Audience Participation Gets a Shot in the Arm with ‘All About Evil’ (Review)

“Zoom fatigue” has come to mean, in the common parlance, the exhaustion that comes from hours and hours spent, day in and day out, staring at so many boxed heads on the screen like an apocalyptic opening to “The Brady Bunch.” For me, though, the big toll is the exhaustion of constantly having to shape the appearance of myself and my home. Don’t get me wrong, I love to get dressed up for a night at the theater, and I decorate my space in a way that pleases me. But attempting to constantly curate myself and my life for all the other floating heads in Zoom-land is a chore. My space is my space; I don’t love the necessity to alter it, or myself within it, for others’ viewing pleasure.

What All About Evil, and by extension, the Seize the Show format (the modular theatrical-gaming hybrid put forward by Gamiotics, the producer of All About Evil) does so well is that it removes those stresses entirely. How? By presenting their work in a webinar format and putting the bulk of the interactivity in a companion smartphone site. Why bother giving the audiences cameras? They can’t and shouldn’t talk over the cast. Down with conference call mode for everyone! It’s so liberating to be able to settle into bed in an oversized t-shirt with a bowl of popcorn and an amaretto sour and just relax while I enjoy the show. While, of course, this wouldn’t work for a more conversational or intimate piece, Seize the Show is brilliant for the kind of light-hearted entertainment that feels just right for a frazzled audience after a hectic week. All About Evil reminds me of the kind of cabaret show I used to embrace on a Friday night out, too tired from the workweek for anything heavier, while saving heady tearjerkers for the weekend proper.

The Seize the Show format works like a theatrical variant on Jackbox games: the main action is in a shared Zoom window, but each viewer logs in with a code on a web portal accessed via a cell phone, and at set times, trivia questions or mini game prompts arrive on your phone screen. This dovetails nicely with the mystery genre the experience is set in. Using my screen to choose answers to trivia questions or play collaborative minigames while watching the live feed of the action (influenced by the outcome of those prompts) felt natural. Playing along with the show manages to take the best parts of Sheer Madness or Edwin Drood-style audience participation in voting for the twists and turns of the plot and add better emotional stakes. All About Evil uses a predetermined killer and concrete evidence (which is only revealed after correct answers are given) to make each vote or minigame feel like a matter of life or death.

And they are! After a string of failures, a chorus girl we the audience are interrogating is shot to death from across the hallway. I can’t help but wonder if she could have made it to the end, if only we had known more about whatever The Great White Way minutia we were being asked about.

The plot, as you may have surmised from the title, is a light trifle of a mystery whipped up around the framework of Bette Davis’ classic All About Eve. A star is dead, and the classic Broadway archetypes that surround her (the understudy, the director, the obsessive fan) are all suspects. The framing of the show is a little bit clunky at first, with the entire audience collectively playing the same detective, but it didn’t distract from the story. And this story gets most of its mileage by acting as a grand tour of Broadway hangouts. The audience let out a noticeable burst of joy in the chat when we made the inevitable stop at Sardi’s, where the now promoted understudy was luxuriating in the attention of Broadway fame now that her competition bit the dust.

To be frank, the similarities to All About Evil’s namesake stopped at its aesthetics and backstory, but the depth of Broadway knowledge the show required shocked me. I’ve never been so relieved to have played Harry the Horse in a middle school production of Guys and Dolls as when I secured a key piece of evidence by recalling that the characters argued ad nauseum about whether “Lindy’s” (better known as “Mindy’s,” cough) sold more cheesecake or strudel. Certain questions relied more on observation, or quick memorization of images, but some required a knowledge of 50’s Broadway culture that escaped even an admitted show nerd like myself.

The whole thing had the energy of Night Trap, or similar FMV games of the Sega CD era. The acting was knowingly tongue in cheek, with withering disapproval at any failures on the audience’s part. As a live show, though, and without the distraction of the other faces in the Zoom window, that energy transforms into a feeling of being paid tremendous personal attention, even with a large audience.

What’s particularly impressed me is the company’s prolific output. Seize the Show has come out with 11 shows since its launch, inspired by a host of themes. The show I experienced is of tremendous quality, with fully realized characters, period costuming, and original music. It’s tempting to almost treat Seize the Show as a serial, tuning in whenever a theme catches your eye to see how your knowledge of that genre can spin the story.

One complaint is that the minigames are, in all fairness, kind of lame. The trivia worked spectacularly, but a “Simon Says” order memorization task and a fastest finger button-pressing challenge felt more like placeholders, or proof of concept games. If Gamiotics is able to design and program stronger challenges, of the quality a “Jackbox” style system has primed an audience to expect, it could rise to the level of extraordinary.

I would also encourage Gamiotics to look into potentially offering (at a premium and with altered games, of course) privately booked shows. While it was fun playing along with strangers, my attempts to frantically convince everyone in the chat who the culprit was at the very end felt like they could have ended in disaster. I know I can be a bit of a control freak; for those with that impulse, the option to play with a set, known group could be appealing.

The consistent, high-gloss competence of All About Evil is what sets it apart from so many other theatrical experiments of the COVID-19 era. I get the impression that, coming out of the world of game design, the creators of the Size the Show platform place their emphasis on the participant experience. In a time when it feels nearly impossible to escape and forget oneself like before, it’s refreshing to be able to focus on having fun without feeling stress. In a time when, to paraphrase Bette Davis, I had fastened my seatbelt for a bumpy night, All About Evil was the patch of smooth road I needed.

All About Evil has concluded but Seize the Show announces new productions on a regular basis.

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