Immersive Review Rundown: It’s Terror Time 2024!

This week’s edition puts a special focus on LA’s Spooky Season, with stops in London and NYC for non-spooky engagements.

Come on boys and ghouls, let’s go a-scarin’.

NoPro is 100% reader & listener supported. Join our Patreon campaign to secure & expand our coverage of Everything Immersive! Get the NoPro Newsletter and access to our Discord when you do.

Want more? Check out our most recent edition and our REVIEWS section.

Check out our How To Get Covered By NoPro guide to submit your events & experiences for review.

Want to get listed in our newsletter?
Submit a listing to Everything Immersive.

Creep LA: Ghosts — JFI Productions
$75.50; Los Angeles, CA; Through October 27

After taking two seasons off, Creep has returned to Los Angeles. This year, they’ve partnered with CBS to feature their television show, Ghosts. That partnership manifests in two ways. The first is through a themed pre-show area where you’ll spend some time waiting to be called to enter the experience. I haven’t ever seen Ghosts, but the theming here feels on point and like a match to a cozy B&B haunted by friendly ghosts. The second way is through the theme of the actual Creep LA walk-through experience, which features ghostly stories throughout an incredible mansion in West Adams.

Previous Creep shows have featured wonderful sets, but this is the first time that it feels like it could only take place in this space. The layout feels confusing and haunted; I was never quite sure where I was in the house and that disorientation set a nicely creepy mood. The stories themselves feel like classic Creep and alternate between spooky, weird, fun, and scary in equal measure. After two spooky seasons off, it was exactly what I was looking for.

— Kevin Gossett, LA Reviews Editor, from an upcoming feature length review

Monster Party — Matt Dorado
$85; Los Angeles; Run Concluded

In its best moments, Monster Party is a poignant vignette of the horrors forced upon ordinary citizens just trying to live their lives during the McCarthy Era Lavender Scare. Sympathetic to both its paranoid gay male characters and the lonely women duped into wifing them, the show has strong potential to tell a story that echoes with relevance in our modern era of governmental fear-mongering around queer people.

The conceit is simple: audience members have been invited to an exclusive party where the hostess, portrayed by a devilishly mirthful Dasha Kittredge, encourages indulging in a booze-forward cocktail and piping-hot tea courtesy of her befuddled guests of honor. Over the course of the evening, it’s revealed that each of these guests met a violent demise before their arrival.

But rather than a “who done it” the show struggles to get past its “who is it.” Audience members are encouraged to chat with the characters to elicit the story, but they’ve woken up with amnesia, and initially can’t answer questions as basic as “what’s your name?” The result is that attendees end up playing the tedious role of investigative journalists with little context and uncooperative subjects who at no point volunteer anything of narrative substance. The meat of the story happens in the last ten minutes of this two-hour experience, narrated by the hostess. My plus one for the evening, an accomplished Broadway actor in his own right, expressed frustration that there wasn’t any sense of payout in the reveal, because we didn’t get clues along the way from motivated characters so much as high-camp 1950s gestalt.

That said, we certainly had real moments of delight. Matthew Greenwood teases as Bernard, and our interactions over the course of the evening entailed increasingly suggestive subtext about the, uh, ins-and-outs of living on the down low during trying times. I think I even caught a whisper of Polari, the gay code language of the period. Interestingly, my straight companion picked up on none of it, nor did the other presumably straight people I compared notes with over the course of the evening, but the gays all got it. Whether intentional or not, this touch of realism elevated my experience, and I love the notion that certain characters might only reveal certain secrets to certain audience members based upon rapport.

Sidney Franklin in the role of soldier-cum-salesman Charlie earnestly offered us a great deal on a vacuum cleaner, Emily Yetter’s lobotomized housewife Loretta waxed poetic about her Sunday roast, and Bukola Ogunmola as wide-eyed Patricia surprised us with a wild side at the end of the night. An opera singer, a magic show, and a suspicious ringing landline punctuated things nicely and kept the room moving. Clever leverage of an art gallery as the venue gave us plenty to look at when not directly engaged with performers.

All in all an evening well spent, and we look forward to future forays into the medium from creator Matt Dorado.

— Eli Aultman, Special Correspondent

The Queen Mary’s Dark Harbor/Los Angeles Haunted Hayride
— Thirteenth Floor Entertainment
$47.99 and up/$36.99 and up, Los Angeles, through Nov. 2

It’s spooky season, y’all! So like clockwork Thirteenth Floor Entertainment brings us multiple offerings of varying quality to our Los Angeles Spooky landscape. This year, they are the creative leads for a resurrection of The Queen Mary’s Dark Harbor, and bring some new experiences and “IP” to the Los Angeles Haunted Hayride in Griffith Park.

Get No Proscenium’s stories in your inbox

Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.

SubscribeSubscribe

The Queen Mary’s Dark Harbor has been dormant since pre-pandemic times, so its return is a welcome add on to the greater Los Angeles spooky landscape. With three of their five mazes playing within the lower decks of the eminently creepy Queen Mary they maximize their creepiness factor thanks to the dimly lit corridors and the haunted history of the ship itself. As a fun add-on, there are speakeasies within some of the mazes that will give you access to even creepier parts of the ship where you can have a cocktail and appreciate the melancholic aura present. The mazes are a little too reliant upon the ships charms, as one of the land bound mazes greatly lacked in narrative quality and creepiness…

The core of Thirteenth Floor’s other Los Angeles site is the old chestnut of the Haunted Hayride in Griffith Park. Upon entering the site there are the ubiquitous Hayride, three mazes, an interactive Seance show, and a couple of carnival rides. Two out of the three mazes were effectively the same as last year being the “Hellbilly Halloween” and “Trick or Treat: Ding-Dong-Dead”. The new addition this year was “Monae Manor”, a haunt themed to indie-soul singer Janelle Monae. This was rather uninspired as it felt like a sub-standard Thirteenth Floor maze with the occasional video of Janelle Monae, and her music wafting in over the soundscape of “horror.” Compared with previous pop music inspired mazes, (generally at Universal revolving around either Rob Zombie or the Weeknd) this does not warrant a special visit, and I’d rather just experience this year’s Weeknd maze at Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights. The interactive Seance show should be lauded for its clever use of immersive audio technology and compelling performance by “Madame Aurora” making it one of my highlights for the year.

All in all, both Dark Harbor and Haunted Hayride offer entry level frights for spooky season newbies. They are complete enough experiences to justify a quick fix, but longer form offerings around town beckon, and if you truly want to be immersed in the spook, you’d best find something a bit longer and more bespoke.

— Martin Gimenez — Reviewer At Large

Jeff Wayne’s The War of The Worlds: The Immersive Experience
— Layered Reality
£45-£82; London UK; ongoing

It’s a rare immersive show which survives the trials of pandemic lockdowns, social distancing, and the slings and arrows of the post-recovery entertainment vogues. Yet so stands War of the Worlds (last covered January 2020), one of the few shows worldwide which was built in the Before Times and continues to pack ’em in years later.

With good reason: a 24-scene musical promenade dark ride with kinesthetic VR integration, live actors, advanced projections and holograms, and physically engaging audience work is proof enough of their heavy claim to the London scene. Scents, splash zones, smoke and pyrotechnics — seems no expense is spared to bring each room to life. The journey we take as an audience feels like a string of pearls: every new space has its own sparkle of fresh wonder. From boat rides to crawling through trenches, from confessional booths to rickety hot air balloons, we’re treated to a carousel of practical wonders; occasionally brought further into life by VR headsets.

That said, there are some tempering notes: parts of the show border on horror and ‘fraidy-weenies (like me) should be prepared for moments of spookery. The show is very active, playing with perspective angles and requiring flexibility and mobility — no wheelchairs or cane/crutches admitted.

From a more immerso-experienced perspective I sympathize with the actors: a fresh performer every other room who’s got to establish and maintain a high-energy-high-stakes narrative for the barely 5 minutes we’re with them. It’s an even greater struggle dealing with a maximum group size of 12 which can take ages to move between spaces. Unfortunately our group is very giggly in the face of gravitas and isn’t particularly interactive with the actors, but my partner and I shrug this off since there’s no audience agency on the plot nor any incentive/rewards to engage.

The format is excellent for immersive newbies and casuals: the environment is rich but the emotional demand on the audience is low, allowing the audience to be part of the huddle but not be so burdened by narrative responsibility that they feel embarrassed to not be good at improvising. Junkies will appreciate set & sound design and will likely forgive the railroading & lack of agency in favor of clever VR integration.

Worth the price tag, worth the journey — War of the Worlds is worthy of its longevity and we expect to rely on it for many more years to come.

— Shelley Snyder, London Curator

The Wind and the Rain — En Garde Arts in association
with Vineyard Theatre
From $45; New York City; Through October 27

How do you make a play about time, The Wind and the Rain asks, and oh, does it ever answer.

You make a play about time by immersing the audience in the entire history of Sunny’s Bar. It’s an old bar in Red Hook, itself an old neighborhood. The actors are talented and charismatic, but there are only four of them. So they change roles again and again, emphasizing the synchronicity of the stories across the generations.

You make a play about time by putting the play in an historic railroad barge, floating on the very water that is such a big part of the Red Hook story. Sea level rise and Hurricane Sandy, the forces that nearly destroyed Sunny’s and this community, have extra poignance when the theater itself is gently swaying on the bay. And then you move the audience to Sunny’s, giving them a meditative walk to the bar itself. This is the most specific of site-specific works.

The Wind and the Rain is some of the best historical interpretation I have ever seen. At turns, the show is charming, funny, and heartbreaking. It’s a mark of the power of the show’s storytelling that the show is also suspenseful. We know that Tone (Sunny’s wife and bar co-owner) saves the bar after Sandy. I still wondered how it was going to turn out.

The show is intentional, sharp, and powerfully human. It positions all of us in the Sunny’s community, and places that community in the vast expanse of time. Mentioning “all of us” is a good time to mention audience participation. Those words make people nervous, but in the case of this show, they shouldn’t. The performers do a careful job taking care of the audience and their nerves, allowing those who want to participate to do so (delightfully) and those who don’t to gracefully decline.

The Wind and the Rain is magnificent. Through the years Sunny’s has been repeatedly characterized as the edge of the world. Go to the edge of the world, then keep going to the barge. See this show, and lurch on shifting time just as the barge lurches under you. The emotional payoff is beautiful, grabbing you and holding you in the many many stories that make up neighborhoods and institutions like Red Hook and Sunny’s. I simply cannot think of a better way to spend an evening.

— Penelope Ray, NYC Correspondent

Discover the latest immersive events, festivals, workshops, and more at our new site EVERYTHING IMMERSIVE, home of NoPro’s show listings.

NoPro is a labor of love made possible by our generous Patreon backers. Join them today and get access to our Newsletter and Discord!

In addition to the No Proscenium website and our podcast, and you can find NoPro on Bluesky, Facebook, LinkedIn,YouTube, Instagram, and in the Facebook community also named Everything Immersive.