Review Rundown: Lights, Camera, DREAM!

This week’s batch of reviews are EXCITING. There’s even a BROADWAY SHOW. (That would be Sunset Blvd., for the record.)

We’ve got an awesome-sounding interactive experience in Berkeley, a Seattle show that the reviewer instantly started texting me about the moment they got out of it, and a lovely bit of site-specific dance to boot.

Plus a capsule from our latest feature review.

Let’s get into it.

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Batman: Arkham Shadow — Camouflaj & Oculus Studios
$49.99; Quest 3/3s; Availible Now

The team at Camouflaj didn’t exactly call an easy shot.

Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham Asylum set a new standard for superhero action games in 2009 and put in motion a series that has seen highs and lows, confounding both other development studios and even the originators as they’ve sought to expand on the promise of the first game, which captured all the things that make Batman a phase that millions of kids go through and many never leave.

In 2024 here comes Camouflaj, looking to take everything that works about about those games and translate that into virtual reality.

I’m here to tell you they freakin’ did it.

— Noah Nelson, Publisher in the preamble to his Feature Review

Dreamspace — Enemies of Time
From $60 — $100; Berkeley, California; Run Concluded

Last weekend was an immersive first for me — I’ve never been “tucked in” to a show until I went to Dreamspace. I sat on a canopy-bed airlock as a sleepy induction carried me off to a trade show conference ostensibly held in a shared dream. Over the next three hours, I explored a steadily unraveling fiasco until, by the end, we all broke out of the dream through the building’s windows and down ladders. Enemies of Time’s first ever public show was like something out of a fever dream — an exploratory, story-rich fever dream.

Dreamspace is the newest “venture” from a satirical tech company called Somna, the “first and only company to extract and bottle dreams, eliminating your dependency on sleep, while creating a potential new income stream for those willing to dream.” At first, I thought the show would be exploring the conference, but every half hour or so, I discovered a new layer to thicken the plot.

Explorers had three full floors of exhibition booths to peruse, from a science lab to a retail company selling whimsical products for people to stay fit while sleeping. Interactive experiences invited attendees to improvisionationally act out dreams “ordered” by investors. Through it all, the main stage hosted lightning talks explaining the intricacies of “dreamware.” I’m personally a fan of quests and puzzles, and I got both. Early on, I broke into the security office and uncovered evidence of Somna’s nefariousness. Later, I also helped solve a group puzzle to operate the control panel that helped everyone escape the dream, after a climactic confrontation between Somna executives and conference attendees.

The ending was as surprising as it was genius, blending game mechanics and narrative storytelling. Dreamspace gathered an impressive array of talent all into one place. They quickly sold out their first shows, added an extra show to accommodate the extra demand, and sold that one out too.

It’s hard to believe this was Enemies of Time’s (Karen Casteletti, Lyra Levin, Michael Feldman) first public show. I can’t want to see what they dream up next.

— Corinna Kester, Correspondent At Large

Red Delicious — Thistle Dance Inc
$22–75; NYC; until December 11th

One thing that I’m always impressed by is how well immersive shows can use quite limited spaces. An exemplar of this is Thistle Dance Inc, who create intimate dance performances for small audiences in unorthodox locations. Their latest, Red Delicious at Alédaïde Salon, is a terrific opportunity to see how they shine.

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Red Delicious is a three-act dance meditation on the apple as a symbol of temptation, seduction, and eye-opening transformation. Each scene explores one myth (Paris and the Apple of Discord, Adam and Eve, and Snow White) where an apple plays a key role. The show explores how the apple serves as a catalyst for the characters in the story. But Thistle isn’t engaged in the normal moralism of the fallen woman trope. Temptation here isn’t sinful — it’s enticing, freeing, and empowering. Each fable reframes the apple as a door to discovery and exploration for the protagonist. It isn’t totally safe or stable, but it’s always exhilarating and new.

Where Thistle shines is the dance itself. The show takes place in a tiny speak-easy, but it never feels cramped or unsafe. Dancers interact naturally with the audience and although your actual input is light (you vote at one point), you never feel far from the action physically or intellectually. The choreography of Thistle’s work leans into narrative — it’s beautiful and skillful and it connects to the story in a clear way so the dance remains comprehensible. I wish Thistle had trusted the choreography even more — there is spoken narration at points that I don’t think was needed and detracts from the performance, but this thankfully lessens as the show goes on. But when the dancers carry the story, the combination of incredible performances, striking costumes, and seductive choreography can be stunning.

Given the giants of immersive, notably the one closing soon, it’s easy to think that immersive dance needs giant sets and casts of dozens, but Thistle Dance is yet another company showing us the form’s broad potential, making it work at small scales with refreshing themes and choreography. So take a bite out of this apple. I know it’s tempting, and why should that be a bad thing?

— Nicholas Fortugno, New York Correspondent

The Stupidest, Scariest Time — Swim Pony
$40; Seattle; through Nov. 9

Swim Pony’s The Stupidest, Scariest Time (TSST) bills itself as a fully participatory experience and it means it.

TSST brings players through a camp-forward productivity workshop that manages to culminate in a meaningful discussion about what really matters in life — or at least it did in the first night of previews. An interesting piece of work, the show successfully engages participants no matter how seriously they’re taking the exercises.

TSST could have easily turned into a nothing burger about the cult of productivity as told through a series of “workshops” hosted by characters straight out of your direct-selling nightmares, surrounded by a secondary story line rooted deep in the ocean and a glossy layer of death. Instead, Adrienne Mackey, Swim Pony founder and artistic director, manages to pull the thread, creating a meaningful experience out of scenes that at times feel like non-sequiturs. Participants were actually honest in their answers during the sessions and earnestly engaged throughout the show, wondering aloud at my table if their “goals” were big enough to try to achieve.

Maybe this was the benefit of a preview night, or maybe Seattle is just open to sharing their deepest thoughts with strangers. Either way, the depth of audience participation I witnessed is the highest compliment I can give the entire Swim Pony team.

Be warned if you go: preview night ran long (run time is already 100 minutes) and there are some moments that feel out of place. That said, Swim Pony’s The Stupidest, Scariest Time is worth seeing if you’re in Seattle, no matter how deep you want to go.

— Rachel Stoll, Seattle Correspondent

Sunset Blvd. — Directed by Jamie Lloyd at St. James Theatre
Tickets starting at $56; NYC; Through July 2025

Jamie Lloyd’s Sunset Blvd. is an innovative, bold, and at times, as I will argue, immersive take on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s classic.

If this was a typical theatrical review, I’d spend much of this piece belaboring Nicole Scherzinger’s enthralling performance as Norma Despond. Or how Tom Francis’s portrayal of the fresh-faced writer Joe Gills met hers in stride. Or even how the hyper minimalist set design presents a compellingly damning view of an insubstantial Hollywood.

But I won’t. Because this is No Proscenium, and we focus on things that are anything but typical theatre reviews.

So instead, I’ll write about Sunset Blvd.’s technological innovations and jaw-dropping Act II opening number, which quite literally took the work off the proscenium.

Throughout the production Lloyd heavily features a crew of cinematographers who film the characters and project their melodramatic close ups in real-time onto massive floating screens above the stage. These black-and-white projections offer another way to enjoy the show cinematographically through a modern take on Old Hollywood that can only be described as the Digital Noir.

While Lloyd isn’t the first director to experiment with projecting footage live and while a screen is by no means inherently immersive, these projections do add nuance to the audience experience. Watching Scherzinger’s close-ups, we become both non-diegetic audience members of Sunset Blvd. and diegetic audience members watching a Norma Desmond movie within the world of Sunset Blvd. We are both watching the show and in the show.

But beyond the conceptual role of the audience aided by this tech, Sunset Blvd. extends into the immersive space at the start of Act II with an impressive rendition of the show’s title song (spoiler alert). Using live-streaming videography, we follow Francis backstage and then ultimately out of the theater’s doors and into the streets of Times Square. There, he and a tight ensemble process through the New York City streets singing and dancing past tourists, rivaling marquees, and moving traffic — performed live every night.

There’s an absolute thrill of taking Broadway into the streets. Perhaps one day, instead of buying tickets to the show, I’ll just wait on 44th after intermission for a well-needed dose of site-specific theatre and Francis’ belting. But in the meantime, I’m content with musing on what it means to watch this immersive number from the comfort of my seat. Maybe in a show about the image and ego of Hollywood, it’s quite fitting to experience this uniquely immersive number mediated through the supremacy of the screen.

Probably the best compliment I can give Sunset Blvd., paraphrasing Andrew Lloyd Webber’s lyrics, is that I can only hope this stunning and ballsy production teaches future Broadway theatre makers how to dream.

— Alec Zbornak, NYC Correspondent

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