Immersive Review Rundown: The One With Secrets & Adventures

This week we’ve got a grab bag of theatre, improv, and projected art from the three biggest cities in the immersive cosmos: NYC, London, and LA.

Is there a thematic link? NOPE. And I tried. But some week’s it’s just a matter of: Hey! This is what’s on.

Hey! This is what’s on!

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Amplified — Rolling Stone
NYC: Manhattan; $39, booking through Aug 31

Amplified is a projection mapped documentary style exhibition of photo content from the magazine Rolling Stone. Over the course of about forty minutes, you are told a story of rock ‘n roll organized around a number of themes (freedom, cars, studio time) and then surrounded by pictures of musicians from the Rolling Stone photo archive. This experience is a mixed bag — while I found the content intriguing, the use of immersion here didn’t add anything of value.

What worked for me is the photography and video content. Rolling Stone clearly has a very deep well of material with musicians over the last sixty or so years, and the photos themselves are stunning in places. Seeing the breadth of that history by means of these images was genuinely interesting, and in particular a section on the cover photos of the magazine across the decades was a fascinating snapshot of popular attention and cultural conversation of the past. If Rolling Stone had made a gallery exhibit of this material, I would have loved it.

The issue was that they tried to force this into an immersive form. I’m not saying that there weren’t really nice moments of projection magic — there were sections where you were surrounded by flowers or saw fans with lighters all around you. But for the most part, it was just giant pictures on the walls coming and going faster than you had time to fully appreciate. The narrative frame stringing the content together was the roughest part. The chapters were thin ideas with short, vapid expositions narrated by Kevin Bacon, arguing about how much inspired or created cultural movements such as rebellion. There’s actually a whole section on hair which argues that until rock ‘n roll appeared, everyone had boring hair and then music made hair interesting. The power of the photos themselves is just cheapened by this facile wrapper.

Rolling Stone Magazine has been a cultural force because it takes a complex and nuanced approach to music and society. The great photography they have commissioned throughout that time is part of that legacy, a powerful snapshot of the movements and trends of our culture. An exhibition of that history is something very deserved, but Amplified is not the right form for that story.

— Nicholas Fortugno, New York Correspondent

Raiders of the Lost Adventure — Andrew Agress
NYC: Central Park; $39, through June 2

Silly is something I don’t get to see enough of in immersive, so I was very happy to see Raiders of the Lost Adventure embrace its farce. A parody of archeological adventure stories mapped on to a walking tour of Central Park, Raiders is a tight interactive comedy experience with just enough gameplay to keep you engaged throughout.

The basic plot is that the audience is part of an adventuring society exploring the park in search of a lost artifact. This of course is just a MacGuffin for some Indiana Jones/Tomb Raider style pulp and Raiders has that in spades. Several players are given roles and the group has to solve puzzles and find clues to keep the party moving. Along the way, secrets are revealed, betrayals take place, and danger must be faced. The whole thing takes about an hour and you get to wander around some less travelled parts of Central Park along the way.

What makes all of this work is that Agress and his cast, notably Becky Ho, are terrific comic improvisers. There’s a clear script they are following to move through the park, but for the entire piece they are talking directly to the audience as peers and punning off everything that’s said. It would be so easy for this piece to lag, but Agress and team keep everything moving with quick jokes and hints and sudden needs for movement such that you’ve never given a chance to get bored. Nothing here is very deep, but the piece is well aware of its source material and leans into all of the absurdity of adventuring archeologists with joyous stupidity.

This is not one of those immersive pieces that’s going to touch your soul or transform your life. It’s an extended joke about Indiana Jones that you get to play in. Immersive needs jokes like that, and my fedora is off to Agress and team for making a piece so focused on being so silly. Raiders is going to Edinburgh Fringe in August, so you can also catch it in Holyrood Park if that’s more your kind of adventure.

— Nicholas Fortugno, New York Correspondent

Secrets — Secrets Team
NYC: Manhattan; $50, run ended, returning Fall 2025

To make a successful immersive piece requires getting form, execution, and concept right all at once. Secrets is a show that nails two of those elements, but missing the third undermined what it got right.

The work is an immersive experience of eavesdropping on the drama of people around you. The show takes place in Dom Lounge, a slick venue of red lights and curtains, and you can get appropriately upscale cocktails as you wait for the action to start. The gimmick is that the show happens in the lounge around you as bartenders and tables get a spotlight and actors play out what are meant to be naturalistic moments. We follow a handful of characters — a couple meeting their parents with news, a server with hopes of a singing career, the brother of the bartender waiting on a date — and listen in on their private encounters and drama.

The execution of Secrets is very strong. Hitting spotlights on specific parts of a packed bar and getting the right mics on in a rapidly shifting show is not easy, and Secrets pulled that off without a hitch. The actors were also generally solid, particularly when they engaged with the audience. As they are playing servers and guests in the lounge, there are lots of opportunities for the performers to speak to the crowd and these moments (the bartender trying to pick up the people he’s serving, a date joking with strangers about finding drugs) were the strongest of the piece. You could see how this form had potential.

Unfortunately, the concept is where Secrets missed. The premise is you are going to witness private dramas you could diegetically overhear. But the writing of the work drops that ball entirely. The tone is scattered, with some scenes played as embarrassing jokes and others as serious betrayals. Many of them don’t ever resolve; they just stop when characters leave. It felt like the writer was trying to be naturalistic, presenting scenes you would actually overhear without polish, but these stories still need to have stakes and develop. I just couldn’t care about anything I saw. Nothing moved me or added up.

I really like the idea of Secrets and I want to see this team do something interesting with the structure, but there needs to be a more meaningful story with more compelling content if I’m going to eavesdrop again.

— Nicholas Fortugno, New York Correspondent

The Show of Many Things — Fables and Rumors
LA, Hollywood; Price: $0 with a suggested donation of $12 to Black LA Relief & Recovery Fund; June 21 & 22

If the title of this rollicking, charmingly makeshift production comes across as vague or cagey, it’s only because the merrymaking ensemble from Fables and Rumors finds out what the show is actually about at the same time as the audience– akin to a narratively driven improv jam session and tenuously structured even by the mildest of sandbox standards, The Show of Many Things is a lighthearted play date striving to lift our spirits and allow its audience to connect in a positive way just when we need it most.

The experience begins in a recognizably similar way to a standard improv show with a line of grinning, enthusiastic performers in matching, neutral clothes astride a bare stage, looking to the fates for inspiration. A genre is randomly selected from a deck of cards– we were dealt “Western” for our performance– and the audience was further asked to provide some words of wisdom to set the tone, with someone calling out “Love more!” That’s all they get. Or rather, all we get.

After a quick ransacking of a nearby costume rack, filled mostly with outfits better suited to other genres that remained in the deck, the cast sprang into a short, stagebound introductory scene where the basics were invented– setting, characters, a conflict or two, a culminating event to build towards, all thoroughly steeped in the Western tradition. Then, without warning, they turned their eyes to us, and suddenly we were in the town.

This kind of blank canvas LARP-lite can be intimidating even for more seasoned immersive goers, as ultimately the onus is placed on us to be the fuel for the story’s engine, but the cast was across the board adept at making even the most wide-eyed would be participants feel comfortable and empowered while respecting boundaries, with each impressionable character taking even the most benign suggestion and running with it with disarming, earnest silliness.

By the end, my audience was frothed up into a joyful fever pitch, and where there had been an empty room of strangers mere moments ago, suddenly the town was abuzz with neighbors contributing to their community, breathlessly pushing romantic couplings, doublecrosses, and haphazard heists; contradictory plotlines stacked on top of each other, but somehow, against all odds, the structure never collapsed. The cast performed their roles as narrative traffic cops with aplomb, and while there were of course moments when separate groups approached the same character at the same time hoping for diverging outcomes, each performer was able to juggle the balls– which occasionally means knowing when to drop one in a way that’s still entertaining.

For shows like this, success should be measured by the grin on your face as you walk to your car. That momentary levity that can come from tapping into a communal sense of play, conjuring a world out of thin air where the dasterdly bandit can sing, the corrupt deputy gets exposed, and the new sheriff has a heart of gold; where despite all the chaos and conflicting ideas, everything comes to a happy end as we all learn to “love more.” In this city, especially this month, you need moments like that. And with admission technically being free alongside a suggested donation to charities connected to LA wildfire relief, I think you’d actually be hard pressed to find a more refreshing yet impactful way to spend an hour this Fringe– one that celebrates the importance of community in all its forms. For a Show of Many Things, it never loses sight of the things that matters most.

— Chris Wollman, LA Correspondent

Storehouse — Sage and Jester
London; Tickets From £25.00 ; Runs through Sep. 20, 2025

There’s a stereotype in theatrical criticism that states that a critic who starts off a review by complimenting the physical aspects of a show, like the sets or the costumes, is being passive aggressive, or attempting to run down the acting talent. I would like to assure you that, when talking about Storehouse, I am not doing that, and I suspect that no other critics of the show will be doing that either. It’s just, well, the sets really are that good.

Sage and Jester have opened the doors to Storehouse with great fanfare and intrigue. Inhabiting an enormous warehouse near Greenwich, the journey to the show, which includes a long wander up a twinkle-light-bedecked path in an overgrown field, helps set the stage that you are going to be Somewhere Else. And boy are you!

The show’s premise is that you, and your fellow audience members, are to be inducted as trustees of Storehouse, a mysterious, subterranean vault of physical copies of all the digital information produced since the invention of the internet. As new trustees, you’ll take an oath, and be given a tour of Storehouse’s facilities, guided by various employees. But something seems to be going amiss among the stacks of code and origami “tweets.” Dare you dig deeper?

Now, about those sets. The show takes full advantage of the enormous space, with an alarmingly convincing waiting room where you’re served “liminal tea,” to a luminous cavern dominated by possibly-sentient fungus. There are nests of twigs and scraps of paper, mysterious lanterns, and an ominous fountain. You could, frankly, have a very fine evening all on your own, exploring.

That would be a mistake, though. Storehouse’s cast brings humor, charm, and depth to roles that would otherwise run the risk of being preachy or one-dimensional. As semi-immortal library science professionals, they all have backstories and subtly-defined relationships with each other, despite a late-game anticlimax.

The show bills itself as an exploration of digital media, but I didn’t see it that way. Storehouse is at its best when it’s a celebration of the physical world — of lighting a lantern, wandering down a corridor, and bandying around a philosophical question with a group of strangers. In trying to make us think about what the digital world does to our lives, Storehouse ends up reminding us how much fun “IRL” can still be.

–Ellery Weil, London Correspondent

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