Review Rundown: Music, Dancing, Mysteries and More

This week No Proscenium is brought to you by SEE TICKETS, which has proudly supported thousands of clients across the globe in areas as diverse as historic attractions like Stonehenge, immersive theater like The Burnt City, and important cultural touchstones like LA Pride.

Hope you like reading, because this week the Crew was sufficiently impressed by the six experiences they tackled — from the Broadway musical production of Here Lies Love to the opening of Otherworld Philadelphia’s art playground — that they went long on pretty much every one.

A bumper crop of immersive for sure!

Looking for more? Last week’s Rundown featured five experiences, including some you can do right at home!

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Bang On A Can LOUD Weekend 2023 — Bang On A Can & MASS MoCA
$49 — $225; North Adams, Massachusetts; July 27–29

A scene unfolds with peculiar charm: frizzy-haired professors talk excitedly on a concrete stoop. They eat ice cream beneath a canopy of inverted trees. Inside, a young boy sits quietly in an auditorium, wholly absorbed in his sketchbook. His pencil slips and hits the floor, eliciting sympathetic smiles. A man passes out earplugs because “this next piece by Ensemble Klang is really very loud.” Composer Oscar Bettison’s mega-work O Death, leans hard on jaw harps, harmonicas, recorders, melodica, flower pots, and prepared wrenches. It is, in fact, loud.

This is LOUD Weekend 2023 at MASS MoCA, “a fully loaded, three-day, eclectic super-mix of creative, experimental and unusual music” that transforms the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art’s sprawling campus into a vibrant symphony of artistic exploration. Despite its name, the weekend is calm and not especially crowded. MASS MoCA was built in 1999 on the site of a defunct printworks factory before growing into one of America’s largest centers for contemporary visual and performing arts. This is a space that rewards curious exploration (more on that in a future review) and LOUD Weekend amplifies those rewards by peppering performances across the compound, encouraging attendees to stumble into delightfully strange, intimate performances tucked between looming sculptures from Louise Bourgeois, an indoor facsimile of a 1980s chalet, and the surreal light installations of James Turrel.

My favorite thing about LOUD Weekend is the amount of access it provides. Tickets to the festival include access to the museum and its exhibits. Performances run late, so the museum and its various bars, restaurants, and shops stay open well into the evening. Museum visitors mingle with festival-goers, enjoying ambient performances as they wander through galleries. As an attendee, you’re just as likely to snag a front-row seat to a show-stopping 50th-anniversary performance by The Kronos Quartet (complete with SIMON solos and cat videos) as you are to fall into a casual conversation with featured composers like Nicole Lizée. As one of the event’s younger attendees, I felt embraced by a community of kindred spirits who shared a passion for pushing the boundaries of expression. I did notice, though, that most attendees seemed to have backgrounds in composition and classical music. Where were my fellow immersives? For an event focused on creating moments of unique human experience, I have no idea how LOUD Weekend has flown under the immersive radar for so long.

— Leah Davis, New England Correspondent

CLUE: A Walking Mystery — Right Angle Entertainment, The Wild Optimists, and Hasbro
$35-$45; Chicago, IL, Currently Through September 4th

Inspired by the classic board game, CLUE: A Walking Mystery has one to five players exploring downtown Chicago to solve Boddy Black’s murder. Immediately after his death, Black’s entire estate was photographed and auctioned. The furniture bought by local Chicago businesses contain perfectly preserved elements pertaining to the murder. Upon receiving a detailed auction catalog book, players visit the businesses, inspecting furniture and solving puzzles to deduce who killed Black, with what, and in which room.

CLUE: A Walking Mystery is easily the most wonderfully fun experience I’ve done in a long time. Key to my enjoyment is The Wild Optimists’ fantastic puzzle design. All furniture contains traditional puzzles like cyphers or rebuses that novices will find challenging and experienced players will appreciate. But additionally embedded in the furniture is circumstantial evidence in many forms and sizes that players must be vigilant in discovering. This element makes the experience shine, as everything is in play, requiring a keen eye and critical thinking across and in conjunction with multiple locations. It creates a dynamic tone, deduction being equal, if not more important, to solving Black’s murder.

Paired with the puzzle design is how the experience expands gameplay. As a massive Clue fan, I thought I’d simply spend a few hours checking off items from a list. In examining evidence, sussing out possible motives is critical. This element’s inclusion adds much flavor and depth, especially in regards to identifying the culprit. For the first time ever, a game of Clue is an actual mystery requiring real detective work.

Yet, the VIPs of this experience are the performers. Several times players interact with Butlers, performers driving the story forward by conveying details and clues about Black’s murder. It’s their genuine interest and eagerness in ensuring players solve the case that ties this experience together. If two Butlers hadn’t allowed me to summarize the details of the case for five minutes, I wouldn’t have gotten it right on the first guess. For those few minutes, with the fleeting sunlight reflecting off the Chicago River, I was Hercule Poirot on the Nile about to name the killer.

But, for as much fun as I had, even my highly trained ability to suspend disbelief was occasionally shattered. A downtown hotel having a grandfather clock in its lobby? Makes perfect sense! A rope display case in a Blick Art Material store? Uh, wait, what? Oscillating between these extremes caused a noticeable mental whiplash. I was willing to forgive it, but couldn’t forget that it had occurred.

If audiences are willing to suspend their disbelief, CLUE: A Walking Mystery is an expertly designed expansive puzzle experience run by kind performers that guarantees every game ends with you, walking about town, having a delightfully fantastic time.

– Patrick B. McLean, Chicago Curator & Remote Experiences Editor

Here Lies Love — Broadway Theatre
$149+; NYC; Ongoing

Immersive theatre creators and lovers have long known and witnessed the unique power that immersive storytelling can bring to theatrical works. In recent years Broadway has begun to sit up and take notice too; works like Great Comet and KPop have taken inspiration from our immersive world, and tried to bring them to the great white way. Friends, I am happy to report that with Here Lies Love Broadway has taken the next big leap into the immersive scene.

The Broadway Theatre has been reimagined into “Club Millenium” in truly the most striking of ways; all of the seats of the orchestra have been entirely removed, and replaced with a bright and shining disco floor (David Korins Set Design). As I enter the club, I realize that I am standing (quite fittingly) on where the proscenium of the traditional stage should be. A giant disco ball takes the place of a fourth wall, and I am treated to the most unique Broadway musical I have seen in a long time.

Here Lies Love tells the true story of the rise to fame and notoriety of Imelda Marcos, the first lady of a dictatorial presidency. Told through the boppiest of bops, this is a delightfully memorable dance party, with music provided by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, it is easy to be whisked away into the frivolity of the space and the incredibly charismatic performances, by world-class Broadway performers. For the casual American audience, myself included, the historical story may be entirely new, and so to witness a small-town girl’s incredible but fateful meteoric rise has much weight attached to it.

Now of course the extent of the immersive interaction is fairly light in the grand scheme of our immersive theatre experiences; there are moments of brief interaction, but there is no audience agency or ability to alter the narrative. But for our older cousins of the theatre world, this is a huge step into the immersive sphere, and is a fascinating case study for what traditional theatre can utilize from our world. The actors walk around, and through the audience, interacting with them in such a way that a political candidate would; using us for publicity.

Hamilton is the all-American musical that changed the Broadway landscape forever, a celebration of history and culture. Here Lies Love is the all-Filipino musical that tells a story that is far too present and of a history that is still being written, told in a transformative immersive format for Broadway audiences. With this production I feel that we have entered into a new era of Broadway, one that proves that the qualities of immersive theatre can be well adapted and adopted for the traditional theatre going crowd. Impactful, thought-provoking, and an incredible experience, I had a blast at Club Millenium, and particularly for those interested in immersive theatre, would highly recommend getting on that dance floor as soon as you can.

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— Edward Mylechreest, NYC Correspondent (extract from full review to come)

The Now Building / Outernet
Free; London UK; ongoing

Just at the north edge of Soho there is an architectural revolution ongoing. Not only the reclaiming of Oxford Street from the tacky tourist candy shops, but the emergence of a rejuvenated entertainment district fit for the 2020s, and of the several new hubs rising up amongst the historic churches and preserved pubs one stands beaming above the rest.

The Now Building covers an entire city block, a mini-district unto its own right. Owned by Outernet, it sits on Oxford Street over Tottenham Court Road Underground station, one of the top five busiest corners in the city. Over 200,000 people emerge daily, blinking into the brilliant glow of Outernet’s building-sized screens: the exterior displays usually reserved for advertisements but the inner courtyard commanding the lion’s share of pedestrians’ attention.

Free wifi, community wardens, and scattered benches rest beneath an immense inner digital canvas: the ceiling and walls covered in a seamless screen which showcases expansive displays of custom art. The vision is overwhelming, demanding passersby to drift through and gape up at the landscape, starscape, tessellation, fireworks, whatever is gleaming from above and around, while also bathing in the ambient soundscape which fills and travels through the space. There are three free public galleries, my favorite being the hallway hidden behind the main two courtyards. This area feels more like a womb of light, a journey through the artwork while relaxing in the auditory resonance.

While I was able to plan to catch one of the current showcase pieces The Spaces In-Between (an interactive piece which tracks audience movement and incorporates it into fractals), there are apparently several currently running but unfortunately the times aren’t posted anywhere public: times for The Spaces In-Between are posted on the website but details for the others are only accessible via the Outernet app, which feels exclusionary and unfair to the artists.

This single gripe aside, if a huge ground-floor reception hall is the mark of wealth for a company which doesn’t need to earn income from street-level retailers, the Now Building’s urban lawn is a gift back to the people. These changing murals are a painting of public space, living graffiti worth traveling to see, bringing interest and engagement to an until-recently limping neighborhood.

For two centuries, Piccadilly Circus was London’s Times Square: the blindingly-bright mecca where folks agree to meet — it appears the Now Building has risen to challenge that claim.

— Shelley Snyder, London Curator

Otherworld — Otherworld and Thirteenth Floor
$35; Philadelphia, PA; Ongoing

During the worst of the pandemic, I began to develop a sort of fixation on wishing I could return for a drink at Trader Sam’s in the Polynesian Resort in Disney. With detailed immersive environments, dense and layered Easter eggs, and buzzers and routines triggered by every drink order, it was a carefree comfort experience, of the same shine and polish as Disney, but at an intimate scale. With transformative theatre extended to Zoom, phone, and mailable experiences, what I really began to crave was to be transported, in a sort of carefree way.

I think that, while certainly at a larger scale, and incorporating local artists, there’s much of the same spirit in Otherworld, a 40,000 square foot cohesive art installation in the style that Meow Wolf popularized. There’s a feeling of childlike wonder, a kid in the candy store energy that makes you want to run around and pull every lever, climb every rope net, and sneak through every secret passage. Certainly, the fact that a good 80% of the figures representing characters are giant fuzzy animals bristling with soft fun fur to pet doesn’t hurt this sensation.

That isn’t to say the tone is entirely childlike, though. The world building incorporates themes of bio experimentation, corporate greed, political corruption, and authoritarianism. Of course, it helps when the Gattaca-like abominations of science are giant fuzzy snakes, or a cuddly Mothra with void eyes.

The puzzles might be the weakest element. Certain puzzles made for one are basically glorified checklists, proceeding through a text document, while others required a fair deal more finesse. Of course, the finesse becomes near impossible when you have to coordinate strangers to help synchronize buttons, or shoo children who want to flip every switch amid the brightly colored fantasia. Beyond that, a handful of the four individual puzzle tracks have somewhat obtuse and anticlimactic endings (although the climax should you solve all four is fairly spectacular). Beyond that, a few rooms and puzzles are experiencing some technical difficulties as of their launch.

Still, as a large scale immersive art venue, it’s a joy. A playground for the senses, it escapes the doldrums of the standard selfie palace by encouraging constant movement and interaction with the environment. For those seeking selfies though, the shots are spectacular, colorful and visually dynamic with both aesthetic consistency and wide variety. For families with children, date nights for escape room fans, or concerts and functions, the venue offers something for everyone, and will be a valuable permanent asset to entertainment in Philadelphia.

— Blake Weil, East-Coast Editor at Large

Poison Garden: Harvest — Alterra Productions
$20; Media, PA; through Aug 13

“It’s Summer, and that means it’s The Poison Garden”. That’s a phrase that I’m longing to say now that The Poison Garden has begun to explore its potential as a franchise. A sandbox-style immersive show, each iteration of The Poison Garden (this one styled as just Poison Garden) follows the legacy of the cursed Alden Family Garden, who’s strange alien intelligence possesses and destroys all it comes into contact with, like a vegetable version of “The Thing”. This time, a series of bouquets and clippings have made their way to the historic Media Theatre in 1927, ready to pick at the weaknesses of the cast and crew of the vaudeville gala to commemorate the grand opening, turning them to murder.

While I previously commended the earlier iteration of The Poison Garden for the way gender, sexuality, and religious trauma lent characters texture, it admittedly, made the show sort of a bummer. Queer desire was torturous and punished (as was any desire), women remained frustrated and reduced by a sexist society, and the Garden felt very much like a metaphor for a stifling era that consumed those that deviated from the norm. Poison Garden miraculously juggles a sort of ecstatic queer joy despite the knowledge that the characters are all doomed. It almost feels closer to Anne Rice in tone, with beautiful tortured people who delightfully consume each other in their lust for power and pleasure.

All this high minded talk isn’t necessarily the focus. No, you’re really here to down suspiciously glittering “welcome cocktails” from the not at all suspicious historian leading your tour (Noah Sturtridge in a scene-stealing role), and explore the Grand Guignol mysteries of the past. The production team has to also be commended for giving access to four floors, many rarely accessible, of the gorgeous historic Media Theatre.

The whole evening is a delightful phantasmagoria, a kaleidoscope of gothic weirdness. ARG fans, such as those who dabbled in the intersession play of Alterra’s pandemic hit Thickett, can even begin to see the beginnings of a puzzling meta-plot, a Resident Evil flavored paranoia thriller of malevolent ambition and sinister pharmaceutical concerns.

Overall, Alterra continues to expand their ambitions to great success. Their work is continuously delightful and increasingly thought provoking. Poison Garden is both a wonderful evening out on its own, and a promise of things to come.

— Blake Weil, East-Coast Editor at Large

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