, so it’s not a burden to go to, and you should, because there is a terrific piece of surround video art there called The Deer of Nine Colors, a poetic narrative film with some stunning visuals and choreography. If you can get down to Canal Street and spend a half an hour with it, it’s worth it. Also until the 18th.

The Mushroom (finished) - Sadly, this one is already past, but it’s worth mentioning. The Mushroom is a new work by the same group who created The Art of Psychic Self-Defense. The work is a combination solo play and then puppet-dance performance using complicated costumes of many layers of cloth. If you have never seen Normandy Sherwood’s work before, make a note to check it out. There’s a really incredible craft and sensibility to these fabric, mechanic expressions of whimsy. The Mushroom wasn’t perfect, but it cut between an interesting personal monologue and crazy expressionist dance piece deftly and the construction is breathtaking.

An Arc - The Shed is currently running this augmented reality short play. While it’s not perfect, I think it’s interesting to check out. You don a pair of AR glasses and then watch an performance of four actors aimed at you. What was interesting about it is that it actually felt intimate to have the actors talking to you when the experience is carefully designed and the actors are good, and these actors are very good. The play itself was weaker — while some of the writing was strong, the storyworld didn’t add up and that meant the whole thing felt a bit self-indulgent and thin to me. But I would say it’s worth just seeing what it feels like to have a close encounter with digital actors.

The Haven - Some immersive work fits into a category of what I privately think of as “white-magic self-help.” This is stuff that is lightly narrative, based on a loose narrative storyworld, that’s meant to let you explore some issue in your life and help you find a kind of next step or closure. I’m not generally a big fan of things that purport to be therapy through immersive, since therapy is a science that takes genuine training, but I am a fan of well-crafted ritual and The Haven succeeds at that. The writing is good in that it doesn’t promise too much or take itself too seriously, the tech is subtle and interesting, and the performance (in my case, by McKenna Parsons) does a good job of creating a just-open-ended-enough ritual to allow you to carry some meaning from it. I do not believe that anything immersive is genuinely going to solve your problems, but The Haven is a good example of using ritual as compelling if a bit saccharine entertainment.

Festival Season Not-So-Muchs

I’m going to take my pants off now - A solo show with minor audience participation that’s meditating on a cod overfishing crisis and personal insecurity. The performer here is talented with a good deadpan sense of humor and there’s a great costume bit, but the show was really just a bunch of random moments that didn’t add up. I’m not sure why anything in particular happened in this piece. Maybe interesting if you want to see some clowning, but this one was just too scattered for me.

2021- This game meets grief memoir just didn’t work for me. The main idea (although not the only one, and that’s the big issue here) was that an audience member was called on stage to be the player of a game that’s the story of the narrator’s father’s decline into dementia and death. There were interesting moments in the piece to be sure. The narrative of the torture of hospitalization was powerful and there were some nice moments of storytelling and interactivity where the player roleplayed the father, making dialogue choices as the narrator spoke live to him. But there were just too many disparate ideas here that didn’t make sense together. There’s a narrative about a daguerreotype at the top that only cursorily connects to the rest of the show. The show ends with the narrator making an AI version of her father, but nothing has set that conclusion up in the story and the use of AI here feels about 2 years out of date. Most importantly though, and I’m going to write a longer thought piece about this because asses.masses also has this issue, the show uses games in the wrong way and becomes unbearable at times. I appreciate the experimentation and the content, but this work just tried too many things and didn’t do most of them well enough.

Ok, you’ve been waiting long enough to know about Masquerade. Did Broadway just screw up immersive again? Or do we finally have our big mass-market immersive hit on our hands? Let your mind start a journey through a strange new world, leave all thoughts of the world you knew behind…

Let your soul take you where you long to BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE……..

Masquerade Review

Dear friends, my precious immersonauts, it’s good. Really good. With Masquerade, Broadway has finally done immersive with a major IP and done it well. Go see it. It’s worth the price. I have a published conversation about it with the great Allie Marotta on NoPro, but I wanted to synthesize some notes here for you in case you want reasons to see what I think is the most can’t-miss thing in immersive NYC right now.

Is Masquerade perfect? Heavens no. Is it the next Sleep No More all the immersive kids have longed for? Absolutely not. But it fulfills its primary mission - giving us a version of Phantom that the fans will go crazy for and that doesn’t look like any immersive I’ve seen before. It’s immersive done intimate and close where you still get the power of Broadway.

This is a big enough show I’m going to do a longer write up for it. I’m not going to give any major spoilers at all, but even minor ones I’m going to block in case you want to know nothing about the content. I will spoil form at this point, but you’ll still be surprised by the show if you read this. But stop now if you really want to know nothing. It’s Phantom though — it’s on you if you don’t know the basics.

Masquerade as Dark Ride

Masquerade is basically a musical done as a dark ride with some immersive scenes built in. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, a “dark ride” is an amusement park feature where guest are put on an automated vehicle in an indoor space and then moved through different multimedia exhibits. Think of a haunted house or many of the Disney IP rides. It’s a linear experience where you’re moved from moment to moment to watch something that’s usually narrative.

Masquerade is a dark ride you walk through to see a series of musical theatre scenes. It’s the story of Phantom of the Opera with some extra content thrown it. This is not unique to immersive — a number of shows (the Stranger Things experience or the Money Heist experience, to name a few) have used this format to let fans experience a property close-up. Where Masquerade is different is that it’s a Broadway musical and those two elements — the Broadway and the music — are what make Masquerade unprecedented in the immersive world.

This was not the only structure that could have worked here. There were lots of other ways to imagine it working as an immersive show. I think they went with dark ride for a few reasons:

• It allowed them to make it feel immersive without changing the story much (and given it’s Phantom, there’s a lot pressure to not change the story.)

• It meant that they could ensure that everyone saw every critical part of the show. Given the fandom of Phantom, I think exactly zero audience members would be cool with missing a major song or moment.

• It gave them an affordance set that could really work as a Broadway-level experience in terms of staging.

This last point is what I want to dwell on. This is where the show blazed a trail for this time of immersive going forward.

What Worked

There is only one really interactive moment in Masquerade which takes place in a single location. It’s actually quite good; you get to play with performers and see some genuinely different content depending on where you are in the room. Other than that, an actor may say a line or two to you and someone may touch your shoulder, but everything else is on rails. This is not a sandbox and you have no agency at all. Sleep No More it is very deliberately not.

But giving up that audience choice and interaction allows them to plan each location with a precision of stagecraft that’s incredible. What in the musical would be a set change on stage is instead you entering a new location with a specific setting that’s made for that one scene. And that is just stunning. There is a precision of costuming and lighting and blocking that is really breathtaking. So many scenes stand out in my memory because the theater of them was so strong. It’s the production magic at the heart of the show. Putting all the scenes in different places meant that each step of the performance could be even more precisely staged and done so with an incredibly intimate audience. Again, that’s not weird to some immersive works, but pair that with a Broadway like set and costume standard and you get something stunning.

Then there’s the music. If you’ve never seen musical or opera singing this close, you have no idea how different it is. I can’t explain exactly why it’s so affecting, but as someone who doesn’t generally like opera, I feel a visceral difference when the singer is 10 feet away from me. Masquerade has phenomenal performers (I saw Kyle Scatliffe as the Phantom and Claire Layton as Christine; both were amazing) and to hear them sing right in front of you is a testament to the talent of live performance. This is worth your ticket price alone.

What Worked Less Well

Not every scene in this piece works. There’s some parts where they rehash the musical which, I mean, it’s Phantom — who doesn’t know this story, or couldn’t follow it up to this point? And there’s a scene in which is supposed to be a metaphor for the Phantom’s control of Christine that I saw multiple audience members laugh at both times I saw it. But these are weak moments in a strong work. I wish they would edit them, but none of them break the show or even really detract from the powerful stuff this piece is.

The main issue is at the heart of the project. It’s Phantom of the Opera. Your mileage will vary here, but I have never really been a fan of that musical. Some of the songs are amazing, but there are just as many clunkers for me — how does anyone sing “Point of No Return” without cracking up at how literal it is? The story is just a giant pile of cheese in places. What I’m saying here is that if you don’t like things about Phantom, you’re probably not going to like them in Masquerade either. The most intellectually interesting bits were the new parts that were free from the burden of the original. There’s a part of me that left Masquerade longing for an original Broadway show to manifest in this form, something that could go the next step in being more diegetically consistent and less beholden to something stale. But the quality of this show makes me hopeful that’s coming.

Final Take

In a NoPro podcast recently, a team of us did some handwringing about the potential of Masquerade. Many of us were nervous that Broadway would screw it up and scare the industry away from immersive for years longer. But I gave a success threshold. Masquerade would not succeed if it got the immersive crowd to love it. Masquerade would succeed if it got the PHANTOM crowd to love it. That’s the big fish. If they tell their friends to see it, the show has won.

During the first run I was at, there was a young man who sat next to us for several scenes. For as long as we saw him, his mouth was agape and tears were streaming from his eyes. It was like he was having an ecstatic vision, like an angel had descended in front of him. Everyone like him, every superfan of the show, is going to tell EVERYONE they know to see this show. Christine can look you in eyes when she feels the Phantom in her mind. You will be six feet away from the performers as they flawlessly sing your favorite music. What Phantom fan is not going to travel to NYC, pay hundreds of dollars, and wait on 45th street in their black-silver-white finery to see that?

I get it too. Jaded friends from the immersive world who were at my show (and I won’t out here) told me they almost cried several times. Everyone I know who has seen the show has told at least one other person they needed to get a ticket. I’m not a fan of Phantom, but by miles this was the best Phantom I’ve ever seen. Right now, I’m telling YOU - go see this show. It’s not the next coming of immersive. It’s a new form of Broadway. I can’t promise you will like it and I can’t promise that Broadway will make more of these, but if you want to see one future of immersive in expensive, mass-market IP, Masquerade is the swing for the fences.

I realized as I started putting this together just how many reviews I owed and that would be far too much for any one blast, so I’ve decided to create two posts. This one is just a couple of reviews of things you can still see, a bit of year round up, and a catalogue of the things you can look forward in 2026. I made another post that’s all the now-finished shows I’ve seen in the last three months that you can check out if you’re interested in everything else I’ve experienced.

By the way, be sure to take another look at No Proscenium if you haven’t for a while. The site just went through a huge upgrade and it’s much easier to search and navigate now. Most importantly, check out the new version of Everything Immersive. It’s a MUCH more usable site that is a great resource for finding immersive work around the country and the world. And remember, much of this is possible because of the good work of those sites, so please consider supporting them keeping the faith.

Immersive reviews first, year-end-evaluations, and then the long list of January and February events in NYC to check out.

Immersive Reviews

Again, you can still catch these two if you’re interested. Links in the titles. More reviews of shows you missed are here.

Masquerade - I’ve been teasing this one for a while, so let me get right to it: it’s good. Really good. It’s not Sleep No More in terms of immersive, but it’s immersive Broadway finally done right. The stagecraft is stunning, the talent is incredible, and the chance to be that close to singers is an entirely new way of experiencing a musical. I don’t like Phantom, and still I’m saying it at the top of my lungs. You should see it. Get tickets when you can. I did a longer conversation about the show with the brilliant Allie Marotta recently and I have a draft of a post that’s a much longer review of the piece coming next week, but Masquerade is simply the best thing I saw last year and 100% worth the ticket price.

Room 204 - The Walker Hotel Greenwich Village is putting on this two-person play in a hotel room for audiences of about 10. It’s not interactive, but since all the action is in a very small hotel room, you are literally inches from the actors at times. It’s the story of a relationship as it forms and disintegrates, told out of sequence through entrances and exits of the room. Overall, it’s a solid piece — the actors are quite good and the use of the hotel room is compelling and really intimate. My issue with the work was the writing. The play does a wonderful job making the relationship complex and placing kindness and fault with both partners, but it’s a piece from an older generation with very… different… views of domestic violence. I couldn’t elide over that part of the story, which makes me wonder why this narrative needed to be told again. I can’t say it’s a deal-breaker for you though. Room 204 well performed and it’s an interesting set; if seeing plays in unorthodox places is your thing, it’s worth checking out.

Year in Review

Normally, I take part in a best-of coverage piece with No Proscenium, but college program building and travel distracted me. You can see the other correspondents’ takes above. Of course, one of the privileges of having your own substack is having your own deadlines, so without further ado, here were my favorite immersive moments from 2025.

Masquerade: By far, the most important thing in the field that happened in 2025. For so long we in the industry have said that Broadway can’t do immersive. Masquerade single-handedly destroys that myth. The show is not an original form of immersive and, at least in my opinion, it’s not the best musical, but in terms of execution of spectacle and performance it’s unparalleled.

Hamlet: An Experience: My fuller review is here, but the tl;dr is that Emily Carding’s solo work is truly powerful re-interpretation of Shakespeare that leans hard into Carding’s brilliance as a performer and their talent for interacting with audiences. I’ve only seen this one piece of Carding’s Trilogy, but playing Laertes to Carding’s Hamlet could not be topped as a moment of interactivity this year.

Tribeca Immersive: In Search of Us: I’m not going to lie — I have often been underwhelmed by the Tribeca XR showcase, but the partnership with Onassis ONX seemed to bring an new level of quality to the exhibition. The work was generally quite good, and the top pieces — Fragile Home, A Father’s Lullaby, and The Innocence of Unknowing — were all terrific. Applause to a high watermark for this kind of gallery. I look forward to its next incarnation.

Playground - Please yes to more chances to see immersive works in progress. What May Come Immersive and Culture Lab LIC hosted this night of experiments, and I’m really hoping we see more of these in 2026.

Non-Immersive Bests

This is also the one moment of the year where I indulge in pushing a few other things I like from 2025, so apologies to those of you not here for non-immersive things. Skip the next two sections and you’ll find the upcoming shows.

Music

Good year for both new artists and returning ones.

• Oklou, choke enough: A truly new sound the world introduced me to this year that is now a constant night working companion for me.

• Purity Ring, Purity Ring: Sometimes a band just keeps doing the thing it’s good at, and if that band is Purity Ring, I am so there for that. Also my top concert of the year by miles.

• Youth Lagoon, Rarely Do I Dream: Youth Lagoon is one of those bands that I thought was just ok, but then this album just brought the sound together so well that it made me rethink the artist completely.

• Water From Your Eyes, It’s a Beautiful Place: Water From Your Eyes continues to be challenging and driving and complexly beautiful. It’s maybe the most interesting album I heard this year.

• Sudan Archives, The BPM: I heard older Sudan Archives and just so wanted her to make a dance album, and then she did and it’s just as awesome as I hoped. .

• Wet Leg, Moisturizer: Another more of the same remains terrific.

Books

If you ever want to see (a good percentage of) what I’ve been reading, you can find that here. Here’s what I read in 2025 that I recommend strongly.

• Audition, Katimura - A very weird novel about motherhood and performance. Probably the best novel of the year.

• The Empusium, Tokarczuk - Tokarczuk is an amazing and very versatile author and this is a rare novel that sticks the landing brilliantly.

• The Mobius Book, Lacey - Lacey continues to impress with this half-memoir, half-novel about perspectives in and around relationships.

• Orbital, Harvey - A beautiful meditation on space and the scale of human life against time and the forces of the universe.

Upcoming Immersive

As warned, the coincidence of Under the Radar and Exponential and Prototype means that January and early February are just chock full of immersive things to do. There’s also a couple of non-festival related works that should be on your radar.

This list is quite long, so my descriptions are going to be pretty brief. Just know that I’m seeing A LOT of this work - anything with an asterisk after the title is something I already have a ticket to. If you want to know when I’m seeing something or what to coordinate around a show I’m still planning, give me a write and we can try to make it happen.

• Faggotica* - A transgender romp through a dreamy goth nightclub. My read is that this is an immersive dance performance in a club like space, light on interactivity. I’ve seen good and bad things of this kind, so I’m game to try it. 1/14-1/22, $20

• The Mushroom* - A dance and installation art experience focused on a micro view of a forest floor. I’m guessing this is another watch-but-don’t-touch dance experience in a stylized space. 1/8-1/11, $25

• 2021* - A live performance using theatre, AI, and interaction, an audience member plays an unhoused veteran living through his final weeks inside digital hospital, making choices in response to his daughter’s prompts. I want to see if the interactivity here is going to surprise me at all. 1/9-1/18, $30

• I’m Going to Take my Pants Off Now* - The site says it’s a sweaty interactive play that contains lowly cod fish, funny and not funny words, and dark thoughts. And…yeah. Who knows? These things can be amazing sometimes. 1/3-1/17, $29

• Techne Homecoming* - An installation of six large-scale art installations and immersive performances exploring how kinship and identity are shaped by different bonds. It’s free for 6 pieces and, as I said above, I trust ONX a bit right now, so I’m checking it out. 1/9-1/18, free.

• We Have No Needs of Other Worlds* - A digital seance where performers and the audience interact with a digital phantom as a son reads the journals of his elderly father and reflects on memory. This a technology/theater mashup. I can’t vouch for it, but it sounds interesting. 1/9-1/12, $15

• Drinking Brecht* - Part interactive documentary and part biohacking experiment, Sister Sylvester attempts to determine the origins of a hat they stole from Bertolt Brecht’s costume collection in a marxist-feminist celebration of science. Yeah, your guess is as good as mine. 1/9-1/18, $20.

• Professional Development* - A community-built self-help seminar in which audiences are guided by a variety of professional team-building techniques to explore self-actualization. The company doing this, Little Lord, seems to do crazy stuff, so I slightly more hopeful I’ll see something interesting here. 1/13-1/17, $30

• Down and Out* - A meditation on feeling bad at the club, this piece blends theater and nightlife to showcase a cast of actors and club kids seeing what a dancing night can be if it’s not an ecstatic release. I’m interested in these club/theater mashups right now, so I’m curious to see what they do. 1/28-1/29, $30

• An Arc* - A play in mixed reality at the Shed, in which you wear MR glasses to watch the actors perform in front of you. It doesn’t seem to be interactive at all, but it’s an interesting use of technology I’m going to try for myself. Runs through March 1st, $45.

• Secrets Bar- A play that takes place in a bar with the action happening at tables around you that you “overhear” during the course of the show. I saw this previously and had mixed feelings about it, but they say they’ve made changes so I’m going to try to catch it again in January to see if it’s improved. Runs through 1/31, $79.

• Roomies Live - A live version of a 90s sitcom where members of the audience are rotated on stage to be special guest stars and improvise with the cast. I saw a prototype of this a few months ago and it was an interesting if light piece. I’m probably going to go again just to see how it developed into a full thing. 2/20, $39.

• Dirt - An interesting and weird thought experiment in city planning in which the East River is suddenly filled with land. The audience votes on what developments should happen and then the cast builds it DIY style on a scale model of the city before your eyes. I’ve seen this already and while I don’t think it’s perfect, it’s certainly weird enough to check out if you like strange interactive things. 1/22-2/15, $38

• Artbath* - Part of the Prototype Festival this year, this event has run in previous locations in 2025. It’s a themed immersive art salon that features a variety of works in different media. I can’t vouch for it, as it may just be a slick marketing package around a bunch of disparate acts, but it’s run at Lincoln Center before, so I’m giving it a shot. 1/16-1/17, $72

• Burnout Paradise - An absurd meditation on productivity and overwork, four performers attempt to perform tasks while running on treadmills for the whole show. I saw this previously and thought it was okay, although other No Pro people loved it, so YMMV. I’m not seeing it again, but it’s running from 2/18 through 6/28, so you have plenty of time to catch it if you’re interested. $79.

Whew. You made it! Thanks for sticking with Immersed In NYC for 2025. Much more to come in 2026. Happy New Year all!

But before all that, did you know that the NoPro podcast hit its 500th episode in August? That’s 10 full years of immersive coverage. Noah Nelson put together something like 13 hours of content interviewing people who have been connected to NoPro during that time as a celebration of the community, and it’s a pretty crazily deep bench (including many members of this newsletter as well as its humble author.) If you have a lot of time to list with, you can find all the interviews here; mine is part of Part III. Remember that so much of what I do here is possible because of NoPro and you can support them through Patreon.

Immersive Reviews

Oh so much to discuss. See below for the back-catalog. Note that anything that’s still playing and you can catch is in the December 30th blast, so this is just the stuff you missed.

Arbologues - This was a fifteen minute solo experience where you are given a script to read to an audience that is a living tree. That sums up what I did and it basically worked. You have to bring a bit of energy to this one; I imagine if you didn’t have some intention in the reading, it would be a waste of time. The script was better than it should have been given that it went to the obvious places of climate change and the differences between people and trees. There were some nice beats where you could add your own thoughts to the script that allowed you to reflect on time or human influence on nature. It’s a simple piece and nothing really profound was going to happen, but I’ll give the artists credit that it was an interesting experiment and executed well at the scale they choose.

Playground - Culture Lab LIC and What May Come Immersive hosted this workshop of three different immersive pieces with a talkback from one of the artists each night. As a format, this was great. $40 got me a chance to see three different works in progress, all of which were advanced enough that I could enjoy them as shows but clearly see that there were things being prototyped. I liked the chance to sample some work and get a look at the creative process. Playground was a fun and useful event that I hope runs again. Our community needs more spaces to experiment with audiences and I hope Culture Lab and immersive ticket buyers keep supporting these efforts. As for the work itself, What May Come has terrific performers and the work all had promise, but since it was in-progress, I don’t feel that comfortable talking about it in detail, with one exception…

Radium Girls - Lena Wolfe presented a prototype of her new immersive dance performance based on the history of women who got workplace injuries while handling radium in the early 20th century and how the plight of those women created many of the workplace safety laws we know today. The piece was a Punchdrunk-ish large cast dance piece with interactivity large and small. What worked for me is that the narrative is compelling and the promise of the use of radium as a visual element is strong. Wolfe is also playing with interactivity in the show — that was demoed in the prototype in a very placeholder way — but it promises something interesting that you don’t normally see in this mask-adjacent pieces. Radium Girls is a piece to keep an eye on.

asses.masses - asses.masses is a digital game that’s played in a single sitting in a room of about 75 people. One person plays the game at a time and it takes about 8 hours to finish. This was an interesting example of a number of good parts adding up to a not good whole. The idea of playing a durational game in a theater-like audience is terrific and there was good collaborative and joking energy in the room. The game itself was pretty good too — there was nothing original in the game play (it’s an RPG-maker style narrative game with some derivative mini-games such as rhythm-action and menu-based combat), but the writing was quite good and some of the characters were just great. The issue is that I don’t know what this specific game gained from being in front of an audience. There was no point in the gameplay that the fact of the large room mattered. The game itself was basically just a Steam experience on stage, so while the room did take turns on the controller and vote on options, none of that was enforced by the design of the performance or really integrated into the play experience at all. I struggle to see how anything would have been different if I just put any narrative game on stage. This piece is going to tour further, so you’ll have chances to see it, but I’m torn about recommending it. I guess if you want to see a narrative RPG played in its entirety in one sitting, this is a decent game to watch, but just know the “theater” designers have done nothing more than make the game and put the console on stage.

Poe-tetic - The next three reviews are all Halloween pieces I saw when I was in LA recently. Poe-tetic was an original dance/theater mashup set in a Masque of the Red Death storyworld. The staging itself was a bit weak. The piece was put up in an old warehouse they did little to dress, so it was hard to stay immersed when the only appropriate elements were the costumes and some props. That said, while the performers were somewhat uneven as actors (some great and some not-so-great), the dancing was terrific: evocative, close, and interesting narratively. The story had to do with disease, privilege, and deals with the devil. It worked well enough although it started to drag in the final act. I’m honestly not sure how I felt about it. The team on this was really trying and in some ways they did a great job, but they need to work a bit more on their set design and tighten up their writing and acting.

The Man from the Tuskhut - A truly trippy experience that’s hard to describe. You walk into a small room that designed as cabin in the Arctic to face a lifesize animatronic of an arctic explorer who then has a conversation with you, meaning you talk to the mannequin and then an AI comes up with a response and the explorer dummy talks to you in jerky, old theme park style. The story is just batshit. What starts as an interview descends into paranoid ranting, accusations, and a final revelation that is just too crazy for me to spoil. You should see this. I’m not saying it’s good. I just have never experienced anything like this and thus I feel it’s worth witnessing.

Body Filters - Another work-in-progress that I think is worth paying attention to. Greg Nanni and Griffin Stanton-Ameisen creating this curious interactive work about a post-climate-crisis future. The audience is cast as members of a small community who witnesses a crisis of conscience among the group’s Body Filters, the workers who keep drowned bodies from poisoning the island’s water supplies. Participation here involved the audience answering questions about their values and memories on index cards that the actors would use to improvise their stories as they performed. The piece used an interesting 12-step group therapy structure to showcase actor monologues and solicit structured audience input. What I saw was a very early prototype of the work, but I found the narrative compelling and the structure interesting to play with. I hope Body Filters get a fuller mount, but I would certainly watch these two artists to see what other experiments they try.

(No) Refunds - A live game show meditation on the demands and compensation performers are subject to. Katy Murphy, best known from Candle House Collective, wrote and performs in this, playing the host who leads a single special ticket holder from the audience through a series of challenges on stage in an attempt to win back their ticket price. The piece is an interesting meditation on the labor of performance and Murphy is good at juggling the input of a random audience member and keeping the show moving. I personally don’t love watch non-professionals on stage as much as this show demands, but it’s an interesting work that shows some creative potential and I would certainly check out what Murphy does next.

Disremembrance - The Cell, lover of immersive experiments, put on this Sleep-No-More style immersive play about Mary Shelley and the moment she came up with the idea of Frankenstein. The audience can wander the space to witness the interactions of Mary, Percy, Lord Byron, and the other party guests as they work out their infatuations, betrayals, and moments of creative inspiration. The concept of this work is very good, but the execution just took the wrong direction. All of the drama of the play circles around the love affairs between the characters, whether they are seducing or jealously taunting or rejecting each other in turn, but none of it has enough plot to stay interesting for the duration of the piece. As a result, listening to the characters go in their loops of longing and hostility just gets fatiguing. I don’t know why the creators didn’t use the actual material of the geniuses they have in the room (why are we not hearing more of their writing?!?) and/or the backdrop of drug use and grief to make something less literal and more expressive and surreal. It’s a shame given the care that was put into this that the creators wouldn’t let go more of the text and lean into the more interesting content that was right in front of them.

Far Away - My long review here. An immersive staging of Carol Churchill’s play by Stairwell Theater for the Fall of Freedom theater event, Far Away was a series of surreal scenes exploring the absurdities and horror of fascism and violent revolution. The play as a text was mixed; some scenes were pitch-perfect takes on oppression that were both silly and horrifying, but at other times jokes were too literal and went on for far too long. But Far Away shined because of Stairwell’s staging. The play wandered all over the warehouse space of Box of Moonlight and, at times, pushed into the audience itself, forcing us to pick up our stools and move them so the action could continue. My hat is off to Stairwell for using innovative movement and staging to bring this play to life.

New Frame - Odyssey Works puts on an annual display of its Experience Design Certificate Program with an interactive gallery of their participants’ works-in-process. What the work had in common is that it was all based around ritual — every piece I saw asked me to have a conversation with it, creating something that was personal to me that was then incorporated into the experience. I don’t really want to say anything about the specific pieces given how early they were, but I saw a lot of interesting ideas, including a really compelling storytelling piece with a live cellist accompaniment, and all of the artists are clearly looking to make more interactive work in the future and people to watch. I had been meaning to check out Odyssey Works for many years and I’ll make seeing this showcase a priority in the future.

Mediamorfosis Quito - Did I mention I also gave a talk in Quito, Ecuador last month? No rest for the weary, I guess. Mediamorfosis is a conference that showcases XR creators in Latin and South America and has taken place across the region including in Buenos Aires, Santiago, Montevideo, Bogota, and Mexico City. I saw a number of good talks here as well a few interesting VR pieces. I want to particularly call out Damien Kirchner’s coming immersive piece based on the classic comic, Mafalda Immersiva, and Feedback, a VR piece by Peruvian artist Lorena Garina Espino and the AMIXR collective. This conference is a great reminder to all of us that immersive things are in no way absent from the Americas south of us.

Oratorio for Living Things - An oratorio (because I didn’t know this before I saw it) is a large scale music work performed without costumes, scenery, or action. It’s a form I found interesting, in that it’s music that revolves around themes without becoming literal stories. This one was vaguely immersive in that the singers were standing in the audience all around you. The piece was a meditation on cosmic time. I had mixed feeling about it as a work. Some of the music I really liked, but I thought the work failed to land the cosmic sense it was going for. The arrangement was too traditional and lack the real chaos it would need to represent something as huge and violent as the universe, and the meditations on eternity felt kind of cliche. But when the piece looked at the finitude of human perception of time, including an amazing song about the details of minor important memories, the piece felt powerful and touching. There were parts of this work that were great — it didn’t land as a whole, but I would be curious about what more consistent executions of this form could produce.

There’s WAY too much for me to cover in one post, so I’m going to break this update into four. This first one will cover upcoming immersive so that you can catch things if you want to. There’s also a poll here so that I can get some intelligence from you about why you’re reading and what content you like. The following post will be a plethora of reviews from the things I’ve seen over the last few weeks. The next will be all Masquerade. I’ve seen it, friends, and it’s very good. I couldn’t post about it before because it was still in aggressive previews, but I’m seeing the full show in November a second time and then you will get my full take. Finally, I had a truly awful experience at a show I love that has made me want to rant, so prepare yourself for a brand new thought piece, this time an instructional guide for how to be a good audience member at immersive shows, so that I can maybe avoid miserable audiences in the future.

I’m always on the hunt for more immersive things to check out so push to me what you’ve seen or heard about that you want me to taste first. And look forward to the next few posts in the coming weeks as I clear out my backlog and get ready for the winter of new work to check out.

Upcoming Immersive

Masquerade - As mentioned above, it delivers. It’s expensive, but given that you’re seeing Broadway level quality in an immersive format, it’s worth the price. And it is very good. I’ll save my full review for a later post, but the key thing to know is that it’s not Sleep No More. It’s more of a promenade performance you walk through, but it implements that form incredibly. Note that this group is also hosting some kind of Halloween party if you’re into a Phantom inspired holiday. Through February 1st (for now), $220+

Tell No One - If you have no plans on Halloween and you really want to do something in this medium, the best I can offer you is this Instagram party in the McKittrick hotel, the old site of Sleep No More. I’m not a huge fan of the Tell No One events; they are pretty much cool spaces with DJs and some random performances that don’t really synthesize into anything more interesting than a backdrop for influencers to get photos. But this one is featuring a real immersive company on Halloween and Nov 1st by way of Artemis is Burning. On those two nights, they are putting up a short vignette of the next incarnation of Death of Rasputin, the immersive dance/theater piece that ran on Governor’s Island earlier this year. Death of Rasputin was a good show, so I figure you can do worse that enduring the Tell No One scene to see what this group is doing next. 10/31 and 11/1, about $120

Gallery of Sin - I just noticed one other Halloween thing, this time brought to you by the improv studio the Upright Citizens Brigade. Billed as a interactive comedy piece, the group Characters Welcome is taking over the two floors of the theater to let you walk through different scenes, which I imagine are comedy takes on sins and punishments. I can’t vouch for this, but it’s cheap and it compares itself to Sleep No More, so you could do worse if you just want to have a fun, interactive time this spooky season. Just Halloween, $15 in advance and $20 day-of

Secrets - This locative theater show structured as a set of conversations you eavesdrop on in a bar is returning this November for a revised run. While I didn’t love the first incarnation, I thought it had a number of good components and the creative team promises that it’s been reworked based on feedback. I’m inclined to give it another shot to see if they did something more interesting with the script.

Oratorio for Living Things - The Signature Theatre is hosting this supposedly immersive oratorio (which is defined as a sung musical work without costumes or staging) which appears to be some kind of abstract multimedia experience. I really don’t know anything more about it, but it’s getting some generally good buzz and I’m always drawn to weird and genre-breaking art, so I’m going to check it out in early November. Through November 23rd, $124 to $181.

The Body Filters - The next interactive piece at the immersive friendly venue The Cell, this play invites the audience to answer questions and then builds a part-scripted, part-improvised performance reflecting on climate change. I’m going to see a dress rehearsal of this before the official run on November 16th, so hit me up if you’re on the fence about it and I’ll give you a report. 10/16, 10/18, and 10/24, $20

Also, note that an apparently multimedia theater piece is coming to the Shed in January and the Under the Radar festival just announced its line-up, so early 2026 is looking quite good in terms of weird stuff to see. More on these in coming posts.

Quick Poll

Given how behind I am on posting, it occurred to me this is a good time to find out what content people are looking for from this newsletter. As I primarily do this for myself and not to be internet famous, I can’t guarantee I’m changing anything as a result of your feedback, but it’s always useful to have data about what’s working and what’s not. It’s only a few questions, so it shouldn’t be too onerous. You can check the form here - thanks in advance.

Next post will be my deluge of reviews. Get ready for critiques of work from across the country. And have a good spooky season, everyone!

My travel this month was fueled by the Next Stage summit. I promised it would be a great gathering of immersive thinkers and can happily attest that it was. I got to meet creators of pieces I had only heard rumors of, reconnect with old friends and a kind of shocking number of former students, hear from partners huge (e.g. Disney, Secret Cinema) and tiny (e.g. Deadweight of The Manikins fame) about their processes and challenges, and generally join in reinforcing the community of knowledge and creative sharing in our field. It’s hard for me to accurately describe how many interesting conversations I had and connections that formed, but the summit exceeded my high expectations. I push NoPro in every newsletter for a reason - the Immersive Experience Institute and NoPro are really great organizing forces for this art form. Support them and go to this event when it returns.

I do also see non-immersive stuff, of course, and while I try to keep this list focused, every so often I see something that I need to share. This update, that’s John Proctor is the Villain. An amazing meditation on The Crucible and this moment of #MeToo and sexual politics, this play hits some of its beats so skillfully I would call this unmissable. The piece is brave enough to be truly surreal in moments and it will blow your mind. I know these things are expensive, but if you have a budget for theater, this is the one to blow that money on. It’s currently predicted to close on September 7th; I’m hoping it will be extended, but go while you can.

What’s up next is a clean-up of my reviews and then a few more upcoming events, including stuff quite soon - over this weekend and next week. I’ll see Masquerade (aka Immersive Phantom) on the 28th, so there will be another update shortly after with my review and some looking forward to that most wonderful time of the immersive year, Halloween. As always, push me the events you hear about - you know I’ll try them so you don’t have to.

Immersive Reviews

The Affair of the Poisons - Wow, was this crazy. Printemps is a fancy French department store downtown that’s known for expensive goods and over-the-top styled showrooms. The department store decided to host a performance, put on by Death by Classical, of the Versailles Royal Opera Orchestra, which was on its very first US tour ever. And to showcase this, they did an immersive show with the orchestra as a centerpiece. I don’t know classic music well, but from what I could hear myself and see in the audience reactions, they were phenomenal. The immersive frame was a loose narrative about a poisoning spate in the historic French court that kind of didn’t make sense, but it was delivered by well-costumed actors game for playing with you and supported by a number of terrific musicians, dancers, and performers scattered around the 5 or so rooms of the department store you had access to. It wasn’t a perfect event — a lot of good food was promised, but the delivery was so slow and limited I had to camp out at the kitchen entrance to get even three small snacks — but getting to see a world-renowned orchestra with a bunch of incredible sideshows in a gonzo department store was an experience worth having.

Viola’s Room (NYC version) - This is the remount of Punchdrunk audio show from London where you walk through a number of intricate sets and diorama listening to a story in your headphones. It’s essentially the same as the London version and thus my opinion of it is also the same. I will say I paid less attention to trying to tie the narrative together the second time, which made it a much better experience. It’s definitely worth seeing once — the form is interesting and the sets are stunning at times. But like much of Punchdrunk-inspired immersive work, it functions best if you don’t try to understand it and just let the sensory experience wash over you. It’s still running at the Shed for a while so catch it if you can.

Broken Bone Bathtub: The Documentary - This was a screening of a documentary about the titular work and its creator, Siobhan O’Loughlin, hosted by Siobhan, who also directed the film. It’s a pretty good doc on the topic, giving a clear sense of the spirit of the project as well as the crazy five year journey its creation was. What really struck me watching it was how original Bathtub was. I’m hard pressed to think of any immersive show before it where the entire piece was grounded in the conversation between the performer and the audience so centrally. Siobhan is offering private bookings of the piece if you want to see it (which I do and would happily contribute to - contact me if interested), but if that’s not possible for you, the doc is a great way to understand this foundational piece of our form. Oh, and Siobhan can throw a party, so the screening event was fun too.

Upcoming Immersive

Playground - This weekend, there’s an event at Culture Lab that’s a workshop for three different in-progress immersive shows, including a dance piece about the women who worked with radium (for real, people were just painting radium on watches and such a hundred years ago) and a fully immersive sit-com. Creators here are solid and it’s a chance to see a bunch of work at once, so it’s a no-brainer for true immersonauts. And each night features a talkback from one of the creative groups. Friday the 15th to Sunday the 17th, $45. I’m going on Friday.

Masquerade - There are still limited tickets for this highly anticipated fusion of Broadway and immersive. Early spoiler-free reviews tell me it’s a good show. Don’t wait for my review on this if you’re curious. Big shows don’t have good track records of becoming easier to see lately.

Arborlogues - A new piece by Dan Daly and Lee LeBreton at the cell, Arbologues is a fifteen minute long piece that hands you a script and has you engage in a one-person performance with a tree. Yup, that kind of show. Daly has done other work like this at the cell that I’ve found interesting enough to make this worth my fifteen minutes, so I’ll be checking it out at some random time I can be on 23rd Street. $16.25, runs until August 24th.

The Bird - I’m not often talking about escape rooms here, mostly because they hang around for years and there are other very active communities reviewing them, but when I hear about a good one, I plug. This is co-developed by friend-of-the-newsletter Brett Kuehner and I have heard from several good sources it’s the go-to room in NYC right now. It’s a MyssTic room, who also host the small and lovely Ghost Light, so I’m trusting my contacts here. Three is a good number of players, I’ve been told. $62.

Jury Games - I’m biting the bullet on this one. Anyone want to go with me to see this Fever-supported interactive court thing? I know it’s not going to be that interesting, but I feel like it’s successful, so the researcher in me needs to see it. Dates are on and off until the end of the year, but I want to pick a date to see it by next week. Let me know if you want to go with me and we’ll coordinate. $40-50

That’s all for now. More later this month when I have witnessed the Angel of Music (…muuuusiiiic) and have more for you with which to plan your immersive autumns.

I cannot in any way vouch for this and it’s certainly not cheap, but this is clearly the it show of the season in NYC so I can’t miss it (and won’t, since I’m seeing it in August) and I would say that you can’t either if you’re as dedicated to this field as I am. The new drop is for tickets from September 9th to October 19th.

I’m going to list a few more things that I know are going on in the next month as well, but note that I can’t make a lot of these since I’ll be at Next Stage, the NoPro conference on all things immersive, August 1st to 3rd. I have discounts for tickets to that festival if you’re interested. Message me privately and I’ll push them to you. I really do think it’s the best networking space for immersive I’ve seen, so if you’re going to be in LA, the 2-day ticket with discount is a bargain.

Upcoming Events

Masquerade - Sign up at the link attached and log in at 10am to try to get them. It’s seriously selling out, so be on top of this if you’re interested in going.

Mechasonic - A musical performance event featuring experimental and DIY instruments/performance art pieces. I’ve done previous incarnations - it’s a quite cool event that’s a kind of combination art show/concert/metal shop. It’s immersive in the sense that it’s crazy and surrounds you; you will certainly feel transported. July 11th and 12th, $65.

Broken Bone Bathtub: The Documentary - Immersive veteran Siobhan O’Loughlin is premiering her documentary about her OG interactive performance Broken Bone Bathtub at Culture Lab on July 11th at 7pm. It’s hard to adequately express how central this piece was to NYC immersive and Siobhan is an awesome human, so come support if you can. I’ll certainly be there. About $40.

The Woods - This work is described as an immersive dance-driven concert, with music by San Fermin and performance by BalletCollective. It’s at Pioneer Works which tells me it’s going to be technology-focused in some way. The description makes me assume some surround video work that accompanies the music, but that’s a pure guess. Were I not in LA for the conference, I would definitely be here. July 31th and August 1st at 8pm, $58.88.

Psychomagic 9 - An improvised immersive performance based on The Holy Mountain, an amazing trippy film about enlightenment and spiritual journeys. I really can’t tell what this is, although they argue that the audience participates by trying to help an alchemist get a film production back on track. The Classics Department created this and while I don’t know this group, the work on their site looks interesting. Again, I would definitely attend this one if I were around. August 1st and 2nd, tickets range from $100 for normal tickets to $250 for VIP and extra show.

That’s all for now. Still more events are popping up, so don’t be surprised if another dispatch appears before long. Good luck ticket hunting!

In upcomings this month, there’s a lot of promise but little data. I’ll update when I know more, but things seem to be more in the space of potential right now than actual, with one very notable exception that will make your scroll to Upcoming Events worth it. Oh, and there’s a meetup happening if you want to have a casual conversation with some creative immersive folk.

Also, the Next Stage Immersive Summit is going on August 1st through 3rd in Pasadena, California. Next Stage is the premier meeting place for immersive creators and a great chance to connect with the artists and critics of our field. I’m going to be there and if this is a field that interests you as a practitioner, there’s no better event in the world.

As always, drop me a line about things you hear coming that are in my wheelhouse (shout outs to Andrew and Ida for heroic duty on this front lately) and let me know what you’re planning to check out if immersive buddies are welcome.

Immersive Reviews

Voidspace Live - Voidspace Live is a two-day festival for interactive performances hosted by Voidspace, an organization promoting interactive writing. The festival was a chance to see a bunch of immersive works-in-progress and hang out with the creators. The work is what you expect from this kind of testing event — a mixed bag of interesting ideas and not great implementation in places — but the conference itself was a wonderful chance to meet some very creative, very smart, and very friendly designers and actors in the London scene. If you’re in London, you should check it out if you want to see up and coming work and teams.

Since the pieces were in progress, I don’t generally feel comfortable reviewing them; I’ll plug anything I saw there that was particularly good if it goes fully live. However, there were two pieces that were complete and solid and I’ll review those here.

• Hamlet (an experience) - Longer review here. Emily Carding’s one person interactive take on Hamlet casts them as the title character and select members of the audience as the other personae in the Shakespearean tragedy. Emily is one of the greats of immersive acting and they carry the show with enormous presence and complexity, but the structure is just as good. Audience members given roles are handed short scripts and then singled out for scenes before the whole audience, largely to be Hamlet’s verbal punching bags (it is Hamlet, after all) but occasionally to deliver some lines, reenact some moments, or in one lucky case, fake a sword fight and tragic death in a duel that ends the play. (See the above photo for your boy Laertes in action.) Both in form and execution, the piece is incredible and I highly recommend catching anything Carding is making if you have the chance.

• Where We Meet - This interactive dance show by Unwired Dance Company gives you a headset and invites you to watch three dancers standing in their own circles performing individual choreographies. As you approach a dancer, the headset plays the interior monologue of that character and at certain points, the dancer leads any observers through a simple set of physical mirroring exercises as the soundtrack offers a meditation. I thought the use of spacial audio here was quite good and the dances were compelling. I do feel like the piece could have a bit more of an arc making it last longer, but nonetheless Unwired has made a fascinating fusion of gaming technology and dance. This piece will also run at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, so you can see it if you can make it to the Berkshires this summer.

The Waiting Room - This piece of AI driven group instructional art felt like a prototype, so I want to go more easy on it. When you arrive you have a text conversation with an AI where it asks you questions and then it processes those questions into a personalized audio track. You start that audio track at the same time as the rest of the audience and watch slides that tell you a story and then manipulate props in the space when prompted. It’s an interesting idea that didn’t really work. The audio needed polish — it had a clear skip in the soundscape when it switched between content everyone was getting and content that was personalized to your answers. The AI customization was quite crude as it really felt like it was just plugging your direct answers into a Mad Lib and if your answers didn’t fit, it all became a bit disconnected. And the story itself was, because this Mad Lib structure, too generic to be meaningful. That said, I like the idea of hearing a personalized audio story while participating in a single group event, so I think there’s potential in the form. It just needs another polish pass to deepen the story and smooth out the production.

Secrets Bar - You can find my longer review here, but the short version is Secrets is a good structural idea with some good performers stuck in a bad story. The concept is that you “overhear” a narrative in a bar by having spotlights and mics focus on actors embedded in the space around you. The production pulled off the tech of this perfectly, and the actors were generally very good at being in the space and talking to the crowd in character. The problem was the story was very broken. It was trying to be naturalistic, in the sense that it was the kind of stuff you would actually overhear, but that meant that scenes ended without any resolution, tone switched wildly, and there was no center to hang everything on. I left really not sure why I would care about what I saw. It’s a shame — there are very good ideas in Secrets, but the show needs a story worth telling.

Riven - A better-than-expected docu-play about waste pickers in Brazil, the people who sort recycling to keep that sustainability engine running, longer review here. I was worried this was going to be really didactic, but the playwright wisely choose to cut between naturalistic conversations about the lives of two women working in the plant and some magically real moments of spiritualism and plastic and aluminum outerworldly beings. On top of that, Sure We Can is a beautiful and resonant setting, reflecting the ambiguity of the piece: both artistic and industrial, reflecting art and poverty. You can still catch it this week if a well-told story about real people who toil in this industry is interesting to you.

Balls: The Monster-Catchin’ Musical Comedy - Longer review here. I cannot say I had high hopes for this immersive music parody of Pokemon and Nintendo, but I am so happy I was wrong about this one. Balls is an excellent show. It is exactly what it promises on the label — a juvenile riff on the ethical and taste issues of the catch-em-all franchise — but the execution is so good that it’s a joy to behold. The performers are just terrific, great singers and improvisers who deliver on the music and the gags. The writing is sharp giving you both the 10-year humor you hope for but also some genuine character development and morals. And you get to make up dumb attack names at one point. I can say enough positive things about this show. It’s like Avenue Q for gamers. Balls desperately needs to be in a bigger venue for larger audiences, but you can see it now at Caveat during July and August. Adventure awaits, immersonauts. Don’t sleep on this one.

Privy Privy - A short installation and performance art piece, Privy Privy creates a gloryhole simulation by having you enter a bathroom stall and eat an ice-cream cone a human has extended through a hole in the wall. That’s the whole thing. It takes maybe 10 minutes. That said, I think it’s an interesting piece of art. Donna Oblongata and Patrick Costello have created an interactive commentary on desire and sexual power without anything really explicit happening. I like art like this that can in a single gesture capture a lot of complex thinking in a silly and approachable way. Again, it’s ten minutes of your life, but it’s an experience that will make you think and you get ice cream, so live a little.

Amplified - Again, my longer review is here. Amplified is the projection mapped immersive experience of the history of The Rolling Stone Magazine photos and videos. Like many of these projection mapped things, I’m not sure why this was the medium for this piece. The shame of it is that the photo archive of the magazine is pretty incredible and perusing the covers and historic stills was a fascinating snapshot of earlier cultural moments. But tying it together with a vapid narrative frame and flashing the photos by too quickly while spreading a digital wallpaper around me added exactly zero to that photo appreciation. Skip this show and wait until there’s a good retrospective in a museum that knows how to curate and display it.

Man’s Search for Meaning - I went to a table reading of this quasi-autobiographic show about the narrator struggling with the ramifications of Frankl’s great work on logotherapy and finding mental health through meaning. It’s interactive in that the narrator talks and improvises with the audience throughout the show, reflecting Frankl’s belief that connection to other people is a critical part of well-being. The show is an interesting conversation on this topic and the weaving of the biographical complexities of the narrator’s understanding of Austria and Judaism with Frankl’s life and trauma is rich and though-provoking. This is going to come back in a full theatrical run in the future, and I for one am interested in seeing it.

Tribeca Immersive - As part of the Tribeca Film Festival each year, a group of immersive works in VR, MR, and other technologies are brought together into a showcase. This can be a mixed bag depending on curation, but I found this year particularly interesting with a number of works which, while not all perfect, I saw interesting ideas in. You can still catch the festival this weekend and it’s 100% worth your $20, but be sure to sign up for the VR/MR things when you arrive because you need to book a timeslot to see them. The pieces I would recommend are A Father’s Lullaby, Fragile Home, In the Current of Being, and The Innocence of Unknowing (try to catch that piece during a documentary time — full disclosure that I know the artist Ryat Yezbick.)

Upcoming Immersive

I’m going to spare you the stuff I don’t have dates for yet just for brevity, but expect another post soon with more upcoming. Keep in mind there are a few good shows above you can still see if you want:

• Riven (through June 27th)

• Tribeca Immersive (through June 29th)

• Privy Privy (through June 28th)

• Balls: The Monster-Catching Musical Comedy (July 18th and 19th, August 5th)

• Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha - You have seen this already, right? Yes? Congratulations, true immersonaut! No? Why are you reading this newsletter if you don’t go and see the thing I have told you is amazing?!? You still have a chance until June 29th.

Immersive Phantom - Tickets to this immersive version of the classic musical go on sale on June 30th. The show starts at $195; you are required to wear elegant entire in white, grey, or black; and you have to either bring your own mask or buy one ON TOP OF your ticket price. So yeah, this is overpriced and pretentious. But we’re kind of without big masked immersive in NY right now with Life & Trust losing both and you know me well enough to realize overpriced tickets won’t stop me from seeing something. If it won’t stop you either, tell me and we can try to coordinate. I’m going for my tickets on the day they drop.

Campfire Stories - There are at times immersive meetups in NYC to let creators talk to each other, but lo, it’s been some time since that has happened. A few of us have decided to rectify that. We’re having a little salon to get some practitioner-style immersonauts together to talk shop. It’s a limited space, but feel free to RSVP if you want to hang out. But please RSVP if you want to come — space is truly limited. This is a first stab; more events will be coming in the future.

As I said, lots of promising things on the horizon so keep an eye out and give a shout if you want to see something or you learn about something I missed. And may a flight of angels sing thee to thy rest from this torrential post.

That said, there are a few good things out there and it’s soon going to be summer concert time in NYC, so there will be at least a couple of good shows to catch. I’m also heading to London for the Voidspace conference to see a bunch of immersive in one go, so my next report will be chock-full of new work to vicariously enjoy.

As always, poke me if something crosses your radar that I and others should know about. There have got to be some roses amidst all the thorns after all.

Immersive Reviews

Subject - A really potent two-person dance performance set in a dystopian future where you witness two test subjects for a drug that erases memories. Dance duo and immersive veterans Welcome to Campfire put together this short and powerful piece exploring loss, memory, and connection. It was staged in the extremely intimate setting of 3AM Theatre, where we sat on benches less than a meter from the performers as they charged through their aggressive, repetitive, and abortive movements. It’s one of the best dance things I’ve seen in a while. Welcome to Campfire are very interested in the mixed media side of this, having done an interactive component for the piece during its first run back in COVID and an accompanying film this time. They are looking to remount Subject with two other companion pieces in the same sci-fi setting in the near future. Watch this group — they are smart and daring and the work delivers.

Death of Rasputin - The inadvertent inheritor of the mantel of big immersive since the wild death of Life and Trust, Death of Rasputin is a multi-room, dance/theater fusion about early 20th century Russia and its volatile mix of out-of-touch nobility, corrupt armies, raging revolutionaries, and cult-leader con artists. The show was in early days when I saw it, but I would say it had potential. The set isn’t Punchdrunk mind-blowing, but given that it’s an art center on Governor’s Island, they do a pretty good job giving you the setting. The early part of the show is the weakest as the text just hammering the character’s motivations into your head and the actors were trying too hard to deliver it, but as the performance went on, it got more dance focused and evocative and it found its footing. By the finale, I was completely on its side, and it’s big enough to support at least a few different paths with very different content. (A friend I went with got to be part of a plot I never even saw.) And refreshingly, this piece has a strong sense of humor which at least for me is a breath of fresh air in mask-adjacent work. This one you can still catch as the run has been extended until the end of May. It’s expensive ($140) and it wasn’t perfect when I went, but if you need a fix of pretty good larger scale immersive, this is the one to see.

Upcoming Immersive

Here it comes. A couple of good things up front and then a steady stream of less promising potential trash. Here there be dragons, I guess.

First of all, this is your reminder that Viola’s Room is running at The Shed and you should see that if you actually want to call yourself an immersonaut.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha - I don’t know how much you read this list and mourn that you missed the good stuff because it was gone before you could see it, but if that has been your plight, do I have good news for you. Julia Masli’s truly excellent clown show is back in NYC at the Public. How excellent, you ask? One of my four favorite things in immersive all last year, I answer. I’m still not telling you anything about it because you should just go see it. But I’m planning on catching it again too so write me if you want to coordinate attending and thus relieving your FOMO alongside friends . Tickets are like $54 with taxes and the show runs from May 30th to June 22nd.

Secrets Bar - And now we find ourselves at the precipice of the definitely good and almost certainly bad. Secrets Bar is an immersive theater experience set in a bar where you “eavesdrop” on other tables when a spotlight hits them to witness the action of the play. The website implies some interaction, but I can’t tell if it’s just an inverse surround play or if you can actually engage in the story. Jury is completely out on quality. Still, I’m going to try to see it this month. Let me know if you want to do it with me. $55 per person for a drink and show.

Down the Road - An immersive version of the Lee Blessing play about a journalist and her husband interviewing a serial killer in prison. This is from The Other Side, the group that gave us the trashfire that was Call Us Villains, but the director is new and it’s a previous existent play, so that’s enough change to get this critic back to the buffet to sample it again. If you really want to take the chance, I’m going on 5/16 and you will have someone to commiserate with if the low expectations become reality. Tickets are like $50.

Bootleg Bandit Saloon - Another immersive drink event, this time with a Western outlaw saloon theme where you can rub shoulders with outlaws and dodge the Sheriff. Dear friends, I actually was shuddering as I wrote that. It’s another The Other Side production, so I really don’t have any hope at all, but new director, right? I can’t even sell this one to you. If you really want to roll the dice, please reach out so neither of us has to endure it alone.

The Jury Experience - Fever is supporting this theatrical experience in which you witness a trial and then use your phone to vote how the story moves. Nothing about this sounds good to me; it’s very likely a play about a cheesy, multi-twist crime story where your only interaction is to vote at the end. Still, these are things critics must do. I haven’t decided on when to see this yet, but it’s about $55 and it runs periodically until the end of the year. If you’re dying to see it, let me know and we’ll find a day — otherwise, I’ll catch it when it overlaps my schedule and let you know if I just gave in and saw it.

Concerts

If you’re unfamiliar, one of the great things about NYC is that lots of parks host free and paid quite good concerts during the summer and given that they are outdoors, you don’t even need to get a ticket. You can just get a blanket and sit in the park to hear some good live music. This is an early and incomplete list, but the stuff I think you should mark your calendars for is:

• Snail Mail (opener for, ugh, Dinosaur Jr.) - Prospect Park, July 17th

• Men I Trust - Prospect Park, July 18th

• Soccer Mommy - Central Park, Sept 16th

• Wet Leg - Central Park, Sept 17th

There you go. Summer will be here before you know it and with that, more great NYC stuff to do. You let me know what’s cool and I promise to do the same.

P.S.: Would you happen to have access to a bathroom that could feasible fit about a dozen people inside that also has a tub? If so, would you be willing to host an immersive event in it? If so, let me know. I’m asking, someone presumptively, for a friend.

But, oh, that has changed. Here come some seriously good listings for you. Because I’ve been delayed a bit, tickets may be a little harder to find than I would normally hope, but my quick scan shows openings at all of these events so you still have a shot to see them.

I’ll write again with reviews in a couple weeks after I’ve seen all of the things. If this current bloom is any sign, I’ll have more upcoming work to talk about then too.

Of course, if you know about something showing that I don’t, email me and I’ll make sure others know as well.

Upcoming Immersive

Death of Rasputin - A preview of a new large-scale immersive theater piece from the women-led company Artemis is Burning. It promises to be not just an immersive show, but a revolution, as audience members befriend revolutionaries, scavenge the palace, and devour the narrative of early 20th century Russia’s Romanovs, peasants, and of course the cult leader himself. I don’t normally go to previews, but as distrustful as I am of hyperbolic marketing language (“a revolution!”), this is a company with pedigree and an interesting premise. And it’s being performed on Governor’s Island, so that’s pretty hot. Tickets are premium immersive at $140. I’m going on April 17th, but there are dates all that weekend and the next (17th-19th, 25th-27th).

Subject - This is a narrative themed immersive dance piece about a memory-erasing drug and two test subjects who try it. The company Welcome to Campfire originally put this piece on pre-COVID in a pop-up location. I saw it then; it was an interesting concept and performance that I wanted to see iterated further. It seems my wish has been granted as there’s now a film and revised live show. Tickets to the dance part run from Friday, April 17th until Sunday, April 20th with a Q+A on Saturday the 19th. $35 if you can afford it, $15 if you can’t.

betaTest Vol. 3 - A collection of short virtual immersive works in an about 75 minute block. This is a works-in-progress show; it’s free and thus you takes your chances. What I can say is that two of the presenters are veterans of the space: cirqueSaw, who do fascinating, risky experiments with web technology and performance; and Megan Markham, who as part of Phoenix Tears has done a number of interesting innovative pieces in phone-based theater. I cannot promise this will be good, but if immersive on your computer is formally interesting to you, I’m pretty sure you’ll see some interesting prototypes. Sunday April 13th at 2pm ET.

Balls: The Monster-Catchin’ Musical - The science-leaning performance space Cavaet is hosting this immersive musical about the 100%-fair-use-safe monsters who are stored in balls and fight each other. I would normally be skeptical about the use of the immersive label here, but reviewers from other publications have said it’s interactive and I am a game designer so I feel this is something I can’t avoid. Tickets are $30 regular and $45 splash zone, whatever that is that I’m sucker enough to buy. You can see it on April 18th and 19th; I don’t know which date I’ll be at yet, but it’s the kind of piece that could go either way, so a buddy for this one would be appreciated.

L.A. Immersive Invitational Showcase - This is in L.A. on May 4th, so I can’t see it, but if you happen to be in SoCal, the most excellent immersive creators After Hours Theatre Company bring you 8 short immersive pieces created in 48 hours by teams of assembled artists. This is the event that previously brought you Casting, so you might just catch a fascinating new seed of a show here. Three runs on May 4th at the Los Angeles LGBT Center for about $35 each. If I were Los Angeles on this day, this would be a can’t miss event for me; if you are, don’t miss it.

Viola’s Room - The biggest saved for last. Punchdrunk’s audio tour through immersive sets, Viola’s Room, has been brought from London to NYC to be shown at the Shed. It’s a really interesting experiment in performerless storytelling. I saw it in London and while I had issues with the story, the sets were beautiful and the use of audio and multisensory experiences was fascinating. I have no idea how this will translate to the Shed, but I’m definitely going to see it, and I can’t recommend it enough just in terms of interesting form. Tickets are on sale next week to general public, but if you’re a member of the Shed (which you can be for all of $10), you can get them now. $69 per ticket or get 6 tickets and buy out a whole show for $414. Let me know if you want to see it with friends (there is already a posse forming.)

There’s still an immersive Phantom on the radar so it’s quite an immersive spring before us. Who knows what other immersive treats await us in 2025? Well, you will, as soon as I hear about them.

By the way, if you’re still interested, there are still a handful of tickets left for the Hawkins LARP I’m working on. I’m working on it because I really respect the work Grimmoire Productions, so if you’re looking to try a blockbuster LARP and you’re willing to take a short trip to Wisconsin, this is a great chance to roleplay Stranger Things as your first live-action experience. You can find more information about it here, including how to buy tickets..

What follows are the bunch of the things I’ve seen and the couple of shows coming that I know about.

Immersive Reviews

Lore - This storytelling DJ set was an interesting concept for a piece, although the execution missed the mark. The idea was that a dance party was run through with a Little Red Riding Hood story delivered through spoken word and small dance numbers. I’m being pretty generous here, because while the DJ was terrific, the spoken word was too awkward and blunt and the “performers” in this piece were basically improvising a set of poses from the fairy tale without any interesting acting or choreography. It’s a shame because I could see the potential of this form; the idea of dancing to some good music and then see a show in interstitial moments is a great concept. I just want to see some actual skill in the story part.

Fight Back - An interesting piece of re-enactment, Fight Back cast all the attendees in roles from an actual ACT UP meeting from the 80s. The piece itself was a recreation of the meeting in the true setting it was held in, and the attendees took turns speaking in front of the crowd for their specific historic causes. I can’t review this one for you, because as someone who lived through the AIDS crisis and knows a lot about ACT UP, I took one step into the room to hear a crowd chanting a call-and-response about HIV and knew this was going to be too emotionally heavy for me. I know other younger people who saw it who say it was powerful and who felt a responsibility to do justice to their historic personage and the meeting, but I could not think of a way to interact with this without either being disrespectful or diving headfirst into very traumatic content. I appreciate what this piece is trying to do, but I have to say that I’m not really sure about the ethics of re-creating an event this potent. But that might just be my experience. It’s an interesting and challenging piece of work I’m glad I saw for the 10 minutes I could tolerate it.

DOOM - Probably the worst interactive thing I’ve ever seen. Anne Imhof’s installation work at Park Avenue Armory promised to be a commentary on rebellion and apathy, but it was essentially an extended Cadillac brand event performed like a Calvin Klein ad in slow motion on repeat. I mean, at least that’s what I could glean from the little I could see. The audience was standing on the floor and so were all the performances. Crowds were so thick around everything that I actually couldn’t see the dances. What I did see were models in overpriced streetwear affecting apathy while flapping their arms slowly and saying profound missives such as, “We’re fucked; we’re dead.” I stayed in this thing for over an hour waiting to actually witness something interesting before I gave up and left. I don’t know how so much money was spent without anyone in production thinking about how you needed to actually see the content, but I’m almost thankful I saw as little as I did. Apparently, Imhof has done interesting work before, but buyer beware going forward, because DOOM was irredeemable pretentious garbage.

Eulogy for Roman - An interesting one-person interactive show, the audience are the guests at a eulogy for the Milo’s friend Roman as Milo tries to give a speech to strangers to share his friend’s life. The center of the interactivity of the piece is a set of challenges that the protagonist had as a bucket list with Roman that he asks you to complete. It’s a very interactive show in that you are constantly being pulled up to participate (see the picture above) and contribute content, and the performer did a terrific job managing that and keeping us on track. The show’s narrative is strong as well with a nice tightrope between humor and pathos and a good reveal that brings the emotional message home. It’s a small show, but the combination of the great performance, the tight writing, and the appropriate interactivity made this worth checking out.

If Walls Could Talk - The premise of If Walls Could Talk is that a house is for sale and you are cast as one of the buyers. You are brought into the home’s living room to meet the sellers who reveal that the house has a number of secrets in its history. Then the real estate agent takes you to different rooms where scenes revealing those secrets are performed by actors in short sketches. If Walls Could Talk was an interesting early version of something with potential. The stories it depicted didn’t really land — mostly it was that they were four disparate scenes that had no thematic or narrative connection beyond setting, so there wasn’t a lot to keep you hooked and it meant that the opening scene in the living room dried up too quickly. But the interactive structure of the piece was tight. The setting of the house was great, the agent did a terrific job guiding us into small rooms and moving us from the present to the past and back, and the framing of the house sale was a great vehicle to tell the story. This work needs some polish, but I’m impressed by this group pulling something so complex off in their first immersive piece. I’m excited to see what ideas they come up with next.

Upcoming Immersive

Heads up that I’m not seeing any of this, as I’m out of town next week and a couple of these are kid-friendly ones, but as you may not be out of town and/or looking for things to do with children, see below.

Lost Grrl Found - A feminist coming of age story set in a riot grrl concert, this is some kind of immersive punk concert/musical. I can’t make it due to travel (I’ll be at GDC next week), but if you’re still curious about immersive concert stories (as there have been many of these lately), this one is on March 21st at 8pm for $28.

Gimme Please! - A play about friendship where the audience gets to interact with the props and learn the theatrical structure so that they can play along during a show of music and light and magic. Or so they say. It runs March 28th to 30th and tickets are about $18.

Big Feelings - A interactive puppet show for kids aged 6-10, this award-winning piece explores bad feelings, mindfulness, and mental health. This is running at Culture Lab in Queens, which has a track record of interesting experimentation with immersive work, and Big Feeling previous ran a sold-out show there in 2024. March 15th-23rd, for $15.

Oh, and did you know there’s an immersive Phantom of the Opera coming? Instagram says so. Word on the street is that it’s landing this year; I’ll provide more details when I know.

There’s also a rumor that the amazing experimental London show The Manikins is going to do some private showings in NYC later this year. I’ll try to find out more, because this was one of my favorite shows of last year and you should definitely catch it if it comes to town.

That’s all for now. More when the next set of immersives drop. Let me know what you’re hearing about in the meantime and stay safe out there from the, you know, everything.

In other hilarious news, in my first experience of comeuppance for a negative review, I just got my ticket refunded and got kicked out of a LARP because I complained about their atrocious character selection system. I will spare you the gossip, although I’m happy to tell the story and name the culprit in private settings. But in case you thought being a critic lacked risk, look on my works, ye mighty, and despair, I mean if missing a probably average LARP is despair-worthy.

And this is your regular reminder I love receiving your advice and reactions and recommendations, so don’t hesitate to email if there’s something you think I should know in the weird theater cosmos. And join me in doing things if they are of interest — remember it’s always better to do immersive, and especially BAD immersive, with friends, and you have one buddy locked in for almost anything you do on this list.

Enough babble. On to reviews and listings for all the little things on my very sensitive radar.

Immersive Reviews

I hit the Under the Radar/Exponential/Prototype trio of experimental theater/new media/opera festivals (respectively) pretty hard this year, so there’s a bunch of that as well as random other one-offs around the city.

Nothing Doing - This and the next two reviews are part of my festival review round up on NoPro, but the short version is Nothing Doing is a Dadaist clown show in the sense that it kind of has no fixed message or structure. It’s a chance for Alex Tartarsky to throw a crazy, chaotic, comedy work-in-progress at you. It’s very work-in-progress; some parts absolutely missed the mark. But there were some brilliant skits too, including one very meta physical gag that could have been a whole show on its own. Tartarsky is great at what they do and held the audience’s focus even when the show missed the mark. Be sure to look out for them for more polished stuff in the future.

The Search for Power - Longer review here, but The Search for Power is a terrific idea on a great theme that could use a bit more workshopping. An immersive documentary exploring why Lebanon has had rolling blackouts for decades, The Search for Power is a fascinating and painful story of colonial abuse and greed tied together with a beautiful set (you’re sitting as a guest at a banquet table) and a great structure ending in a dance party you actually want to dance at — no small feat in the immersive world. But the writing and performances were a bit loose and clunky. It really felt like the whole thing needed a couple more edits and rehearsals to land. It’s a great concept though and I would love to see a more polished version of it.

Bardo/Black Lodge - One last link back to the reviews. Bardo was the immersive opening night to the Black Lodge live-opera/70 minute music video. As an immersive intro, it was pretty stunning. Set as a gallery of five different vignettes and interactions with a hellish inner world, Bardo was visually striking and aesthetically consistent. There was an MC who riffed on people’s desires and regrets for over an hour, a writer’s room/torture space that was rivetting, and a slow choreography piece straight out of Silent Hill. Black Lodge itself was impressive if bloated — the music was a great opera/death metal mashup and the production quality of the film was just unbelievable, but so much was happening with the video that it distracted from the great live musical performance. Still, this is an immersive newsletter and on that front, Bardo killed it.

Dream Roulette - An experiment by the great minds of Houseworld Immersive, Dream Roulette takes you into a lucid dream as you interact with surreal characters and take part in unexplained interactive moments. It’s a really interesting experiment in being able to wander through and interact with actors in a themed space. It doesn’t feel totally right in its setting — you really want a more deeply and bespokenly designed space for a piece like this — but that’s the nature of the experiment. What I liked is the way the work had a surface level that was entertaining to watch, but then had deeper interactions if you pushed it to go deeper. And of course, it’s Houseworld, so there were interesting musical and ritual elements. It’s early and there’s work to do, but it’s not a bad experiment to check out if you’re interested in how agency and theater can collide.

Christopher’s Birthday Picnic - A LARP-in-progress by Kate Conover and Orli Nativ, you are cast as one of the characters of Winnie-the-Pooh, but if you were a real group of friends living in the build up and through World War 2. Christopher, the center of your group, dies at the very end of the war, and you are gathering for his annual birthday picnic to honor him. Conover and Nativ have a good theme and good structure for this game. The way the development of the war weaves through the characters’ stories is striking and powerful. It’s still being developed and there are some pacing elements that need improvement, but if sad LARPs are up your alley, it’s a wonderful game for exploring sudden grief and not-so-sudden disappointment.

Venhue - This immersive theme restaurant bills itself as the not-pretentious fine dining experience and on at least that level it works. It’s a tasting menu for about $120 and if you’re into that kind of thing, it’s on par. The food is generally weird and good, with maybe the best single bite of Waygu beef I’ve ever had and by and large solidly interesting courses. On the immersive side, your mileage may vary. Half of our group of four loved it; the other half (including me) thought it was too scattered. There are screens on the wall showing AI generated imagery related to the food and the staff does bits where the typical fine dining experience is disrupted. Maybe you’re blindfolded for a part of the meal, or maybe the plating is odd and you eat in a strange way, or maybe there’s a monologue by the sommelier. None of these things were bad, but there were just too many different ideas. Are you telling a long joke about getting a Michelin star? That’s great, but why do I need a horse race? Or screens showing fake famous people eating? Or a joke about wine culture? Venhue is a good restaurant with some interesting moments, but it really needs to pick a lane and stick to it.

Wish Tree - Yoko Ono had an art piece up at the Park Avenue Armory where the entire hanger is filled with dwarf trees and you could write a wish on a card and tie it to one of them. Yup. That’s it. I really respect Ono as an artist, but there is simply nothing interesting about this piece at all. Thank your local critic for wasting 15 minutes on that trite nonsense so you didn’t have to.

Temporary Occupant - A remount of a solo immersive piece from four years ago, Temporary Occupant is a meditation on the inauguration of the US President that gives you a chance to speak for a minute about your feelings about the country. In the original version (mounted under COVID), you did this by yourself in an isolated experience; now you do it in a crowd of people where you listen to everyone give their opinion. It’s a taste thing, but I kind of despise this user-generated content work. That said, as a metaphor for democracy, listening to like 50 people’s one minute take on the election is a pretty good symbol for what our system of government is. It resolves in a quiet pretty moment where a chorus rises from the crowd and sings a healing song, and then the audience gets to be inaugurated en masse to whatever personal role they want. This piece wasn’t for me, but I’ll hand it to the creators that they brought some simple immersive staging to it and as somewhat cheesy interactive rituals go, the elements were well considered and thoughtfully designed.

Upcoming Immersive Work

Like I said above, lots of shows to check out if you’re interesting in the high-risk, high-reward world of small-scale immersive.

Lore - Part of a quarterly series of part-party, part-show events (their term of choice is “sharty”), Lore this month is a take on Little Red Riding Hood. The credits list a narrator/DJ, supporting DJs, and performers, so I’m thinking this is a dance party with sonic and light installations and some choreographed bits thrown in. I have seen a number of these in my immersive research life and the hit ratio is not great in this form, but it’s cheap at about $30 so I figure it’s worth looking at. It’s on Saturday, February 22nd if dancing in a fairy-tale is up your alley.

Fight Back - A LARP-like interactive theater piece, Fight Back casts you as a real world person who attended a March 19th, 1989 Act Up meeting New York meeting. There are no actors in the work; if you sign up, you are given a character who was actually there and you participate in the meeting in that role. There are no cell phones in 1989, so you either need to memorize the part or bring physical notes. It seems quite LARP-y in that you don’t have a script and you basically just improvise according to your goals. I’m always interested in LARP-adjacent theater stuff, so I’m doing it, but who knows if this structure will work or if it’s even a good idea to try to re-create this event. It’s a sliding scale price ($25 if you can pay it) on February 24th at 7pm.

A Eulogy for Roman - A Drama Desk Award nominated piece for Unique Theatrical Experience, this play follows Milo as he tries to give a eulogy for his friend Roman. As the ceremony gets unexpectedly difficult, the audience is recruited to assist. I don’t have a lot more information on this one, but it sounds experimentally interesting and that’s what I research. It’s got a long run (Feb 22nd to April 6th) and tickets are $30. I’m going to buy a ticket by the end of this week; let me know if you’re interested and we can coordinate.

The Factory (sneak peek) - The Factory is going to be a new immersive show about Andy Warhol’s famous studio/hangout space. This is not that show; this is a preview of that show presenting selected scenes to test them. I’m definitely interested in the full show, but I’m happy to wait until it’s already workshopped. However, if you want to get a sneak peak of an upcoming immersive, you can get tickets for the February 20th show at 7:30 for $35.

If Walls Could Talk - Visit the Gallery of Living Secrets in this period set immersive theater piece by RJ Theatre. A real-estate agents guides you through rooms where you can hear the stories of the characters who live there and even offer a confession of your own. This is a one day thing running on March 1st, where you can get a ticket for $57 dollars (or up to $80 with drinks) or you might have only the evening slot open on your schedule (like I did) and get the 7:30 VIP experience of $128. These roving performance pieces are hit-or-miss, but we don’t get many of them, so I’m biting. Let me know if you’ll be there that day too.

There you have it. More little stuff is popping up all the time, but I’ll be here to scour the dark and bring it to light for you. Let me know what your explorations turn up.

Dead as a Dodo - Not immersive in anyway, but this innovative puppet show/musical by the group Wakka Wakka features some truly amazing integration of projection and puppetry. It’s a kid friendly show with a very traditional musical structure in certain ways, but the work the performers do and the use of lighting and projection is just stunning at times. I’ve never seen anything as sophisticated in terms of staging something this whimsical. If you have any interest in seeing some boundary-pushing puppetry (or if you wonder what a family-friendly Particle Ink would be), check this out. It’s running until February 9th and worth every cent of the $55 ticket price.

Hawkins - I’m always doing something immersive in my art practice and right now one of those things is serving as assistant director of a LARP by the amazing Grimmoire Productions, creators of my current favorite blockbuster LARP, Lies and Liabilities. There’s no way I can objectively talk about this except to say that I’m working with Grimmoire essentially as a volunteer (certainly not at rate) because I respect Vivien’s work that much and believe in these games. Here’s the marketing copy:

Beneath the neon glow of 1980s Hawkins, WI, something dark is stirring. The kids are talking about strange happenings, whispers of a sprawling evil lurking in the sewers, and the air crackles with a tension that feels all too real. Hawkins is your invitation to a thrilling live-action interactive theater retreat where the only thing scarier than the monsters is the thought of facing them alone.

For one unforgettable weekend, you’ll step into a world that blends the eerie charm of Stranger Things with the bone-chilling horror of Stephen King’s IT. Hawkins is packed with drama, excitement, and fun as you navigate a story filled with mystery, monsters, supernatural twists, and nostalgic 80s vibes. As the line between reality and nightmare blurs, you and your new friends will band together to uncover dark secrets, face unimaginable horrors, and prove that the only way to survive is by sticking together.

Get ready for an experience where every laugh is a momentary escape from the creeping dread, and every friendship is forged in the fires of fear.

The event runs October 2nd to 5th in Wisconsin. Tickets go on sale January 26th. Cost is a bit variable, but imagine it’s around $950 for room and board and the game for 2.5 days, which is kind of market standard for big LARPs. You have to like 80s for this one, but if you do and you’re really interested in seeing what blockbuster LARP is, this is the group to trust.

Read more

(By the way, “immersonaut” is a new term Kathryn Yu and I are trying out. What do you think? Correction: This was a preexisting term from Noah Nelson of No Proscenium. Kathryn and I are just kicking it back into use. But still, let’s use it. We need a term for this.)

So, with that, I’m launching into my clean-up reviews of 2024 and my coming list for 2025. I’ve already written my best immersive shows of 2024 for NoPro, so I’ll forgo that here, but I’ll also throw in some music and book recs while I have your attention. I was also part of a podcast about reflections on last year and trends in next if you want to hear me and NoPro people talk for an hour plus about it.

I was really good at hitting my targets of immersive in December, so let’s check out the rest of last year to start and the coming of next below.

Show Reviews

Doris - A quite interesting immersive performance, Doris put you on couches and chairs inside a small apartment set as a performer dances and lip-syncs to a collaged audio-video track of 80s commercials and television content. It’s a meditation on trying to get entertainment success in NYC and falling into addiction. That’s obviously not the most original theme and the piece flounders a bit when it’s taken on literally, but the staging is magical. The apartment is very thoroughly realized and it comes to life at moments with hidden projectors, disguised screens, and other deft magic tricks. Couple that with the lead performer timing a tight lip-synced dance for about an hour straight and you get an impressive show. It’s not perfect, but Doris was absolutely worth seeing to witness such virtuosity in execution of a tight idea in a small venue.

Truth and Magic - If you squinted, you could see what Gentlemen Brawlers was going for with this poor man’s Meow Wolf/concert, but they tried so hard to tell us to have fun that they missed the ball on giving it to us. The set at CultureLab was actually pretty good in terms of striking whimsy, but the interactions ranged from incomprehensible (there was a game in a ball pit the designer needed to talk me through because I didn’t even realize it was a game) to pointless (a phone instruction told me to run around in a circle without telling me when to stop) to embarrassing (one exhibit was a theremin — that’s it, just a theremin you could play with). You were also in there for FAR too long. The exhibits exhausted themselves in about 30 minutes, but it was an hour before the band went on, and over 20 minutes of that was spent with no performers at all; we were literally just waiting for the next thing to happen. When the band finally arrived, they started well with some skillful original music and choreography, but the dancers did not know how to control the crowd (they literally pushed people out of the way in moments) and about halfway through the set, the experience became what I can only compare to a wedding band — cover songs, a conga line, and ::shudder:: a literal parachute game. Gentlemen Brawlers are saying they are looking forward to the next iteration of this, and if they actually mean it, I hope they find some real interactions, some training in steering the audience, and an actual director to pace the show correctly. If nothing else, stop telling us to become children and instead make an experience that invites us to willingly let go.

True Love Forever - I’m not sure what happened here, but whatever experiment Third Rail was doing in this piece did not come together. It’s sold as a 90s themed concert experience where you sit and watch the band as the dancers perform an interactive story of romance. Coyle Girelli plays the score as a concert quite well, although it’s less 90s generally than purely Roy Orbison. Still, that part of the experience worked for me. Everything else was uneven. The dances were reflections on different aspects of dating and relationships. Some were interesting — a dance about making profile images for dating apps, a piece about being in love doing activities together — but nothing had any specific context or characters that persisted, so it all felt really generic. And some dances (e.g. the climbing on and off chairs) were hard misses. The interactive moments were similarly thin. You were allowed to wander a set and see the characters before the show started, but since the performers had no consistent characters, it just felt pointless once the show started. And the two moments of interactivity (a polling of the audience about their relationship history and a small group collaboration to write a break-up letter) were just not integrated into the work at all. They basically stopped the show and told you to do things, either voting and creating together, with no continuity to the rest of the piece. Jason (who came with me to this show) called True Love Forever “forgettable” and I think that’s the best descriptor of it. There are some good ideas here and I respect Third Rail for trying something, but this work is just a bunch of separate parts that don’t hang together.

Squid Game: The Experience - A surprisingly good branded experience if you have any interest in the phenomenon of Squid Game. (I don’t, but this is the price of immersive research.) You know what this is going to be when you walk in — you’re going to play some versions of the iconic games of the show in oversize sets. That’s essentially what you get, but what impressed me was that care was taken in the execution. The docents were great, enthusiastic and staying in character from start to finish. Given what you generally find a Color Factory-like spaces, it’s incredible how much staff dedication can do to improve the experience. And the games that you’re looking for deliver. There are some duds — a variant of the marble game that’s not really interesting — but the memory game on the mirrored floor is a cool set and playing red light/green light with a giant doll is exactly what you hope. This is not Shakespeare, but if you’re looking for something goofy and physical to do about an IP you may love, this is a solid experience to check out.

Luna Luna - The Shed is hosting an exhibition of an amusement park designed by André Heller and featuring bunch of famous artists of the 1980s. Hats off to the Shed for staging the exhibition correctly. Life-sized rides surround you in a big, wander-able space while loud music plays and performers occasionally appear for light interactions. While you can’t ride most of the rides and the ones you can enter are pretty weak, the experience of strolling around the park is terrific. The music in particular is great - the experience commissioned a bunch of interesting new pieces that play continuously and that curation is very strong. And the space activates at times as a light show that’s striking. Nothing huge is happening in terms of performance, but the simple clowning and puppetry that occasionally appear are appropriate, correctly whimsical, and worth seeing. Overall, I think you should check it out. It could have been yet another crappy Instagram trap, but instead the Shed truly lets you stroll through a weird art carnival.

The Dead, 1904 - The Dead, 1904 is an older immersive piece from 2016/17 in which James Joyce’s classic novella The Dead is recreated as a bit of intimate theater at the American Irish Historic Society. It was not cheap ($400 for the dinner seat, and that was not the most expensive), but your humble writer can tell you it did not slouch in any way. The piece follows the text of the story very closely, only adding elements that provide context and reinforcement of the themes, and that’s a great thing; we’re talking about Joyce here. The performers are quite good, especially given that almost all of them both act and either sing or play an instrument during the show. The dinner is solid — it’s hard to compete with NYC dining but the show at least clears the bar that the price point demands. And it’s genuinely immersive in a way that would have been striking in 2016. The actors engage with you and incorporate you into the story in minor ways that make sense. The whole thing is very diegetically consistent in that it allows you to move from watching a duet of piano and singer to overhearing a fight about Irish history to watching a court dance in a way that keeps you entertained and never strays from Joyce’s reality. It’s a little triumph, frankly. At its price point, it’s not something I would recommend for everyone, but if you’ve read and loved the story, it’s a beautiful immersive tribute to it.

Speakeasy, Die Softly - Yes, I (and Ellena) have done the Carmine’s immersive thing. It is EXACTLY what you expect it to be, in essentially a good way. It’s Times Square, so it’s a room full of tourists who are game for anything and have not one jaded bone about immersive in their bodies. It’s Carmine’s, so you get a lot of not-bad Italian food. I’m going to put the food list in a footnote1, but see if you can guess sight unseen what a Carmine’s murder mystery would serve you in three courses, because I bet you can. And the game part is a pretty straight murder mystery where members of the audience are randomly selected as suspects and clues are revealed during the evening about who the murderer was. Which is to say it’s unplayable. There are like 80-100 players crowding around the 8 people who have information and the plot is too convoluted to follow unless your team is a puzzle solving machine (which, see Times Square above, they are not.) But it really doesn’t matter. The performers clown around in the narrative during the eating interludes and they are great at it, being silly and using totally random audience input to make story jokes. Again, this is not high art, but if you come in with your expectations set correctly, you’ll laugh, you’ll wander around aimlessly when you’re supposed to be investigating, you’ll say a random thing into a microphone, and you’ll have your tourist Italian food. What’sa madda wid dat?

Other Best of 2024

Music

So I do plug music to you from time to time, and thus, hope springing eternal, I give you what I enjoyed from 2024.

St. Vincent, All Born Screaming - In my opinion, the best St. Vincent album yet, combining her early song writing chops with her modern guitar abstractions. Like every song is great.

Cloud Nothings, Final Summer - Cloud Nothings just keep hitting it out of the park, and the new album is no exception. More of the slightly more mellow stuff of recent, but hard enough still to win my heart.

Magdalena Bay, Imaginal Disk - I was so sure this band would whiff on their sophomore album by losing their weird, and I was SO wrong.

DIIV, Frog in Boiling Water - DIIV at their bleakest, in what at least for me is the best way.

Fontaines D.C., Romance - A growth album for the band, with one of my favorite bangers of the year.

Camera Obscura, Look to the East, Look to the West - Wait, you say. You told us new music of 2024. Yes, I did.Camera Obscura is back, friends, with all the charm you remember.

Cindy Lee, Diamond Jubilee - Probably the best album of the year, the drag identity of the lead singer of Women gave us as stunningly beautiful retro dream-pop collection.

Mannequin Pussy, I Got Heaven - But the winner of the year for me was Mannequin Pussy, who somehow made an even better punk album than the great one they made previously. What more could I ask for?

Books

I’ve mentioned this before, but I have a book club, and we rank things, snobs that we are. Of this year so far (we’re reading Everett’s James right now), I would recommend (details on the site):

• Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

• Enlightenment by Sarah Perry

• North Woods by Daniel Mason

Coming Immersive Shows

Get ready because since a couple of the bigger experimental theater festivals in New York going hard on immersive, there’s a lot coming in January. A few of these things I can’t do because I’m going to be at the immersive conference Next Stage in LA, but I’m going to try and catch as much as I can around that.

Techne - A series of large-scale digital experiences at BAM, each one running for about 3 days, from January 4th to 19th. Each is $10 and the package of all 4 is $35. I’m not sure which ones I’m going to catch, but I can try to see some except the last one, Manifold Garden, which I’ve seen before and despite liking Stephanie Dinkin’s work generally, I think has weak interactivity. If you’re planning on going, let me know and I’ll try to coordinate.

Prisoncore - A multimedia show as part of the Exponential Festival where the audience is placed in a panopticon to follow the story of Lucky, a new prison guard overlooking the monitors. Exponential Fest is one of the curators to watch, so I’m trying to check out their stuff this year. This one runs from Jan 3rd and 4th at the Brick for $25. I might try to catch the early show on the 3rd, but I’m still figuring that out.

AMA/Gilda/Winter Solstice - Three short interactive pieces running together as part of Exponential Fest. The only artist I know here is Kenneth Keng with AMA, who has done interesting work I’ve discussed before. The only day I can see this is on the 17th, and even that’s iffy (see the show below), but you should check it out. It’s $23 for all three.

Nothing Doing - A Dadaist clowning performance by Alex Tatarsky, the description reflects the (unhelpful) Dada ideals of being about everything and nothing at the same time, but given it’s $25, it’s part of Under the Radar (which I respect), and I’ve had good luck with clowning lately, I’m going to see it on January 15th.

To Bridge Ten Millennia - Another Exponential Festival piece, the Concrete Aggregate Ritual of Life group meets to demonstrate the Atomic Priesthood, a commissioned solution to the problem of how to communicate the dangers of radioactive waste to humans 10,000 years in the future. No, I don’t know what that means either, but I’m seeing it on January 16th. Tickets around $25.

The Search for Power - Another UTRFest piece, this live performance/lecture covers the topic of electricity in Lebanon and how power (in the infrastructure sense) relates to colonialism and acts of resistance. This one sounds really interesting to me, so I really want to catch it, even though the remaining dates suck for me. It’s running with open tickets the 16th to the 19th at Invisible Dog in Brooklyn for $20.

There’s also this restaurant I’ve heard is kind of an immersive experience, so I’ve been thinking about doing that as well, if getting an crazy price tasting menu from a celebrity chef in an over-the-top way is up your alley. This one I need at least one friend for, so let me know.

By the way, you have seen Marclay’s The Clock, haven’t you? If not, get thee to MOMA before it’s gone. A mindblowingly rigorous piece of work. Right around noon is a nice block to catch, as I imagine leading up to 5pm would be.

That’s it for now, fellow immersonauts. I’ll have more at the end of January including highlights from one of the big conferences in the field. Stay safe out there.

This is your reminder that you can always reply to this email in order to coordinate a show with me. I’m not pressuring you to do so; you are just as welcome to be here if you want to see the work by your lonesome or live vicariously through my fearless adventuring. But if you do want a buddy for seeing immersive things, go on the days I’m going and say hi. Or write me in advance and I’ll coordinate. The bad stuff especially is much more fun with friends.

Without further ado, first what’s coming and then what I saw.

Upcoming Events

Everything you see below is happening in the next month, so yeah, it’s a flood. Except for the very last one, I’m absolutely committed to seeing all of these. Strap in.

• The Books of Jacob - A simultaneous live and VR performance, The Books of Jacob is based on a Nobel-prize winning novel about the historical events surrounding Jacob Frank, who claimed to the be the reincarnation of Sabbatai Zevi. This piece is by Dream Adoption Society, hosted by LaMama and Culturehub, both arts institutions doing interesting experiemental work. I can’t see it live, but I’m going to check it out in VR on December 7th. It’s free, running from December 6-8 at 1pm, but you need to RSVP for the live stuff.

• Doris - An examination of the struggles of unsuccessful performers, Doris brings you into the title character’s apartment as she confronts phantom memories and nightmares. The center of the piece is a lip-synched performance by the lead. This is exactly the kind of weird I’m down to try. It’s $60 at Basement in the West Village, running December 6-8. I’m seeing it on the 8th at 6pm.

• Truth and Magic - LIC’s Culturelab is hosting the band Gentleman Brawlers as they present a multi-sensory immersive concert experience of music, dance, play, and nostalgia. The site promises “Fuerza Bruta energy + Meow Wolf visuals + American Utopia concert.” I don’t buy that for a second, but since this seems to be the season of interactive concerts, I’m up for being proven wrong and the band is clearly decent. It’s $40 and runs on December 13th and 14th. I’ll be there on the 14th.

• True Love Forever - Speaking of immersive concerts, this is the newest piece from Third Rail, you know the veteran immersive folks. This one is a indie concert experience. They just dropped more tickets for December 13th through 15th. I’m going on Sunday, December 15th at 6:30. It’s $100, but this is a for-real group of immersive innovators. Don’t miss this one.

• Luna, Luna - The Shed is hosting this whacked-out version of a theme park created by artists including Basquiat, Hockney, Lichtenstein, Haring, Dalí, and others. Can’t say exactly how immersive it is — depends on how many rides you can ride — but it’s at least worth looking at given the pedigree of the creators. I’m going during the day on December 26th, but it runs through the end of the month for $64. I’m trying the day time to see if I can beat the lines to the rides.

• Speakeasy, Die Softly - I know you’ve been hearing me talk about the murder mystery at Carmine’s for months now, but for real this time, it’s on. I’m going on December 27th at 7:30. Come on. Do the cheesy-in-every-way immersive guilty pleasure with me.

• The Dead, 1904 - The Dead, 1904 is that rare bird of a revived piece of this kind of work, originally staged in 2016 and well-reviewed. It’s an immersive version of the (truly brilliant) James Joyce short story set as live dinner theater. I never saw this in the original run, but I am not going to miss it now. I still have to book my experience, which has been delayed by me debating the $200 show ticket or the $400 dinner ticket. (There’s a $1000 premium dinner ticket, but that cannot be worth that price.) I’m probably deluding myself that I’m not going spend extra for the complete-with-meal version, but while I’m wasting time pretending, you could tell me when you want to go and we can coordinate.

• Squid Game - I’m going to finally do this some random day when school’s out. If pretending to do deadly kid games is up your alley and you’re around after December 15th, let me know and we can do it together. No Pro says it’s good, for what it’s worth. I think I might do the 19th, since tickets are $30 rather than $50 that day.

• Tingle Bells - And the iffy one. It’s an ASMR immersive digital installation just in time for the holidays. It’s at Artechouse, which means it’s projection mapping. This is going to be SO BAD but I haven’t been to Artechouse in years, so I’m mainly going just to see what the space is doing. Probably sometime between Christmas and New Year’s? I don’t know. It’s worth a laugh to do it if you want to share that laugh with me. $23 until January 5th.

Immersive Reviews

Kind of random assortment, but wow was there a lot on dementia in this month of my life.

• labRats - cirqueSaw’s latest online and Zoom experience, this was a multiplayer game where you play an experimentally advanced rat that escapes with about a dozen of its brethren and gets access to the larger lab. The lab is represented as an ASCii map in your browser and you use the keyboard to explore its rooms, finding videos, narrative bits, and puzzles. There’s no particular goal, but there are food and water meters it’s implied you need to keep up and there are ways of escaping the lab. I found it an interesting experiment but not that fun. You’re supposed to be coordinating with the other players, but that’s only through a not-very-good custom chat interface that you actually can’t see while navigating the map. That was frustrating because many of the puzzles actually need coordination which was unnecessarily onerous. The puzzles themselves were fine, but the whole thing was deliberately undirected — you weren’t even told you had a goal — which made solving the puzzles both unmotivated and somewhat confusing. I’m excited the cirqueSaw is doing these weird little web experiments, but I think if something is supposed to be a game, you need to make the interfaces and objectives tight, because that’s how games work.

• Mixtape - A light experimental work by Theater Uzume, the piece was set in a 90s music venue where you play reporters covering the very early grunge scene. The show is an interactive concert by a band covering 90s music coupled with circus performances every twenty or so minutes. As a show, it worked pretty well. I’m not for nostaglia of any kind personally, but the band was solid and it was clear a ton of attention was paid to the history of the period in terms of backstory and song choices. Very cool to see a show give L7 its due, for example. Perhaps the most impressive thing is that the circus bits were diegetically appropriate; a grunge show is actually a place where an aerialist act or firebreathers would make sense. The interactive stuff, on the other hand, was weak. You could talk to NPCs in the space, but it wasn’t clear why. There was a game about getting information to fill in a scoreboard, but that was just a boring conversational scavenger hunt and there wasn’t any real space to converse with characters beyond that. A couple of the more skilled NPCs improvised some interesting bits of audience participation that were highlights for me, but the show could have had three times as many of those. So Mixtape was, well, mixed, but Theater Uzume has an idea with legs here, if they can up the interactivity to make it a truely immersive show.

• Lucidity - My longer review here. The short version is that On Site Opera put the audience on the stage and the performers in the house. The story explored memory loss and changing identity through four characters as they take part in an experiment about dementia and music. The opera was pretty good in terms of taking dementia seriously and offering a complex set of perspectives on what one can give up and how one can feel and react to it. I’m not an opera expert so I can’t speak well to the quality of the singing, but the performers are at times VERY close to you and that’s a pretty powerful experience. Immersively, it’s pretty light. There are touches of story content in the hallway leading you into the show and the reversal of the theater was if not clever at least different. I liked the piece, but I would love to see something pushing harder on the immersive if it’s going to call itself an immersive opera.

• Burnout Paradise - Australian troupe Pony Cam created this farcical take on productivity and worklife balance for St. Anne’s Warehouse. In it, the four performers run on treadmills themed to different aspects of life (i.e. Survival, Admin, Performance, and Leisure) and challenge themselves to do tasks while running before the show ends. Tasks include making a three-course meal (Survival), filling out a grant live (Admin), or doing random activities including shaving, downing a beer, or reading a bedtime story (Leisure.) The audienece is continually invited on the stage to help them complete tasks. Pony Cam are solid performers who do a good job being funny and keeping the show moving. But the bits are really played for laughs more than sticking to the theme of productivity. The idea that the performers are literally running on stage to complete the show is a solid metaphor of overworking, but every time Pony Cam could have made a more insightful comic gesture towards that theme, they went instead with a successful but cheap joke. The interactions in the show were just not that interesting either; doing dumb tricks on stage by itself is not engaging participation. Much of the audience enjoyed Burnout Paradise, so I’ll give them credit for a solid show, but given that I’ve seen much better immersive work with treadmills and much better interactive clowning as critique, I think Burnout Paradise didn’t live up to its full potential.

• Mercedes, Part 1 - An interactive documentary piece about care-giving and dementia. The center of the piece is a documentary by Modesto Flako Jimenez about his grandmother Mercedes and the way she held her commmunity together even through her severe memory loss. The immersive bit of this one is that the show starts with you looking around a set made up like Mercedes’s apartment as actors walking through the space talk to you and each other about her life and her struggle with Alzheimer’s. Normally, when other media try to use immersive frames, it’s half-assed, but Jimenez created a really tight interactive experience in that first twenty minutes. It feels like you’re at a wake and between the stories of the actors and the objects you can look at in the apartment, the piece neatly sets the tone that leads you into the doc. This is a small work, but I applaud Jimenez for the care and polish of the immersize bits here. It’s a good model of how to include immersize elements in a small yet effective way.

That’s all I’ve got for now. Stay tuned for the end of the month where I’ll give you my top list of immersive things of 2024, as well as my personal plugs of the music and novels I enjoyed this year.

The first section are the coming-up things, some spooky and some not. I’m looking for people to join at all of these things, so reach out if you’re interested and we’ll coordinate. Also, non-zero chance I’m going to be out in L.A. for work before the end of the month, and if you’re reading from the West Coast, poke me if you want to do some scary stuff during my visit.

The second section are the reviews. That goes on a while. I’ve broken it up into two parts: NYC and the U.K. I was in England and Wales doing immersive stuff a couple of weeks ago, and I’m including it here because if you do have a chance to make it over there (and if you’re interested in immersive, you should) there are things you should know about and/or check out.

As always, push anything interesting you find to me. I’m kind of shocked by the lack of interesting horror in NYC this spooky season, so if you hear of something good, push it my way and I’ll share it.

Upcoming Events

• Speakeasy, Die Softly - This the the Carmine’s murder mystery dinner theater. I will admit, I’ve been really surprised that a list that’s largely NYC immersive enthusiasts and hobbyists haven’t jumped all over this yet. I still need to do it, so I’m going to try one more time. How about Monday, October 14th? It’s at 6:30, so you could do it and still have time to do more spooky stuff later. If not, maybe in early November. $138/person.

• True Love Forever - Third Rail Projects, of Then She Fell and Port of Entry fame, has a new piece coming up later this year about indie rock and kitschy notions of love. I like this combination and Third Rail is a very good group to see for experimentation with story in the dance-in-haunted-house model of immersive, so it’s kind of a can’t-miss experience. It’s sold-out in previews (which start Nov 21st) but I’m on the mailing list and I’ll start messaging when real tickets are available. If you tell me you want to go, I’ll make sure you know when I’m going.

• labRats -cirqueSaw does interesting experimental pieces using Zoom theater and web technology. They don’t always totally work, but I have always enjoyed checking them out. They have a new show called labRats where you play as a rat who can telepathically communicate with other rats (presumably the other audience members) during the experience. This is on November 2nd and 3rd at 2pm and 8pm, and it’s free plus donation. I’m inclined to do this in the afternoon of one of those days, but let me know what you’re up for and I’ll go then.

• Mixtape - Alternative music seems to be the rage in immersive right now, as Theater Uzume (of Tiger’s Bride) also has a new piece about a concert, this time looking at 90s grunge. Tiger’s Bride was site-specific circus and theater with a bit of game, so I would be expecting this to be similar. $55-ish for the part that sounds interactive, $40 for just the show. It’s only two nights (November 8th and 9th). I’ll be going on the 9th if you want to join.

• Sleepy Hollow - I have yet to do these Instagram museum events at Rockefeller Center, and I am sure they will be garbage, but I should do at least one to put my curiosity to bed. You know the drill — themed rooms, a maze, a DIY art station — think family-friendly light theme park and you’ve got it. I’ll probably catch it some random afternoon. If you also have a desire to waste money for academic completeness (or just really want to see faux-upstate-NY in Rockefeller Center), let me know. It’s like $35.

• Burnout Paradise - St. Anne’s Warehouse is getting into the immersive game with this show by the Australian group Pony Cam. Four performers on four treadmills engage in a meditation on burnout and boundaries where the audience drives the show. It says it’s not performance art on the site, but I’m not sure I believe them. Anyway, I’m intrigued. Tickets go on sale on Monday, October 7th, and I’ll coordinate a group if people are interested.

• Squid Game: The Experience - Another one I’m doing for the sake of research, although as I said, No Pro has said it’s terrific and I don’t take that lightly. Given the demands of Halloween, I’m going to push this until November, but I’ll do it quickly some Monday or Thursday then. It’s like $30-45. I’ll organize if you reach out and want to go.

Reviews

Like I said, this is about a 6-week backlog, so get ready. I’ll do NYC first and then swing across the Atlantic to close.

NYC (and virtual)

• R.O.S.E. - My longer review here. R.O.S.E. was Park Avenue Armory’s attempt to transform into a club and show an immersive dance performance. The second goal was a success; the choreography and visuals of dancers moving through the floor was striking and innovative. But Park Avenue Armory is not a club and all the times the show tried to make it one failed. Between dance performances, you were left in the dark club to dance to live DJs and given the museum crowd and energy, I had no interest in doing that. This meant that every time a performance wasn’t happening, I was standing around doing nothing and that was at least half of the show. I would see this group again, but not in a venue like this.

• Honor Bound - Again, my longer review here. This 6 person LARP about dueling and toxic masculinity works, placing you into stupid characters doing very stupid things because of cultural expectation and peer pressure. Sinking Ship did a great job with facilitation, so they are a good group to see LARPs with. It’s not so complicated a LARP that you couldn’t just run it on your own with the $8 pdf, so I can’t say that it was worth the ticket price for an experienced roleplayer, but if you’re a beginner, I would definitely checking out the rest of their upcoming season of LARPs because this is a great way to have skilled facilitators introduce you to the deeper art form LARP can be.

• Raiders of the Local Adventure - This simple scavenger hunt mixed with family-friendly performance is an interesting take on a walking tour. Andrew Agress has created a light and fun way to see parts of Central Park that you might not know under a goofy parodic guise of an Indiana Jones style adventure movie. There’s nothing heavy here about the narrative or the puzzles, but the performers are just terrific at interacting with the audience and holding the storyworld, and the game elements are just engaging enough to keep you moving. It’s a fun time if you have a chance to do it, and regardless you should check out how Agress is experimenting with approachable immersive work.

• Spirit’s Speakeasy - If you want to see me go into detail about why you shouldn’t see this, here is my longer review, but the short version is that the space is completely wrong for the kind of show they are doing. The performers are all solid and what I saw of the story worked, but the show is split between two very small spaces that are impossible to navigate, so you are going to miss at least half the content. The price they are charging for this is ridiculous for something this ill-produced. Hard pass.

• Red Delicious - Thistle Dance’s meditation on the role of apples in storytelling as objects of desire and discord, Red Delicious is a charming and captivating performance. Thistle specializes in building slightly immersive dance stories in very compact spaces and this pieces shines in that context. There’s a bit too much narration in the early part and the work gets stronger as it leans more on the dance to tell the story, but it’s a nice combination of myths about apples and seduction that benefits from how intimate the room is. You should definitely check this piece out (it runs into December) — it’s a small but tight exploration of what temptation can be if it’s not so much sinful as chaotically liberating.

• The Ruin - A single person virtual immersive experience from the experiential company Unshut. I just tried it and it’s interesting as a little multimedia thing. It’s puzzle based and nothing’s too hard. I can’t say it’s mind-blowing, but not bad assets and an interesting use of AI at a point. It’s $25 full price for a 30-90 minute experience, but I’ll get a code shortly for paid subscribers and pass it along.

London

• Viola’s Room - This is the latest piece from Punchdrunk Theatre, immersive pioneers behind the classic Sleep No More. Viola’s Room is an audio tour through a highly designed group of sets - you listen to headphones as you are guided to follow triggered lights through elaborately decorated rooms and intricate light projections. The staging magic of the piece is terrific and there are truly stunning immersive sets, but the story doesn’t really hang together. It’s a fairy told with the 1990s era frame, but while the modern frame has some of the most interesting sets, it’s never really clear what its story is or why it’s connected to the fairy tale. It’s not a great work, but it’s worth seeing just to experience the care in the immersive sets and the use of audio to enhance them.

• The Manikins - A fascinating experiment of a single-audience member show. Saying anything much more about The Manikins spoils its theme, but it’s really terrific idea spun in an interesting and successful horror direction. This is exactly the kind of thing I love from small work — a terrific innovative idea expressed through a tight immersive piece. And it’s truly immersive — you interact the entire time. The writer is American so I have heard rumors it’s supposed to come to the States. If it does, catch it. It’s one of the most interesting things I’ve seen this year.

• Bridge Commander - Did you ever watch Star Trek and wish you could have been in a mission? This is it, full stop. You and 3-7 of your friends physically pilot a starship through an immersive television episode, complete with functional bridge stations, teleporters, communications from other vessels, and quick thinking puzzle solving. It would have been so easy to have just made a off-brand version of Smuggler’s Run out of this, but the creative team went the extra mile, including a deep storyworld, critical decision points, and a save system to allow you advance in rank and continue your story over multiple plays. The ship gameplay is complicated and the scappy sci-fi is laid on thick, but if your first reaction to this review was “wait, did you say I can live my dream of being in Star Trek” it does not disappoint. This is a must-see immersive experience in London.

• Key of Dreams - The biggest reason I went to the U.K. this time, Key of Dreams is an overnight Lovecraftian immersive experience set in a manor house in Wales. I would describe it as a 24-hour puzzle-based story experience with LARP elements. I haven’t done anything quite like it. The narrative and puzzles are engaging and well-crafted and the actors had some truly exceptional interactive performances. It’s really trying to wear both hats and it largely succeeds. You kind of have to do some puzzles to stay engaged the entire time, but you can tune up or down how much roleplaying you want to do. I did a lot and that created an really excellent conclusion for me. Key of Dreams is not cheap, but honestly, given that you get all your food covered and you spend a night in a historic manor in Wales, you get your money’s worth. If you’re an escape room person, this is a can’t-miss experience and if you’re mourning Starcruiser, this is an adjacent work that offers a picture of where overnight immersive experiences can go. I’m glad I made the trip for it.

Glad to get that out. As always, clue me in to what you’re looking at and let me know what you want a buddy for. More immersive reviews as Halloween continues.

By the way, I talk about some of the pieces below (specifically Plastic Bag Store) in a NoPro podcast with very smart humans in an episode about “immersive after immersive” whatever we decide that means. Check it out if you want heady, pretentious takes on a bunch of quite silly work.

Reviews

The Story of Lot’s Wife - Given that this piece was $15, I’m not upset I saw it, but I think it was a good idea that fell short on execution. The concept was an installation piece in which you entered a curtained room by yourself and walked a hallway with artifacts, reading short written pieces and following instructions from a small book you received at the start. The theme is solid, exploring the idea of being an ally and the persecution of LGBTQ people historically, and the writing in the book is a pretty good set of meditations on the topic. The issue was that the artifacts you find in the piece aren’t well designed enough to hold your interest. It’s all really execution — I like the idea of looking at an object and reading framing text, but you have to have a better object than a few salt shakers or a pinned napkin to hold my interest. It’s an interesting structure for a piece that I think has potential, but when I’m looking at installation art, I’m looking at it equally as experience and as visual work. The Story of Lot’s Wife hit the former but not the latter.

The Keeper and the Fungus Among Us - This charming online escape room is run by Headlock Escape Rooms and it’s worth your time. It’s a kid-friendly stop-motion-feeling adventure where you help a legendary guardian thwart the evil plan of a fungus trying to infect a town. If you’ve never done an online escape room, this follows a standard formula where a character in the environment is waiting for your instructions and over Zoom you and your team tell the character what to do. What makes this work is that it’s so cute. The story is witty and warm in the right ways, the songs (yes, there are song numbers) are great fun, and the puzzles are just challenging enough to be interesting to the group. Nothing profound is happening here — it’s all at the level of a Sesame Street episode. But it’s no small feat to pull off the production of a live puppet show/escape room and Headlock has put together something special here. If you want to do something fun with your remote family, this is a good online experience to check out.

The Plastic Bag Store - The Plastic Bag Store is probably the most important piece of immersive work I’ve seen this year, not because it’s the best thing I’ve seen (it isn’t) but rather because its setting at MASS MoCA means that it’s likely the first immersive experience a whole new audience has witnessed. Robin Frohardt’s meditation on trash and what we pass on to future generations, The Plastic Bag Store is a film and immersive performance set in an installation space that’s a Meow Wolf-style riff on the role of plastic in our world. Overall, it’s a good piece. While I think the performances of the actors were unnecessary and weakened the work, the installation art was simply stunning and the film had an unexpectedly charming sense of humor that carried the more serious message about plastic very well. Forhardt does a great job pushing very depressing content through a very hokey (in the best way) set of jokes. What makes it so important to me is that it’s in a museum; the work absolutely fits within the scope of MASS MoCA’s interests and general curation, but it’s also without question an immersive theater piece. If you’re around that area or can be, I would check this piece out before it closes in early November. For many museum goers, this will be the immersive rabbit hole that starts them down this strange road and I’m curious about what those people will create.

Upcoming Immersive Shows

R.O.S.E. - Is an overpriced club? Is a snooty take on nightlife culture? Is an interesting art reflection on raves and dance freedom? Who can predict, but you know me well enough to know that I’m going to find out. This is the Park Avenue Armory’s latest immersive foray, created by artists Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar as a meditation on contemporary dance and nightlife. From what I can tell, professional choreography runs through an open, club-like space that invites you to dance as well. Is $65 too much for this? Maybe. But I’m seeing it on September 5th if you want a crew, and it runs until September 12th if another date is your fancy.

The Spirit’s Speakeasy - Heads up that I’m now going to the press viewing on September 18th, so unless it’s truly mindblowing I’m not going to see it a second time, but it’s $79 and runs until Nov 3rd if you’re interested. I’ll be posting a review immediately after I see it to help you decide.

Raiders of the Local Adventure - The next piece in the comic interactive theater work of Andrew Agress, this is a riff on the archeology-ish pulp action stories we know and love. It’s a pay-what-you-like experiment in interactivity, but I think Agress is always trying interesting things in this form. There are dates for the weekends through September 14th, and I’ll be checking it out on the 14th myself if you want company.

Speakeasy, Die Softly - This is in every possible meaning of the word the cheesiest thing I have heard of in immersive. It’s a murder mystery dinner theater game set in a “legitimate Italian restaurant” during the prohibition, hosted at Carmine’s in Times Square. I mean, come on. It’s a whopping $139, but you get to eat at Carmine’s as part of it, so … that’s worth it? This one is so iconic I think the NoPro NYC crew is going to do it together, but if you’re a sucker for immersive and you live in the Greatest City on Earth, how do you not see this one? Let me know if you’re interested and I’ll let you know when NoPro is going and if there are openings, but it runs until October 5th and depending on how this goes down, maybe I’ll even see it twice.

Squid Game: The Experience - I know what you’re thinking - “another cheesy marketing pop-up?!?” - but no less an immersive critic luminary than Noah Nelson (founder of NoPro) vouched for this one. Do I have to explain it? Just imagine what immersive Squid Game is and you’ve got it. I didn’t really watch the series (I prefer Parasite and Snowpiercer in Korean class fables myself), but this is hyped enough I’m not going to miss it, not to mention it’s game-focused and that’s my Venn Diagram if anything is. Oct 11th through March 9th, so we have time to plan, and only $39 a ticket. Who’s in?

Honor Bound - The first of a series of LARPs Sinking Ship Productions is running for the next few months, Honor Bound is a three-hour roleplaying experience about toxic masculinity through the lens of dueling culture. It’s by Randy Lubin and Jason Morningstar, the latter of which I can vouch for as a terrific roleplaying designer and good human. It’s expensive at $95 a ticket (it’s supposed to go up to $120 but hasn’t yet), but you can also get the season pass for five additional LARPs for $570. If you’re looking to see a more serious short-form LARP, this is a good starting place. It runs Sept 7th and 8th, and I’m seeing it on the 8th at 4pm.

That’s enough list for now. Let me know what you’re seeing and thinking and hope to see you around town soon.

Immersive Reviews

Dirt - My longer review is here. The idea of the show is the audience builds a new section of NYC that can be built on the dried up East River by voting on what initiatives they want to pass. While I normally don’t think that voting is an interesting game mechanic, Sour Milk does a good job keeping the audience engaged and talking about what to vote on and the process becomes an interesting commentary on democracy and influence. The city itself is represented by a crude model at the center of the stage on which the performers “build” the improvements you vote for in an improvised way out of graham crackers, broccoli, and other craft objects. That part of the show is quite charming. The issue is there’s no system behind the construction. Building a pool or an industry center or a housing complex has no in-game difference and the plot continues regardless of what the players choose, which means the audience just makes silly decisions to be funny. That carries the show, but I think it would be a much more powerful experience if they forced you to consider actual urban planning at all as you voted. It was an interesting show to see, but I think it needed that last game element to move it from just entertaining into interesting parody.

Murder in La La Land - Again, longer review here. Someone’s been murdered at Summit Pictures and your job as security to interview the potential subjects and find the guilty party. The show is basically a small audience talking to each of the characters in turn, interrogating them to find out what happened. Live in Theater does a terrific job with this piece. The actors are very flexible and present and can keep the story moving whether you’re playing it straight or just making stupid jokes the whole time. The story is light and the characters are played for jokes, but none of it is cheesy or over-the-top. You can solve a mystery or just have fun while the actors react and try to manipulate you. Live in does this as both a live and virtual show, and I would check one of those versions out if you want to see what really fluid audience interaction looks like.

Spyscape - A surprisingly interesting museum/game space. First and foremost, it passed the “does it have a ball pit” Instagram-trap test by not having one, a test which many other similar “museums” sadly fail. The exhibits each have a specific theme around espionage, from surveillance to hacking to cryptography, and each theme has a game connected to it. The games are varied and generally pretty good, the closed circuit camera game being the real winner. And the educational content is interesting, offering some complexity to the ideas of spying by looking at both good actors (journalists) and bad ones (Cold War spies) to show how questions of tracking users and information affect our lives and history. If you want to take your family to something fun and educational, this is kind of at the top of my list of the quasi-museum genre.

Inertia - Inertia is Drew Petersen’s theatrical encounter about creativity and inspiration. Anywhere from a dozen to a hundred audience members sit in a circle around Petersen in a largely unadorned rehersal space as he leads us through a series of call-and-responses and simple clowning moments. It’s an interesting experiment in audience interaction in the spirit of 600 Highwaymen, in that Petersen puts at least half of the performance in the hands of the room as we get called up to trigger sound cues, read lines with him, or walk around the space in particular ways as part of a human machine. It’s extremely intergenerational (I saw it with an audience of about thirty 10-year olds at Park Avenue Armory) and very approachable while still talking about Kandinsky and the creative process. Petersen has made a quite minimal work that’s surprisingly interactive and poetic. If you have a chance to check out Petersen’s work, do it — it’s a real illuminating study of how much you can do with just instructions and a good guide.

Hiker Trash - An interesting but not completely successful immersive experience from Linked Dance Theater. The premise is that you are followers of the blog of a hiker of the Appalachian Trail, getting a chance to meet her as she gets a supply drop while passing through NYC. The company is using this as an experiment with propping and sets. There are parts of the piece that work well. There are a number of different physical elements that are interesting, including miniatures, shadow puppets, and emergent sets, and the performer does a good job juggling acting and singing and dancing during the show. The core idea of trail magic — the moments of euphoria that can happen randomly during the misery of long hikes — is a good theme that has some aesthetic legs. The issue is that the experience is supposed to be a conversation between the actor and the four audience members and that conversation doesn’t really have the power it should. The script doesn’t land properly to create interesting stakes for us, our moments of interaction don’t feel like they really affect the story, and there’s a bit of a reach for profundity in the conclusion that doesn’t land when the audience is asked to give the hiker a final piece of wisdom. I found Linked Dance’s Winter’s Walk a much better version of this idea, but that might be in part because that’s a piece for one viewer and if it’s just me alone there, I don’t hear other audience members and have no barometer for how cheesy I might sound. Hiker Trash is an interesting experiment with some strong elements, but the interactivity here doesn’t live up to the other elements. Linked Dance has done and will do better work.

Upcoming Immersive

This is Theater Season of LARPs - Sinking Ship Creations, veterans of LARPs including Project Ascension, have teamed up with a bunch of great LARP creators to put together a season of live-action roleplaying games spanning into May 2025. The season ticket gets you 6 LARPs for $570; at $95 per LARP, it’s not a bad piece given some of them are longer games. I can vouch for a lot of these games though: designers include Lizzie Stark, Bjarke Petersen, and Jason Morningstar among others — all superstars of LARP design — and I’ve personally played Sacrament and can vouch for it. If the price is high for you, look into the individual games and see if there’s one that’s interesting to you, but if LARP is your jam, this is a good way to lock in a chance to see a lot of interesting work for the next year.

The Story of Lot’s Wife - A short experience of a “performer-less play” organized into stations, the piece tells the biblical story of Lot by having the audience walk through a set of ritual exercises of introspective interaction. It’s only $10 for 15 minutes, so I don’t know why I wouldn’t catch this after work some day. It’s solo though, so if you want to see it with me, let me know and we can coordinate times to connect after. At the Cell Theatre from August 8th to 16th.

Privy privy - An installation piece riffing on public restrooms in queer nightclubs, with a potential moment of ice cream cone licking. This is another short one, so it’s easy to check out, but it’s another one to do some work to coordinate if you want a buddy for it. I think it’s free, 601ARTSPACE, August 22nd to 25th.

The Spirit’s Speakeasy - An immersive soiree of magic and mediumship set around Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the 1920s. The description makes it out to be a party space with specialized drinks and wandering show pieces, so pretty par for the course in terms of light immersive. The quality of this is all going to be in the implementation, which I can’t vouch for, but it’s the kind of thing I’m academically-ethically bound to check out. $79, Sept 19th to Nov 3rd, at Sincerely Ophelia.

Upcoming Concerts

Just a couple more that have come across my radar in case you’re interested:

Cults, Warsaw, July 28th, $38 - Ever wanted to hear 1960’s girl pop about creepy things such as fanaticism, impatience, or self-destructiveness? Now you can, live. A bunch of us are going. Join us.

Slowdive, Brooklyn Paramount, Nov 18th, $64 - This is not a nostaglia show. You might not know this, but this chillwave band of Souvlaki fame has put out two great new albums and so you’re not going for the memory trip. You’re going to want to see the new stuff. You can also catch this on Nov 17th, but if you want to see them with me, it’s the date above.

That’s all for now. More in a few weeks when additional immersive drops and there’s more to explore.