Immersive Review Rundown: Summer Is Here For Real

Now this is what I’m talkin’ about: cowboys, bandits, superheroes, Hamlet, Neo, skirting Nintendo’s lawyers, heartfelt theatre pieces staged in recycling centers.

Summer SHOULD feel like a time of flourishing possibilities, even when the world is spinning off its axis. That’s EXACTLY the feeling I got reading this week’s reviews.

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Balls: The Monster-Catchin’ Musical Comedy — Brandon Zelman and Harrison Bryan
NYC: Manhattan; $30–45; various dates through August 5

If you are like me, the idea of a Pokémon parody staged as a musical solicits a sense of dread. You just expect it to be juvenile and cheesy and terrible. Well, sometimes it’s worth it to check your expectations, because Balls certainly is juvenile and cheesy, but it’s also amazing, both as a musical and as a story about bravery, self-worth, and the questionable ethics of trapping animals to have them cockfight for your entertainment.

Balls is an interactive musical in that the show is slightly improvised every night through audience input. The performers are regularly running through the house and talking to specific viewers. One audience member is pulled on stage for the first song to name the protagonist, known originally as Your Rival, and the show uses the chosen name from then on. Audience contributions are gathered at the start of the show and then come back in a thematic moment of creative play at a later point to great effect. It’s not deep interaction, but your show will be different and the cast does a very good job managing the changing content.

But where Balls really shines is the performance itself. The songs are great — clever jokes about monsters and card games that both resonate with 10-year old humor and offer hilarious critiques on the troubling idea of catching-them-all. The actors themselves are just so much better than you would expect from a Pokémon parody in a house for 40 people. Five of the six actors play several roles, singing in affected voices and different perspectives, and all of it is tight and catchy and fun. I was continually impressed by the commitment and strength of these performances. And the costumes, props, music, and other effects are just the right kind of DIY funny to tie it all together. It’s just hilarious and delivers on exactly what you’re looking for from a parodic musical with some heart.

I was genuinely surprised at how good Balls was. It’s Avenue Q for Pokémon fans in every sense of the word, delivering deep knowledge of the content, a fun sardonic tone, and genuine care into creating a well-written, well-performed, and (dare I say it) meaningful musical. It’s a show you just gotta catch.

— Nicholas Fortugno, New York Correspondent

DC Heroes & Villains Festival — Six Flags Magic Mountain
Included w/gen. admission $49, Santa Clarita, Fridays & Saturdays thru July 26

Billed as an immersive takeover of the DC Universe section of Six Flags Magic Mountain, the DC Heroes & Villains Festival is more of a traditional theme park offering than its sister park Knott’s Berry Farm’s Ghost Town Alive! (also reviewed this edition). Indeed, what’s set up feels a bit more like a Ren Faire stage with rotating DC Comics-themed acts surrounded by meet & greets with the likes of Catwoman, Superman, and the like. Various henchmen chat up passersby in a somewhat silly, sinister take on a scare zone.

Starting with a parade and stage show the area around the big Batman statue that leads to the Batman and Wonder Woman roller coasters is programmed with four hours and change of performances and DJ interludes that include music acts, character brawls, and contests where “hero” of the day.

To be sure: this isn’t a separate ticketed attraction a la Universal Fan Fest Nights. So one can’t really compare it to the Back to the Future setup there that went full immersive theatre loop. There is a story that plays out across the stage shows, but unlike Ghost Town Alive! or that BTTF loop there isn’t really a way for guests to get involved in that aspect. Participation is limited to chatting with henchmen, photo ops, and the various stage contests, which brings it in line with what you might find at Disneyland’s Star Wars Night. None of the action spills over to the Metropolis side of the DC area, where the other coaster is, and where the award-winning Justice League ride is down for maintenance.

I have to admit: as the immersive guy and someone with two tickets to see the new Superman movie and a 34 year old DC Comics-collecting habit I was disappointed that the best thing I found at the fest was the “Hero In Training” drink: an incredibly refreshing strawberry lemonade with pineapple chunks and coconut. I need to be careful around this stuff; I could accidentally drink a vat of it.

I don’t like to write prescriptions here, and I’m betting that this event does what Six Flags wants: keeps kids entertained in a part of the park that is usually just a walkway. It did that for sure, and that’s a real win. Yet, I can’t help but think that with a little bit of interactivity, this might be worth making a special trip for, as opposed to being something worth checking out if you were already planning a Six Flags day this summer. As it stands, that’s the category I put it in, and I also wish I had brought a fanny pack so I could have gone on the Batman coaster. I love a hanging coaster, and I love Batman. Yet I also don’t trust my pockets to hold onto my phone.

— Noah Nelson, Founder and Chief Immersonaut

Ghost Town Alive! — Knott’s Berry Farm
Included with general admission ($59.99 and up); Buena Park, CA; select dates June 13 — September 1

Immersive theatre enthusiasts take note: one of the very best open-world sandboxes you can play in has returned for the summer. Knott’s Berry Farm is again host to Ghost Town Alive!, an interactive Old West-themed show where guests can participate in a story filled with action, adventure, comedy, and romance. It’s a great example of a theme park land brought to life using actors and the guests.

This season in the world of Ghost Town Alive!, it’s the year 1894 and the town of Calico is all abuzz for the yearly Founder’s Day celebration. The day starts with a ribbon cutting ceremony at 10am and goes until the hoedown, ending at roughly 5pm, making it a full seven hours of jam-packed immersive entertainment, all included in the price of your park ticket. Of course, it wouldn’t be Founder’s Day without some shocking reveals and big news unexpectedly dropping at Town Hall.

Multiple storylines are happening simultaneously and the events repeat every day the show is on during the season, making the experience very replayable. Don’t be surprised if you’re deep in conversation with an actor when suddenly a duel erupts behind you or the schoolhouse bell starts ringing and there’s a commotion down the street. The actors — of which I counted over twenty on my visit — are excellent improvisers and lean into whatever silly ideas you might throw at them; they are also trained in bringing guests into the story organically by catching them up on the town’s happenings, making onboarding quick and easy. (You didn’t hear it from me, but rumor has it that the Mayfield brothers are terrible thumb wrestlers.)

As a participant, you might be asked to pass a love note to someone’s crush, or deliver an important package on behalf of the post office, or get a gold nugget weighed at the assay office. The possibilities are endless and it’s easy to dip in and out of the experience. No smartphone app or other preparation is required to join in. The focus in GTA! is about creating emotional connections between guests and characters rather than numbers-based game mechanics or checking off a list of objectives. Characters might write notes to each other using pencil and paper and the most “high tech” thing about Calico is the newspaper, which gets updated multiple times a day as events unfold. Pro-tip: characters might drop a clue on activities to come later on while talking, hinting at when the bigger set piece scenes will happen. So if someone tells you to be somewhere at a specific time, take note!

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If you’re a person who loves conversing with characters, going on missions or fetch quests, contributing to a bigger story, or just taking in a day’s worth of heartfelt shenanigans, Calico is the place for you. I love visiting Ghost Town Alive! every year and you can bet your biggest golden nugget, I’ll be back, sooner, rather than later.

— Kathryn Yu, Senior LA Reviewer & Executive Editor Emeritus

Hamlet (an experience), Emily Carding
London; part of Voidspace Live; free with festival ticket, run complete

Emily Carding is one of the great immersive performers of our moment, and with Hamlet (an experience) Carding shows us that they are not just an exceptional actor, but a skilled interactive theatre maker as well. Hamlet (an experience) is an innovative take on Shakespeare’s masterpiece that lets the audience play in its world while losing none of its stunning language or complex power.

Carding plays Hamlet during the performance, but Hamlet takes two roles: the protagonist of the story and the director of the piece. As director, Hamlet assigns various members of the audience the roles of other characters in the play, including Gertrude, Polonious, Ophelia, and Laertes (who I played in my run.) Each audience member is given a short script for their character consisting of stage directions and occasionally lines and other actions to perform when the appropriate scenes appear. Carding then runs through an abbreviated version of the play, all with the original text, pulling audience members in and out, performing with them up to the story’s tragic end.

As an actor, Carding is incredible. Their fluency in the rhythm of the Shakespearean language and ability to control the room through sheer presence is stunning. Carding’s Hamlet is a twitchy, self-absorbed force of chaos that manages to inspire both sympathy and frustration. But the structure of the show is just as solid. Carding has given the audience just enough simple actions and lines to be a potent sounding board to their dramatic performance, and that both reinforces the theme of the work (that everyone is a pale shadow in the face of Hamlet’s internal struggle) and brings a fresh perspective on the play by allowing you to view it through the eyes of other characters caught up in Hamlet’s destructive wake. I have certainly never wanted Hamlet to shut up so badly before I had to listen to him as Laertes.

Carding can be found in a number of immersive pieces and it is worth it to see them bring their talent to these other works, but keep an eye out for their Shakespeare pieces — Carding’s innovative approach turns a nutshell of a one-person show into infinite participatory space.

— Nicholas Fortugno, New York Correspondent

The Matrix in Shared Reality — Cosm
$40 and up; Los Angeles and Dallas; through August 30

The Matrix in Shared Reality is a new experiment around what it means to extend the edges of a movie onto a domed theater space; audiences view the 1999 film in its entirety, but with brand new visuals above, below, and to the sides of the original work. Imagine, if you will, a virtual living room which “knows” what you are watching on TV and attempts to change your environment to match the screen. This also makes it fitting that the first film in this partnership between Warner Brothers, Cosm, and Little Cinema is The Matrix, which interrogates the very notion of reality itself.

Sitting in my seat, it really does feel like the world of The Matrix can jump outside the frame, onto the stunningly crisp 87-foot diameter LED dome surrounding me. The special effects, sound design, and lighting design crafted for the “outer” frame are exquisite. The whole thing feels appropriately theatrical, keeping the emphasis on the star of the show: the film.

At times the “outer” visuals echo the set dressing of a scene: the rooftops of skyscrapers, a dirty subway platform, or a weapons rack stretching as far as the eye can see. The effects modulate between subtle and dizzying, especially when the “outer” camera slowly moves in the opposite direction of the “inner” frame, creating the sensation of motion (startlingly effective but used sparingly). Other times the visuals are more abstract, filling the gaps like a pulsing frame around the action. Or the light shifts and the surroundings dim, so we can refocus our attention on Morpheus, Neo, or Trinity.

There might be a flashlight carried by a character which swoops past in the scene and the beam of light carries over to the edges of the dome, as if the person were actually in the room with us. When a character falls or something explodes, the outer content frame shakes, trembles, or ripples appropriately as well. The boundaries between the movie and where we are sitting start to blur, a little at first, and then more and more throughout the duration of the experience.

The crowd around me also boos at the first glimpse of the bad guys and gasps in surprise at each reveal or visual hat trick, clearly delighted. And, for the most part, the newly created visuals act to support what is happening in the original film, as opposed to competing with it. It is set dressing around a film, but it’s using a magical, digital set which does not have to obey the rules of physics, either.

Despite having seen the film multiple times, I felt like I was watching The Matrix again for the first time. I didn’t know that I wanted to watch films in this way until I got to watch a film in this way.

Morpheus knew, though.

After all, no one can be told what The Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.

— Kathryn Yu, Senior LA Reviewer & Executive Editor Emeritus

Riven, Marina Zurita and Acadia Barrengos
NYC: Brooklyn; $28.52-$39.19; through June 28

Riven is a docu-fictional play about waste pickers in Brazil, groups of low-wage workers who sort recycling material and thus provide the core infrastructure of much of sustainable consumption. Documentary-focused work always risks the danger of becoming too pedantic and moralistic, but Riven avoids that through a combination of smart writing, great performances, and a willingness to be weird.

Riven’s setting is part of the magic of the show. Sure We Can is a non-profit recycling center and community hub that is also a clearly designed gorgeous piece of industrial installation art, and that combination of infrastructural reality and whimsical creativity infuses the entire work. The story looks at two characters, Melina and Alessandra, who both work in the recycling plant as they chat during work hours and explore their histories and their relationship. Much of their conversation deals with the struggles the women have faced in migration, domestic abuse, and poverty, but the play also explores each of the worker’s beliefs about politics, spirituality, and justice as they argue about their jobs and life choices.

Two things make the play successful. The writing is smart and unexpected; the story swings between very naturalistic conversations about divorced parenting or timesheets or debts to very magically-real experiences of spirits and visions. The choice to bring spiritualism and magic into the play, embodied most strongly by dance moments of characters in full-body costumes of plastic bags or aluminum cans, keeps the story from becoming too didactic and introduces some ambiguity into the issue of the workers’ position in society. In addition, the two leads, Josanna Vaz as Melina and Dee Baesneal as Alessandra, have developed rich and complex characters that resist stereotypes or lazy romanticisation — they are just people with interests and flaws and problems who can tell us the story of this picker group without oversimplifying it.

Sure You Can is a complex and contradictory location, expressing hope and poverty and industrialization and art all at once. Riven’s strength is that it embodies all of those things too, presenting a story of an often-overlooked population while still preserving the ethical and artistic complexity that human lives deserve.

— Nicholas Fortugno, New York Correspondent

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