NoPro’s Best Shows & Experiences of 2024

The end of the year means end of the year lists from reviewers across the worlds of art & entertainment.

Immersive is no different, except that we DO manage to do things a little differently. We’ve already revealed the Review Crew’s Best Moments of 2024, and now here comes the Best Shows & Experiences. Let’s get straight into it.

NoPro’s End of 2024 Coverage

Previously: NoPro’s Best Immersive Moments of 2023
Previously: 2024 Journalist Round-Up — London Edition
Now: Best Shows & Experiences of 2024

Coming Next Week: 2024 End-of-Year Pod

Katrina Lat — Toronto Curator

Key of Dreams — Lemon Difficult

Last winter, the algorithm started sending me ads for an experience called The Key of Dreams. “This looks incredible,” I thought to myself, “but when am I ever going to end up in Wales?” Fast forward a few months later, and I found myself arriving at a 17th century Jacobean manor on a Welsh sheep farm. Over the course of 24 hours, I joined two secret societies, purified the spirit of an ancient beast, witnessed No Proscenium NY correspondent Nicholas Fortugno get ritually sacrificed, and released an Eldritch god. There were puzzles, secret passageways, lavish feasts, hidden artifacts, and plenty of meaningful 1-on-1 character interactions. For 24 hours, I didn’t just experience theatre, I lived theatre.

The Perfect Bite — Secret City

Dinner theatre is a familiar concept, but what differentiated Secret City’s Knives Out themed experience wasn’t just how it leveraged the popular Netflix IP, but the extent to which the food was integrated into the overall experience. The four course meal existed not just as the dinner half to the “dinner and a show” trope, but as a central narrative tool and key element to each puzzle. This was my favourite immersive experience in Toronto this year.

Phish @ the Sphere

Back in January, I had the chance to see Postcards From Earth at The Sphere and was deeply impressed by the space. However, that taste test didn’t come close to mentally preparing me for the experience of seeing a full-blown live concert at the venue. The scale of the space is incredible, and the visuals for Phish’s performance at The Sphere were especially remarkable considering the band’s improvisational nature and tendency to play a completely different setlist at every show. Whereas the visuals for U2’s 40 performances at The Sphere were identical each night, Moment Factory created new technology that could flexibly adapt to the dynamic nature of each different show in Phish four-show residency. This was an auditory, visual, and technological spectacle.

Danielle Riha — Denver Curator

Breathing Healing into the Banks of Sand Creek — Cinnamon Kills First & Control Group Productions

My favorite use of immersive storytelling is as a fun escape from the terrors of our real world, not leaning into them. Using it as a tool to explore historical events has never resonated with me because my role isn’t usually central to the story and interactivity often takes a backseat; it’s the performative equivalent of sitting in a history classroom, which I find boring and uninspiring. This year, however, Control Group Productions changed all that with their brilliant approach to tackling one of Colorado’s darkest historical moments: The Sand Creek Massacre.

Created in collaboration with Cinnamon Kills First, a direct descendent of Sand Creek Massacre survivors, this show was designed as a way to help white people reckon with the atrocities of their ancestors. This was accomplished through a series of stops at five different locations in the Denver metro area that played a significant role in the course of events leading up to, and following, the brutal Sand Creek Massacre. At each site, we listened to monologues, watched or participated in reenactments and yes, even played a few games.

What made this show different from any other historical immersive show I’ve ever witnessed — what made this feel like more than just an outdoor history lesson — was the inclusion of place and the significant role it played in the show. Standing upon the same (stolen) ground that the characters in the story once did, it was impossible not to feel the gravity and weight of what happened at each location.

The casting of audience members as our ancestors — as the Colorado soldiers who murdered 200 Indians at Sand Creek — made this experience resonate in ways I couldn’t have predicted. As I grappled with the dissonance of being asked to hate an entire race for no good reason, and then to celebrate our “success” after the attack, it made me reflect on the vignettes with more pain and awareness than if I’d been an insignificant, passive viewer.

Somatic meditation recordings by Cinnamon Kills First were played on the bus rides between locations, guiding us through prompts about the tough truths we were learning and how it made us feel in response. As Kills First told us in one of the meditations, “We are not our ancestors, but we inherit their trauma. It’s our job in the present to heal [because] our descendents deserve a healthier world.”

This was a vastly different experience than most immersive works I’ve seen, and the goal of the production was lofty. As was often repeated during the show, “you’ve got to feel it, to heal it,” and to really feel it, you needed to face it — not just what happened, but how we got there, how we dealt with it, and the impact it would have for generations to come.

SEANCE/COMA/FLIGHT — Darkfield

Darkfield was an interesting experiment in suspending disbelief that leveraged the power of the mind to fill in unseen details and heighten other senses when deprived of sight. As a diehard horror fan, I was elated to learn that my city would be the North American premiere of the TikTok-famous show that takes place inside a shipping container, entirely in the dark.

Each of the three different experiences started as soon as the doors were thrown open to reveal the set inside. Though the show hadn’t technically begun, the minutes spent loading all participants into the container allowed ample time to look around and build memories of the space that would soon be drenched in darkness.

With the lights out and our headphones on, 3D audio was the star of the show, throwing voices and footsteps to give the effect of a person moving around the room when in fact there was no live actor in any of the three experiences. But the special effects didn’t stop there. In Seance, expertly placed pneumatics created perfectly timed vibrations on a table that had me convinced a person was pacing up and down it. In Flight, when the pilot told us we were pushing off to taxi down the runway, I heard and felt the jet engines fire up, then sensed the faux cabin move ever so slightly.

I enjoyed these experiences because I like horror, but Darkfield also brought me so much joy because of what it symbolized: that there is a year-round appetite for dark entertainment (literally and figuratively) and that you can make it appealing to the general public, even in the dead of summer (as long as the AC is working inside the shipping containers 😏).

Chinatown an Erasure — Kai Lin & Kyle Albasi

Much like Breathing Healing Into the Banks of Sand Creek — another look into the shameful past of Colorado’s white ancestors — this roaming, site-specific show led participants, on foot, to six different locations in downtown Denver with historical significance in the story of the anti-Chinese riot that decimated the city’s Chinatown on October 31, 1880.

This show stood out for its ambitious deployment of technology and (again, like Breathing Healing) for its use of place to enhance the relevance of the story. At multiple stops throughout the experience, we used our phones to interact with augmented reality overlays that helped us imagine what the streets of Denver looked like in the late 1800’s. As we watched enactments at significant spots like Hop Alley and Mattie Silks’ brothel, I felt more connected to this story of my city… and more responsibility to preserve it by sharing it.

By default, the audience had no agency in the story, because we were witnessing a recounting of real, historical events. Still, the repeated opportunity to engage in these spaces with both the augmented reality and the other spectators in my group was unique. Layer in the raw chaos of the roaming, uncontrolled environment and suddenly, you have brought to life a significant but often overlooked piece of Denver’s history.

For the show’s climax, we were onlookers as a Chinese man named Look Young (played by the show’s co-creator Kai Lin) fought for his life moments before he would be hanged.

In the final moments of the show, Look Young broke into a fist fight with a man attacking him. The brawl slowly moved away from the building where the audience was gathered and towards the street corner. When the light turned red and traffic had stopped, their scuffle spilled into the crosswalk and they continued to fight all the way to the other side of the block.

While this was happening, the audience slowly creeped in their direction, stopping before entering the street ourselves. From there on the other side of the block, as the light turned green and traffic began to flow, we could see that Look Young had been hung by the long braid that fell down his back, which was wrapped around the crosswalk pole, leaving him to sway by his hair, murdered in cold blood.

I had never seen a stunt like this before — using a crosswalk with stopped traffic as a 30 second performance space — so when it happened, I was truly surprised at what my eyes were seeing. (Imagine if you were in one of those cars stopped at the light!) And when the light turned green and the traffic resumed, the small glimpses I got between passing cars of Look Young hanging by his hair felt like clips edited out of a movie made available for real life viewing. The entire scene was poetic, beautiful, and completely unexpected — certainly my most memorable moment of 2024.

Nicholas Fortugno, NYC Correspondent

ha ha ha ha ha ha ha — Julia Masli

Julia Masli is an amazing clown and in her interactive show ha ha ha ha ha ha ha she pushes the limits of what audience participation can be. Loosely themed around the idea of solving problems, Masli guides the random input of the random viewers into a hilarious and occasionally shockingly poignant set of gags and set-ups. Over the course of an hour, you may leave the theater, take a shower, build furniture, crowdsurf the audience, or do something else crazy I didn’t see in my experience. You simply do not know where Masli will take it.

What makes the show work is the way Masli masterfully commands risk and control. Masli establishes herself as the captain of the ship at the start and then surgically guides it into a brilliant chaos, both very funny and quite scary at times. You are constantly on edge that the show will go too far or the audience will get truly crazy, but then there’s a prop that was on the stage the whole time or a reveal Masli makes at the right moment and you realize she’s been on top of the madness the whole time. You can’t do anything but sit in awe of such a skillful performance. Masli has made a unique circus that has to be seen to be believed.

The Manikins — Deadweight

Being meta in art is hard. Do it badly and you make things that are pretentious and affected and hollow. But do it right and you blow the form open, and that’s what The Manikins accomplished. The most ambitious show I saw this year, The Manikins dives headfirst into a deep question about what it means to interact in a show and pulls it in a delightful horror direction with nothing more than a couple of actors and a simple, unadorned set. Tightly written and masterfully performed, The Manikins is a model for small-scale immersive work.

To say more about the content is to ruin the show, but it’s a one-on-one piece where you constantly interact with the performers and everything about the work revolves around those relationships. The choice of horror was great; the entire piece has a beautiful scene of surreality that is pitch perfect to the theme. And when the horror lands, it punches. I will admit my heart goes most strongly to the scrappy, focused experiments in immersive work, but I have never seen an expression this tight about a theme that could have been so clunky and off-pitch in the wrong hands. The Manikins is a tightrope walk and you’ll marvel that they walk such a high wire so effortlessly.

Plastic Bag Store — Robin Frohart

2024 was the first year I’ve seen immersive really effectively built into larger multimedia experiences. The strongest example of this was Robin Frohart’s The Plastic Bag Store. A silly and surreal meditation on plastic and what we can (and can’t) pass on to future generations, Frohart combines installation art, film making, and immersive performance into an hour-long riff on plastic that makes you laugh while clearly having the sophistication to deserve its home at the warehouse museum MASS MoCA.

From the beautifully over-the-top bodega of plastic meats and cheeses to the alternate history documentary about the real purpose of Roman vases to the reveal of an arctic cave made of transparent bags, Frohart’s execution of the set and content was rigorous and polished. And most importantly, the immersive elements were as much a part of the piece as the film. The theme was infused in the set and the time you spent looking at the products of the museum or the “pieces” of the museum of the future were as critical to the idea of Frohart’s work as the story she told us. I can’t imagine how many people are now thinking about museums differently because they wandered into this wacky piece. Let’s hope 2025 brings immersive into more spaces and more fusions this skillfully.

Honorable Mention

Winter’s Walk — Linked Dance Theatre

A small one-on-one piece by the immersive innovators Linked Dance Theatre, Winter’s Walk has you go for a short stroll in Central Park with your friend, Win, as she considers whether she should leave New York City for good. This premise takes you into a meditation of growth and endings including locative dances, conversation, and collaborative storytelling. Linked Dance Theatre has executed that theme in a quietly profound way.

What works best about this piece is that it knows its scale and executes on it. The dances are short and unannounced, just expressions of emotion tied to the paths and lakes you pass. Rita McCain and Kellyn Mylechreest do a terrific job as performers, staying present with you in conversation and keeping things from becoming too vague and empty. As a lifelong New Yorker, I found myself in a touchingly familiar situation, genuinely helping someone figure out whether to end a relationship with my favorite place on earth. That scenario has always had a beautiful poignancy to it, and I applaud Linked Dance Theatre for making a tight piece of work that captures that experience so powerfully.

Martin Gimenez — Vegas Beat/Reviewer at Large

My 2024 has been all over the map, literally… In addition to various shows I’ve been able to review for NoPro in Las Vegas, I also took a pretty large vacation centered around the Olympics in Paris, where I was able to take in a few immersive experiences on that side of the pond. All in all, this has been a banner year for immersive art and these are my standouts…

Viola’s Room — Punchdrunk

The first tracked Punchdrunk show that I’ve ever seen did not disappoint… Helena Bonham Carter’s voice in our headphones drawing us through a performer-less, teenage dreamscape steeped in magic and wonder. With it’s smaller groups, there wasn’t the huddling around a single performer that some of their larger scale works create, allowing for all to take in all that was presented in front of you… Even if it was a little rushed at moments. But all in all, this mode will allow for even more economically sustainable shows from the OG masters of the immersive realm, and we can only hope that they can figure out how to bring such a show to our American shores.

Immersive on the Strip

After immersive experiences blasted into Las Vegas with Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart and everything at Area 15, it was only a matter of time before someone would try to bring immersive closer to the tourists on the Strip… And this year, we had two performance setting up shop. Down at Luxor, Particle Ink took over the old wedding chapel turning it into The House of Shattered Prisms, bringing its unique blend of projection mapping, interactivity, and circus arts to the masses. Up at the Linq, Speigelworld has opened up Discoshow, a ninety minute interactive dance floor experience that provides a history of disco where even the squares with two left feet can get a groove on!

Olympic Fun

While many of us watch the Olympics on TV, there is so much more to the experience if you happen to be in the host city. In addition to the amazing site responsive Opening Ceremonies along the Seine (and the Paralympic Opening Ceremony at the Place de la Concorde), there are so many team houses and other activations throughout the city where nations (and brands) can form their narrative in fun and interactive ways. I personally spent three days exploring some of these activations, and can tell all of you in my LA immersive community… Get ready, 2028 is gonna be lit for us!

Kathryn Yu, Senior LA Reviewer

The Ladder — Hatch Escapes

The Ladder is kind of like someone took a branching narrative video game with multiple endings and mashed it up with an escape room. But also there’s a bunch of mini games. And there’s a team goal to earn as much money as you can in the time allotted by playing the easy to learn but often hard to master mini games. But it’s still an escape room, kind of. And it’s replayable. Oh, and the story changes depending upon if you solve the puzzles or not. Got it?

The Ladder lacks a lot of features that people normally associate with escape rooms… and that’s a good thing! You can’t really lose at The Ladder. You are not locked in. You get propelled forward through time from the 1950s through the 1990s regardless of whether you solve all the puzzles or not. Your team chooses an avatar and you collectively get to make choices along the way that affect the story about your avatar’s rise within a corrupt vitamin company in Nebraska, narrative beats which get communicated via cut scenes between rooms. Do you get married and start a family or become a cat lady? Do you make ethical choices, unethical choices, or double-crossing choices? And the choices available to your team also depend upon how well you did in each decade and there are aspects of the game that only get unlocked on subsequent playthroughs.

Did I mention that The Ladder is both fun and extremely, extremely ambitious? And what I haven’t mentioned is that the writing is hilariously on point (your nemesis in the game is named Stab Backner and is played in the cut scene videos by Jordan Belfi of Entourage fame) as is the theming (the 1950s room is built entirely in black and white, for example). In fact, the puzzles and environments and story beats in The Ladder are all intertwined and correspond to the decade and rungs of the corporate ladder for your character, evolving as they climb from the mailroom to the switchboard and eventually to computerized consoles.

Hatch Escapes have created a really wonderful, replayable interactive experience. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. And I can’t wait to go back.

The Bureau of Nooks and Crannies — Andy Crocker

Immersive creator Andy Crocker (whose credits include Ghost Town Alive!, Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser, Escape From Godot, 40 Watts From Nowhere, and more) has created six playful, memorable interactive experience kits and two contemplative audio walks as part of a residency with the Los Angeles Public Library. Immersive? In a library? Yes, it’s true.

These self-directed experience kits, with their pieces nestled in neat wooden boxes, are scattered around Los Angeles at various library branches, including Atwater Village, Vernon, Baldwin Hills, Chatsworth, Lincoln Heights, and Pacoima. One of the soundwalks can be done at any of the library’s 72 branches while there’s a special audio walk designed specifically for the grandeur of the Central Library branch located Downtown. Together, they collectively form the Bureau of Nooks and Crannies. All you need is some spare time, a willingness to listen (no, really listen), and your library card.

If you’re an adult who hasn’t stepped foot in a library since, well, your college days, you are in for a real treat as Crocker’s directives may take you to corners and sections you forgot existed in the stacks. I often giggled (quietly) to myself as I studied my next instruction in the box or wrote down a note in response to a prompt or headed off to a completely different section of the library, tip-toeing among the other patrons who were blissfully unaware of my activities. I also gasped (again, quietly) when I stumbled upon something beautiful hidden in plain sight.

Each Bureau of Nooks and Crannies experience kit is different but taken as a whole I found some recurring themes among them: making unexpected connections, answering unanswerable questions, performing personal rituals in public, sending messages in proverbial bottles, and letting myself be surprised when I least expected it. The Bureau is truly special and I hope many more people get to stumble upon it, perhaps after seeing another patron check one out and asking the librarian, “What’s that?” And as of this writing, they’re still available, completely for free, through mid-August 2025.

SEEK — Nancy Baker Cahill

While Cosm’s bread and butter may lie in their live broadcasts of sporting events night after night, my first exposure to the dome was through its arts & entertainment programming, namely the stunning SEEK by Nancy Baker Cahill.

Like the title implies, the artist wants to compel viewers to look more deeply, to pay attention, and to focus on the details. Attendees are transported through a series of highly detailed, abstract landscapes: water, sand and wind, fire, and forest. The gorgeous visuals in 12+K and their all-consuming nature are reminiscent of being inside of virtual reality as the room appears to spin while the camera pans.

Interestingly enough, the editing is also where SEEK really shines. It may not be obvious at first that editing for a film to be shown in a dome is quite different from your typical screen setup. In the wrong hands, the audience can become overwhelmed, disoriented, or fatigued, similar to what happens when an experience messes with the player’s camera in VR. But SEEK, I felt lulled into a false sense of security, hypnotized by these beautiful images which then turned dark and disturbing at just the right moment.

Viewers of SEEK are taken on an emotional journey by Cahill and her team, and explore a powerful message about ecological sustainability at the same time, all without feeling lectured at or hit over the head, which is no small feat. Bravo.

Honorable mentions: Ghost Town Alive! 2024 at Knott’s Berry Farm; FIELD by Chromasonic

Kevin Gossett, LA Reviews Editor

Life And Trust — Emursive

Since attending a few times in September, Life And Trust is the immersive show I’ve thought most about this year. It’s fun, it’s exciting, and while easy to compare to Sleep No More, is most definitely its own thing.

While there is a “main narrative” to the show, the stories it tells are all connected through the idea of the influence of money, power, and the people propped up or constrained by those concepts during New York’s Gilded Age. Those are timely themes, and, I suspect, why the show has stuck with me.

Those themes are delivered through a shockingly large amount of stories present in Life And Trust, where each character has a full arc. There’s an added benefit here of making it easier to have a complete experience even for those not familiar with the show. (Check out my best moment for more thoughts on this one!)

On top of that, the space is just very cool. Built into an old bank in the New York’s Financial District that offers unique spaces, along with some huge and incredible sets. Add in a few new twists, including public 1:1s, and well, you’ve got a great new show that scratches a specific immersive itch.

The Ladder — Hatch Escapes

The Ladder is an experience that knows exactly what it wants to be for its audience: a machine that generates fun scenarios for everyone playing.

It’s something of a hybrid that offers games, puzzles, and choose-your-own adventure storytelling as your group tries to climb the corporate ladder over a series of decades. Those are what make up The Ladder, but it’s a sense of play that really makes the whole thing sing. Each room is infused with opportunities to get the whole group playing with and off each other as they try to accomplish their goals.

I’ve talked ad nauseum about how I’m drawn to intentionality in immersive experiences, but this is yet another case where a specific goal and smart design choices combine to make something unique that just plain works. Plus, it’s a total blast to play.

Creep LA: Ghosts — JFI Productions

I’ve written a lot about Creep LA over the years, so my feelings are, uh, well documented. But, suffice to say, any spooky season where we get some Creep is a good spooky season. This year offered a very impressive location along with classic Creep vibes, along with a few fun gags. Just a great, spooky show to cap off Halloween.

Noah Nelson — Founder & Publisher

Apple Avenue Detective Agency — Mister & Mischief

The duo of Mister & Mischief — the husband and wife duo of Jeff & Andy Crocker — have proven to have a a knack for taking true tales and using the immersive toolkit to open those stories up to audiences so that they can connect with them in an emotional way.

Apple Avenue Detective Agency draws on experiences in Andy’s own life, and the tropes of kid detective stories, to create a playful afternoon that captures a snapshot of childhood and then uses more traditional theatre tools to re-contextualize the whole affair.

In doing so the work becomes a kind of livable memory play, that layers nostalgic memories with the perspective only achievable when we look back and process what was really going on.

The Ladder — Hatch Escapes

I don’t get to see my people enough anymore, and so to get a chance to do that while zipping through the decades of the 20th Century in a stylized simulacrum of the corporate rat race, was an absolute joy.

Hatch Escapes’ The Ladder is a long-gestating big swing of a piece in Los Angeles. Last I checked it’s still got a few pieces coming online. A game that melds elements of “challenge arcade” and “escape room” into the same footprint and dares you to come back and uncover what you didn’t on your first playthrough.

Most importantly: it’s freaking fun. I completely locked in on multiple mini-games throughout the five main rooms of The Ladder, all without losing a sense of the story that my brilliant team was solving while I hyperfocused on remixed versions of classic games given medium specific twists.

In other words: I loved it. It was much better than Cats. I’m going to play it again and again.

The Morrison Game Factory — Lauren Bello & PostCurious

While I played this in 2023, Morrison was published this year, and thus it makes it into my list for 2024.

A delicately constructed story is nestled inside this box of half-formed board games, with a conceit that draws them all together and gives the sense that you’ve been shipped something from an alternate universe where the laws of reality are maybe not exactly like our own.

I’m the kind of immersonaut who is always looking for “the thing itself”: the element or moment when a piece of art stops being the signifier and becomes the signified. It’s what I chased when I was an actor, and it’s what I look for in everything I read, play, watch, and listen to. Most of the time I have to settle for less, but not so here.

I didn’t think a game about games could bring me to the verge of tears, and yet here I was, playing the role of the living link in an impossible story at my dining table. While there are more challenging “puzzle boxes” and ones with even shiner production values, I doubt there’s one with a bigger heart.

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

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