Get Ready To Get Restless: ‘The Sleepover’ Is Pure 90’s Nostalgia Joy (Review)
It’s Saturday night, you’re 11, and there are no parents around
Before the main show even started, I was charmed.
I don’t want to give away how or even what caused this reaction — hell, even talking about the fact that I had the reaction at all is a kind of giveaway — but it bears noting because so much of the current online immersive theatrical offerings seem resigned to Zoom as a necessary evil whose platform idiosyncrasies are just something we have to live with.
Yet for all that Zoom has become ubiquitous in the lives of those privileged enough to have Internet access in the pandemic age (oh, look, that’s you too), it has also lost any of its novelty. There’s nothing magical about Zoom, but in the right hands it can become a pliant tool still capable delivering an engaging evening that one could never have from binge watching Lava Bakers or Oops, The Tiger Is Loose on Netflix.
What’s smart here is that the producers of The Sleepover, The Cricklewood Theater Company and KatNip Productions, don’t limit themselves to the single platform to create the full effect, and the onboarding is the single best onboarding I’ve seen for an online show yet. Period. End of story.
The Sleepover hinges on nostalgia, specifically nostalgia for the last good American decade — the 1990’s — and the middle school pop-culture dynamics there in. Now I’m a little too old to be in the sweet spot for this wayback machine — the 90’s were my high school and college years — but a different kind of nostalgia swept over me once the show proper began and I met the host of our sleepover, Mikey (writer-director Janson Lalich) appeared.
You see, this isn’t the first time I’ve been to Mikey’s sleepover, although I didn’t know that when I accepted the invitation. No, the first time I experienced a version of this was at the LA Immersive Invitational, which After Hours Theatre Company produced in 2019. There Lalich and a group of collaborators summoned up a prototype of this show, seemingly from whole cloth. It was one of the highlights of the weekend, one that did an amazing job of capturing the vibe of being in a middle school sleepover with all the trimmings.
So when I saw Lalich I wondered: were we in for it? Would the beats translate from one medium to the next. Could that spirit of being slightly out of control just out of the watchful eye of adults be recaptured when it was the middle of the day on a Saturday and I was already home alone?
I’d be lying if I said everything came along for the online version of the show — helium is in short supply these days — but the heart and soul of the experience is there. And it has HEART! And SOUL! This is broad comedy with a sweet center, grounded in the broad comic takes of Lalich and his co-star Susan Louise O’Connor, who plays Mikey’s sister Louise.
All the tricks of Zoom are put into play, but here the operative word is play. This is one of those wondrous immersive theatre pieces that is a joy to visit, and maybe even revisit, and one that makes for a much needed escape from the current decade. Because even with eight million episodes of passably good passive entertainment, it still feels like there’s often nothing worth watching.
(Also, I regret to inform you that both Lava Bakers and Oops, The Tiger Is Loose were canceled by Netflix while you were reading this article.)
The Sleepover scratches that itch for a piece that responds to you without demanding that you rise up and become the star. It knows what it is and what it is about, and that lets you just ride the ride and add a little twist to the turns. When so much of the world is asking for everything we got, it’s nice to just hang out with some friends and try to watch a little SNICK.
The Sleepover continues on November 6–7. General admission tickets are $30, and there’s a 90’s themed goodie bag VIP option for those in the LA area for $55.
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