‘Crimson Cabaret’ Shakes Up A Spy’s Delight (The NoPro Review)

Spy stories are about secrets. Secrets and discovery.

So I’m going to hold a few cards close to my vest in this review, to keep from spilling all the secrets.

We’ll start then, with discovery.

Upon arrival the venue for the Crimson Cabaret, the latest from The Unmarked Door, doesn’t seem like much. How could it? It’s in an industrial zone tucked between downtown Glendale and the train tracks that run near the LA River. The building, complete with its small gated parking lot, is about as nondescript as you can get in Greater Los Angeles. The only thing less impressive would be a strip mall.

Which makes it the perfect front to conceal a glitzy speakeasy that plays home to an intricate web of Cold War era plots. That’s what you find past the lobby, down a hallway lined with offices, and through one final curtain: West Berlin, 1963 — the Crimson Cabaret.

The team from the Unmarked Door strike the right cord from the start, and while there’s more than a little jazz-like chaos to the whole proceedings, you’d be hard pressed not to be charmed by what they’ve built here. Previous offerings from the company have been light on the interactivity, but that’s far from the case here with a heavy puzzling component to the action.

The plot in a nutshell: Stasi agent Boris Engel is suspected of wrapping up several loose ends across Europe. He’s been impossible to track, but tonight his mistress Ana Pavelko has gotten permission to cross the Wall and will be appearing at the Cabaret. So the stage is set for a one-night-only command performance from the greatest spies in Europe as all sides seek to discover just what Boris is up to.

The team tries here for one of the more difficult forms of immersive theatre: sandbox style with a high level of agency from the audience. Or at least it feels that way if you get roped into one of the many concurrent plots that are running inside the cabaret. The show doesn’t demand this level of participation from you, as there’s a full cabaret show that unspools over the runtime and set pieces woven into that which push the overall story forward, so it’s possible to sit back and watch it unfold. But with a ticket price scratching at $100, passive consumption doesn’t seem to be the best value.

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However, if you do dive in, there just might be too much to do.

At the start of the evening you’re handed a notebook and pencil, in order to keep track of clues. The implication here being that attention to detail is going to matter. Yet by the time the first big set piece unfolds, kicking the action of the evening into high gear, I found myself pulled into so many trailheads that a kind of choice paralysis kicked it. Do I cleave to my first handler, or my second? Hang back and wait for the songbird to wrap her set in order to follow up on her request that we talk after the show? (A request she made twice, since I kept getting taken backstage.) Do I solve this crossword that the barman slipped me?

Any given thread was interesting, and at the level of details were well executed, but how they mattered to the whole picture wasn’t clear by the end of the night. In fact, by the end I was holding onto a [REDACTED] which felt like it should be important but had no clue as to what the story was with it. The interactive elements presented themselves more as a buffet than as a tasting menu, something that an iteration of this production would do well to address. It’s not that the ingredients aren’t all there — they’re just not meshing in an organic fashion. Not that it is easy to get these elements to balance, but continued refinements over the length of the run are in order, and could take this show to Westworldian heights.

Yet these issues don’t stop the whole of the piece being fun, and that comes down the strength of the cast and the fact that the dramatic beats are there. One set piece let in the game does an awesome job of progressing from a private “mission” into a full on public spectacle that manages the impossible: a campy premise executed with just the right amount of self-seriousness to awesome. (This is one of those cards I’m playing close, you’ll know it when you see it.)

We’ve had some problems this year with productions feeling unbaked, coming out of the oven half finished, if you will. A full price ticket for a show that is still clearly a beta. Blissfully that’s not what’s going on here. While Crimson Cabaret could use some streamlining to bring it all together in perfect harmony, all the individual pieces have been polished to the point that they feel lived in: a true accomplishment on opening night. This is especially evident in the cast, who are a mix of immersive veterans and fresh faces, all of whom do a stellar job in making this a living, breathing place.

The team led by Rolfe Kent and Lola Kelly have created a sandbox that you want to play in, a place that never was which you hope will always be. There’s something terribly cinematic about being passed messages while a burlesque number unfolds on stage and the Russian agent you’ve shadowing takes off for the back. These kinds of moments are what we look for in immersive, and the Cabaret has stacked the deck with them.

Crimson Cabaret runs through December 29th in Glendale, CA. Tickets are $95–145.

Update: 12/9/2019 3:53pm PST — A previous edition of this article incorrectly attributed the heavy puzzle component to MOON/SHINE Experiential. We regret the error.

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