Immersive Review Rundown: Time Travel! Murder! Democracy!
Not necessarily in that order. Two in NYC, one in Toronto. (THREE REVIEWS)
This week it’s two quick trips to the past, including what sounds like a structurally fun time travel conceit in Toronto, and one trip to the future.
Why no one wants to hang around the present beats me!
Let’s get to it!
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.
Are you a creator who looks upon these reviews with envy? Okay, the positive ones, at least? Then you might want to check out our UPDATED How To Get Covered By NoPro guide.
Want to get listed in our newsletter and have your event shared with our social media following? Submit a listing to Everything Immersive.
Dirt — Sour Milk
$35, NYC, Run Concluded
Democracy is messy in a quite literal way in this silly look at urban planning. Dirt premises that the East River has hardened into usable land and asks the audience to decide what development the city should do on this new property. Attendees use an app to vote from a selection of options and then the cast members create the thing the audience voted for on a very DIY model of the river using cookies, crudité, and frosting. Every few votes, a mayor is elected by the audience and gets some control over how the development goes.
The show works pretty well at this ridiculous level. The performers do a very good job at keeping the energy up and getting the audience involved and the arts-and-crafts aesthetic of the city model works better than you expect, leading to quite funny child-like takes on airports and parks. I’m not a fan of voting mechanics normally — I don’t feel agency when I’m an anonymous member of a mob — but given that this is a model for democratic decision-making, it’s appropriately on theme to see your candidate lose or your policy go unsupported.
Where Dirt didn’t work was the context. There was no system of a city in the show, so the decisions we made as an audience had no consequences. Cities can’t just decide to build farmer’s markets and schools all the time; there are economic and environmental and infrastructural consequences to what they build. But since there’s no reality to the city here, all the decisions we make as an audience are either a whim or a joke. There are successes and failures that happen during the show as a result of our choices, but there’s no logic we can apply to understand them, so everything feels arbitrary and pointless. Sour Milk tries to conclude with a vote to either save our new community or re-sink it, but it’s not consequential because there was no reason why we choose to do anything at all.
Dirt is an interesting combination of elements that works better than I expected. I can’t say it succeeded though. A commentary on democracy needs the actual consequences of democracy to have any power. But I’ll give Sour Milk credit for making an energetic show out of voting and graham crackers, even if it didn’t hit the critical notes it could have.
Get No Proscenium’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
SubscribeSubscribe
— Nicholas Fortugno, New York Correspondent
Many Happy Returns
$49 CAD; Toronto, Canada; Until September 25
It’s New Year’s Eve in the 1920s, and a group of time travelers have been sent back exactly ten minutes before midnight to retrieve ten special artifacts from the party’s colorful cast characters — the bootlegger, the socialite, the bartender, and the evening’s host. The catch? Time travel is a tricky business, and we could only revisit this 10-minute interval five times before our temporal abilities wore thin. With each loop in time, we learned more about these “people of the past”, enriching our interactions with them as we navigated — and helped fulfill — their needs, wants, and desires.
The brilliance of Many Happy Returns lies in the many branches of the story, as well as the script and cast’s ability to improvise around audience interactions. Despite the short 10-minute loop, our actions and conversations within each iteration caused our experiences to differ significantly. Further, given that the audience changes each night, so too would the interactions the group uncovers. There are multiple ways of securing each of the artifacts, and the ways in which we gained each one felt well-earned.
In an age of immersive where elbows-out aggression is often thrown around in the sake of securing an elusive one-on-one, collaborating alongside the audience was a breath of fresh air. Given the time limit to our experience, teamwork was necessary to “win” the game, and there was a genuine sense of camaraderie as we unlocked pieces of the puzzle — especially as we entered our final time loop.
With its collaborative social puzzling, well-executed improvisation, and fitting setting at Toronto speakeasy A Toi, Many Happy Returns’ time travel themed immersive show is a time loop I’d happily experience over and over and over again.
— Katrina Lat, Toronto Curator
Murder in La La Land — Live In Theater
Brooklyn Art Haus; $75, through August 4th
Murder in La La Land promises to not be the “typical pun-laden murder mysteries of the past” and your correspondent can verify that claim. The show casts you as security on the set of Summit Pictures where a young writer has been found dead. Your job is to find the killer from the six suspects by interviewing them and using the evidence you find to make a case. In two hours, you and a handful of other guests talk to actors and try to piece together what happened to Sebastian Black.
Live In Theater normally does these events as online experiences in which audiences join Zoom rooms with live casts to conduct investigations from home. This is a rare in-person run of the show and it delivered on the promise. It’s very clear that Live In Theater has done this kind of interaction hundreds of times. I took the game seriously, trying to win over suspects and ferret out dirt, but one of my counterparts blustered through the whole show with crude jokes and non-sequiturs. None of the performers were thrown. In every encounter, the actors held the space and made sure equal attention was given to the group without losing the thread of the scene. It’s not a trivial thing to find the balance of how much the audience has to fight to get information, but I genuinely enjoyed questioning the staff of Summit Pictures and watching them try to manipulate us to their advantage. As promised, while there were plenty of jokes and hapless characters, nothing felt stupid or cheesy. The world was consistent and believable and it was fun to get to explore it.
I really appreciate the skill Live In Theater brought to this work. It doesn’t seem ambitious — make a 2-hour mystery where the audience gets to question actors and solve a mystery — but making that playable, flexible to kids and animals, and fun to do takes serious chops. Murder in La La Land brings it. Go see it live, or if you can’t, check out one of Live In Theater’s virtual shows. They are speaking truth. It’s not your normal murder mystery — it’s much more fun than that.
— Nicholas Fortugno, New York 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 Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and in the Facebook community also named Everything Immersive.