NoPro’s Best Immersive Moments of 2023
Kicking off our end of 2023 coverage
We’ve reached the end of another year here at No Proscenium and in a few days will be celebrating our founding TEN YEARS AGO.
To mark both occasions this week we are releasing our annual “Best Of” lists, starting with the Best Immersive Moments of 2023 and following up with the Best Shows & Experiences.
Moments is a particular favorite here for two reasons.
The first is a practical one: many of our Review Crew members don’t get to experience the work that leaves the most indelible mark on them in the year that it is first released. Since our “Best Shows…” category is restricted to work that debuted in the calendar year this category reflects the experiences of our team.
The other reason is that immersive, even more than most mediums, is a medium of moments. The experiences that move us the most become cherished memories that transcend something as simple as “I saw this” or “this was cool” and become “I DID THAT” and “I CAN’T BELIEVE THIS HAPPENED TO ME.”
In so many ways hitting that mark is the goal of every immersive creator, and if you see your work here congratulation: you did it.
Be warned: spoilers abound.
NoPro’s End of 2023 Coverage:
NoPro’s Best Immersive Moments of 2023
Best Shows & Experiences of 2023
Coming Next: 2023 Journalist Round-Up
James Brown Plays One More Time
Rumble In The Jungle Rematch — Rematch Luve
For 90 seconds, I am standing in 1974 Kinshasha. I have never been to Africa, I was born in 1989. But James Brown is on the stage in front of me, howling out “I Feel Good” in front of a slamming band, so I have time traveled to the middle of the Ali Vs. Foreman match festival and am jamming along with a few hundred other people to an unmatchable vibe. I forget where I really am. I am immersed.
The rest of the show is also great, but it’s a theatrical retelling of a real event so it’s engaging but there’s a definite separation since as an attendee I have no real role to play in the environment. But I can easily be a concert-goer. I can feel the surge of the electrified crowd around me, I can jump and dance around with my neighbors, and I can feel the vibrant sweating energy of the act onstage, of actor Guy Kelton-Jones streaming out the soul of James Brown over us. It is an all-consuming feeling that lasts for a minute and half, and stays around me like an aura all the way home.
— Shelley Snyder, London Curator
Playing With Strangers
Lonely Hearts: The Game — Birch House Immersive
For nearly a decade prior to the start of the pandemic, there wasn’t a week in my life that passed that didn’t include a board game night. It was an ingrained guarantee that I’d spend time engaging in the ever important act of play, to simply be active, present, and enjoying myself. And when March 2020 began, I pivoted to online, remote ways of playing like everyone else, yet the options (in the beginning) were limited and playtime frequency was sporadic at best.
After several years of exclusively doing remote work, local Chicago mainstay Birch House Immersive return to in-person experiences with their yearly Valentine’s Day production of Lonely Hearts. While traditionally an on-rails, one-on-one interaction experience, Birch House dramatically changed their format. There were still constant interactions with performers, but the evening revolved around randomized groups of audience members playing an original, DIY board game. While clearly inspired by old Parker Brothers or Milton Bradley games, the game was fueled by open-end, thought provoking questions, requiring collaboration between players.
On top of being three years since I played a board game in person with others, it had been even longer since playing with strangers. Ye, as soon as the dice began rolling, so did constant laughs and cheers. By the game’s end, those strangers became friends, with the time I spent with them to be long remembered and cherished. But the true victory won was reconnecting with the ever important need of constant play in one’s life, which I wouldn’t have rediscovered without Birch House hosting a lovely game night.
— Patrick McLean, Chicago Curator
Binging on immersive at Edinburgh Fringe
Edinburgh Festival Fringe
The Edinburgh Festival Fringe has long been up top on my bucket list. But no amount of daydreaming or research could have prepared me for the joy that was marathoning through 57 immersive shows from all around the world. There’s something so electric about being in a city that’s been completely taken over by art and art lovers. From the rom-com-esque serendipity of Tilda Cobham-Hervey’s Two Strangers Walk Into The Bar, the peaceful intrigue of Sisters Hope’s Sensuous Governing, the jubilant nostalgia of Fred Deakin’s Club Life, to the communal ritual of Ontroerend Goed’s Funeral, Edinburgh Fringe was an absolute cornucopia of immersive goodness.
— Katrina Lat, Toronto Curator
A Journey with Persephone & the Fall
The Burnt City — Punchdrunk
The Burnt City was a show that is filled with moments. A non-comprehensive list might include: a tour of a museum, a sacrifice in a town square, a battle between gods (and later, a playful thumb wrestle between the same gods), the ascendance of a king, learning about records with Hades, Persephone crawling from the river Lethe, a prophecy, a wedding, a playful dance-off between a couple on a date, a brief moment of connection with a soldier in the midst of a breakdown. Each offered some kind of insight, big or small, personal or world-altering, into the citizens, soldiers, and gods who reside in Troy and Mycenae. They were all accompanied by astounding visuals that took full advantage of the space The Burnt City occupied. I contemplated making the entire show my moment, but I’ll hone in on two.
The first is my journey with Persephone. Late in the show, the goddess pulls five audience members into a room above Troy’s town square where she muses on her memories and listens to a recording from her husband. She then leads her group back through the museum exhibits that served as the show’s introduction, running through corridors and dark halls until suddenly, the floor has turned to sand. Persephone finds a piece of chalk and scribbles “I remember” on the wall before holding a light up to see those same words, written hundreds of more times. The 1:5 ends with Persephone reclaiming her identity and her memory of who she was and who she is.
It’s a thrilling sequence that creates a bond with a character and fellow audience members as you all rush headlong into uncovering Persephone’s identity. On top of all of that, it’s a moment that is intimate and huge, as it recontextualizes Persephone, her relationship with Hades, and their role in The Burnt City.
My other moment is the show’s finale, a spectacular sequence that takes full advantage of the sheer size of the space. As Hades and Persphone look on, the rest of the cast artfully tumble down the enormous staircase in Mycenae, before arranging themselves in a large circle. They slowly start moving in that circle, mirroring Hades’ spinning records that control The Burnt City, and then move faster and faster until they collapse. It distills the essence of the show down into one moment as these trapped souls are forever stuck in their damned loops, forced to relive their final moments again and again for Hades, for Persephone, and for us.
— Kevin Gossett, LA Reviews Editor
An Unexpected Call
Baby Jessica’s Well-Made Play — Pipeline Theatre Company
In a post-lockdown world, it has been easy for many of us have quickly taken the opportunity to return to in-person shows and experiences. However remote shows continue to innovate and create unique opportunities for immersive theatre, and one such special moment was found in this excellent audio adventure. A telephone play, telling the story of the infamous (in America at least) story of Baby Jessica who got stuck down a well. Told to me while I made myself as comfortable as possible in my own closet at home, this charming piece of theatre was truly excellent, and as a piece of audio narrative wonderful in its own right.
The surprise then came in the third act, wherein I received another phone call. This time from a past audience member. Over the course of an hour, I spoke openly and honestly with a complete stranger, sharing so much more than I ever thought I would, while relating my own thoughts and experience having listened to the story of Baby Jessica. My final instruction then, for Act four, was to call the next audience member and to be their stranger, and the interviewer for another unsuspecting individual.
This human interaction is what we all crave, and is one of the great strengths of immersive theatre. To have this genuine emotional experience, with a genuine audience member, a stranger I have never, and will likely never meet, over a very literal game of “telephone” was so surprisingly and shockingly impactful. The design of the entire show suddenly made itself so clear and helped continue the narrative, taking me from a passive observer to an engaged participant, it had so many clever connections and correlations to the themes of the entire show.
Hanging up the phone for the last time, and reflecting on the importance of connection, whether it be in person or over the phone, was a highlight moment for me of this year’s fantastic immersive work.
— Edward Mylechreest, NY Correspondent
‘Something Strange In The Tub
The Willows — JFI Productions
It’s hard to pull out a single moment of The Willows given how many great points there were, but I will call as my favorite when Angela, the daughter of the Willows family, pulled me out a room to help her with something. After making me promise to trust her and keep her secrets, she brought me into a bathroom and had me sit in a tub where she suspected her brother Jonathon hung himself. She prompted me to read his suicide letter to the family and sat with me as I did, getting more and more agitated until she ran from the room, leaving me in a haunting scene of shifting lights and sound. I stayed there until Dierdre, a servant, burst in to rescue me and the manifestation abruptly stopped.
This moment combines the two elements that make The Willows the greatest immersive horror piece I’ve ever seen. First, all the performances were terrific, with the actors ceaselessly moving from personal encounter to personal encounter without missing a beat. Second, the horror effects were incredible. I kept expecting to see the technical seams of scary scenes conducted in such small and intimate settings, but I simply couldn’t. The combination of the exceptional acting and the mindblowing polish of the effects and lighting allowed The Willows to do close up theatrical horror in a way I’ve never seen before. This is what top shelf immersive looks like.
— Nicholas Fortugno, NY Correspondent
The Ritual
Omega — Paralysis Immersive
In April I detailed the Omega pre-show onboarding experience that took place over the course of several weeks, which included contact via an envelope in the mail, text messages, and emails. I even conducted a ritual over the phone that involved drawing a drop of my own blood.
When I finally arrived for the experience, I met the religious couple who would be hosting me for my “mandatory home rehabilitation,” which amounted to an emotionally charged type of weird religious conversion therapy led by the husband. When he lost his temper and things got out of hand, his wife rescued me and whisked me away to the bathroom.
She quietly pulled some supplies from the cabinet, which I was surprised to recognize as the same supplies I’d been sent in the mail weeks earlier to conduct the phone ritual. I’d promised that person on the phone I’d never do it again, but the wife pleaded with me to conduct the ritual with her in an attempt to contact her deceased daughter.
We were unable to reach the daughter, and our attempt was cut short when the husband began pounding on the bathroom door, demanding to be let in. She quickly hid the ritual supplies, instructed me to hide behind the door, and then opened it.
As he entered the room and they began to argue, he pushed his wife against the wall on the opposite side of the room. With me quietly watching, huddled in the corner, he proceeded to put his hands around her neck and choke her. Through their exquisite and totally believable acting, I looked on in helpless horror as she fought for her final breaths and collapsed, just a few feet away from me.
— Danielle Riha, Denver Correspondent
Hitting The Great White Way
Here Lies Love — David Byrne & Co
I remember a rainy Friday in June 2013 where I saw both Here Lies Love at the Public Theater and Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 (another immersive musical which would take its own extended path to a far too short Broadway run), leaving excited about the new prominence of immersive production for musical theatre. Flash forward ten years after successful runs in London and Seattle, Here Lies Love was finally premiering on Broadway bringing immersive theatre tropes to the tourist audience, only to close within five months.
This transfer was eight years too late and seemingly only for Tony Award eligibility, yet the original 2012 staging and this remount can serve as both bookends of our current phase of immersive theatre’s rise in the North American performance lexicon. After the opening of Sleep No More, Here Lies Love (and Great Comet) showed how an immersive staging in a black box space could work for a traditional book musical.
Transferring those not for profit black box productions to for profit proscenium houses proved to be challenging from a financial front to the point where the shows had to be star reliant (Josh Groban in Great Comet and Lea Salonga in Here Lies Love). So this raises the question, how can the production be the star at the scale of Broadway? Does it need to be? Or is the Off Broadway hip factor that Sleep No More tapped into enough for our community? I’m not sure of the answers, but these are the questions that seeing Here Lies Love for the third time (first on Broadway) brought up.
— Martin Gimenez, Correspondent at Large
Number’s Up
The Boundary — Submersive Productions
The Boundary unmoored me from reality, step by step.
It took me from a silly science lab into halls lined with doors — each allowing a glimpse into a different afterlife — and then, to my surprise, into a timeless world. I sat in this unceasing land for who knows how long, watching hourglasses run out and then fill again, dancing in the void, and talking with timeless beings who circled and flowed, perfectly satisfied wtih their circumstances, and so I felt the same.
Then, suddenly, my number was called.
I entered a bar with kind faces welcoming me. And I am told, finally — I have died. But, not to worry, they would try to return me to life. In the meantime, I am offered a ritual and a reflection — sitting here, in this liminal place, what would I bring back to my life? What will I take from bardo? I am welcomed to stay as long as I want, so I sat, for a long while, feeling deeply outside of my life, but somehow still inside my self. I watched people play pool and peruse the bookshelf, and I witnessed other dead souls welcomed into bardo. And I savored the feeling of timelessness — of true disconnection from my life — and I considered what I would bring back.
It is rare that immersive theater gets this deep, that it perfectly balances the delight of interaction with a depth of introspection. It is rare that it is able to separate you so fully from your every day, and then allow you to reside there, to deeply integrate the lessons that are offered.
Eventually, I took an elixir of life, repeating: “To life. To the journey. And to those who make the journey worth living.” And I stepped outside into the cold winter air.
— Corinna Kester, Correspondent at Large
ALL THE GALACTIC STARCRUISER BITS
What? You really thought it wasn’t making it in?
Ko’Gre’ke in the Climate Simulator
Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser — Walt Disney Imagineering
It’s been four hours since we boarded the Halcyon, the Chandrila Star Lines Purrgil class luxury cruiser that will take our party to Batuu and while I’m impressed with how everything looks and how the lunch buffet tastes I’m not really feeling it yet.
Sure, it’s obvious where the money that went into Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser went but with so many guests to manage and so much plot to introduce I haven’t really clicked into things yet. The all-hands muster three hours in set the stakes of the story, but I’m still in the outside looking in. And given how much money had been laid out by folks to get me here I can feel the clock ticking.
All that comes to a stop when we make our way to the “climate simulator” on board the ship. In reality this is the outdoor patio for the otherwise sealed up “ship” which in the fiction of the show is there to acclimate us to Batuu’s strangely Floridian atmosphere. (Extra strange for those of us who were born in the real Batuu: Southern California.)
While taking note of the names of various local plants a fellow passenger, Sandro — himself a plant of a different kind — carrying a musical instrument introduces himself and asks if he can make up a song for us on the spot.
What follows immediately after is one of my top three moments across immersive, improv, and LARPing the all the decades. Sandro improvises another riff on his guitar trying to get a reluctant friend to sing. I step in to the rescue, and draw upon old “improv a musical” skills and a Wookiepedia level of poodoo to improvise a song in a Star Warsian gibberish that has more than one person in the simulator doing a double take.
In that moment, even though I’m recording on my iPhone like a horrible tourist, I’m so into the reality of the fiction that every doubt I have about the experience as a whole bubbles away like so much kolto.
There were many more moments to come that weekend, but this was the one that brought me over. This was the one that made it clear to me how much work had been put in to create space and time for guests to just live fully in Star Wars for a spell.
I’ll hold onto this one forever, and spend the rest of my career hoping to see other creative teams reach as high.
— Noah J. Nelson, Founder & Publisher
A Hero Completes His Journey
Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser — Walt Disney Imagineering
Sammie’s meteoric rise from the engine room to the bridge of the Halcyon was a sight to see. Star Wars, especially these days, is not a franchise one immediately associates with madcap farce, but through the bumbling sincerity and wide-eyed panic only barely outweighed by a sense of refreshingly old fashioned duty and a light sprinkling of meta fanboyish irreverence. It was easy to be swept up in his story because in so many ways it felt as though Sammie was like us — a hapless participant totally overwhelmed, just barely hanging on, immersed in an experience outside of our control but emboldened just enough by the agency given that we press forward, head tilted, damn the odds. In a cast of heroic Rebels and dastardly Imperials, there was Sammie, in the middle of it all, scared to death, but having so much fun, and giving each one of us permission to be just as unabashedly overwhelmed and starry eyed as he was. There were too many memorable moments to count, from dancing the Ryloth Shuffle through the Crown of Corellia Dining Room to hide a certain Wookie from the First Order, to a breathless rewiring of the ship’s warp systems, to simply operating as his unofficial hype man through every moment of self doubt or uncertainty, but the one pictured here has to take the Chandrilan Air Cake. That culminating moment all of Star Wars is built on: a nobody from nowhere rises up to meet the moment and become the hero. It could have been any one of us. He just happened to be the right size for a Storm Trooper.
— Chris Wollman, LA Correspondant
A Heart To Heart Chat
Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser — Walt Disney Imagineering
Early in my experience on the Halcyon, my group was met by a crew member named Saja Kyr, who took us into the Climate Simulator to talk. There, we had a magical moment where by our concentration, rocks moved physically throughout the space and Kyr told us we had experienced a manifestation of the Force. As amazing as that was, that is not my favorite moment from Starcruiser. The force manifestation disturbed the character I was playing (named Sindeck) and I (as Nick) decided that Sindeck had received a vision during that experience that told him his lost sister was alive and had not been killed during Rebellion actions. Later in the piece, I randomly saw Saja Kyr in a hallway and asked to speak with her. I brought up this vision, and she and I then had a long, unplanned conversation about family and responsibility and empathy, drawing in other players to talk about how they experienced the Force and how we attach to others. She shared her character’s soul and I shared mine.
I have never had an experience that bespoke in an immersive show before. With a plot I generated entirely, an actor in a structured performance heard my story, took it seriously, and improvised with me a scene of intense emotional power that pulled in other guests. In Star Wars, no less. I cannot say enough how amazing that moment was. Saja Kyr and Galactic Starcruiser set a new high bar of what I can expect from performances in immersive shows. Everything about Starcruiser was mindblowing, but that personal moment is the one I will never forget.
— Nicholas Fortugno, NY Correspondent
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