Review Rundown: The One With Ghost Ships, Foul Play, and a Sense of Home
Work hailing from Toronto, NYC, LA, and online! FOUR REVIEWS
Sometimes the Rundown is all over the map, like this one.
You want some site-specific dance? We got that.
An electronica concert leveled up through installation design? Right over here.
A puzzle adventure on an evening cruise? All aboard.
To recapture the magic of Night Trap? Wait. That’s a thing?
Oh. It’s a thing.
Let’s goooo.
Looking for more? Acquaint yourself to the tales of productions past in our most recent escapade.
Are you a creator who looks upon these reviews with envy? Okay, the positive ones, at least? Then you might want to check out our How To Get Covered By NoPro guide. Want to get listed in our newsletter and have your event shared with our social media following? Submit a listing to Everything Immersive.
Keep No Proscenium free for all by becoming a Patreon backer today!
Escape the Ghost Ship — Secret City Adventures and Pirate Life
$67; Toronto, Canada through July 15; Ottawa, Canada through July 30
Secret City Adventures is known for taking iconic Toronto spaces and repurposing them as escape room experiences. This trend continues with Escape the Ghost Ship, which sees the company partner with Pirate Life for a swashbuckling hour-long adventure across Lake Ontario.
This third year of the Ghost Ship’s voyage features a new narrative and a fresh set of puzzles, departing from the previous year’s mobile AR focus that felt out of place with the pirate theme. Instead, this year, the props and puzzles align wonderfully with the pirate aesthetic. While a good chunk of the experience does rely on traditional padlock puzzles, a locked treasure chest is very much on brand for a pirate-themed escape room.
In typical Secret City Adventures fashion, the experience is fashioned for a large group, meaning participants are often paired with other ticketholders rather than booking out the entire space. Escape the Ghost Ship is both a boat cruise and an escape room, so you’re bound to be onboard with people who focus on different parts of the experience. On our voyage, three of the seven participants took the puzzling seriously. The others were content enjoying the sights and sounds of the sunset cruise. Despite our small group of dedicated puzzlers, we managed to alleviate the ship’s curse in roughly 30 minutes, giving us plenty of time to enjoy the sunset.
Overall, the puzzles are straightforward, but the clever application of the theme throughout makes for a charming experience. However, at a maximum group size of 18, if you’re booked onto a sold out ship, the small boat might become cramped or too easy of a puzzling experience.
At $67, Escape the Ghost Ship is priced higher than your typical escape room. However, the experience also doubles as a boat cruise, definitely justifying the cost. Whether you aim to break the curse, or simply want to enjoy the Toronto skyline onboard the boat, Escape the Ghost Ship provides a fulfilling adventure.
— Katrina Lat, Toronto Correspondent
Four Tet/SquidSoup at Avant Gardner
$78, NYC; Run Concluded
If you’re going to concerts regularly, you know that the shows are becoming more and more experimental, from Purity Ring’s Tour de Womb to Magdelena Bay’s Mercurial World Tour to Lizzo in Roblox. And while I found all of those cool, there’s something different about turning a real-world concert into an immersive experience, and that’s where Four Tet and SquidSoup come in. Full disclosure: I’m not an EDM concert goer, so maybe the following is more common that I realize.
The space didn’t look like a normal venue; there was no stage in sight. Instead, the large open room was dotted with a loose grid of cables hanging from the ceiling with what looked like ping-pong balls attached to them, about ten balls per string. You stood among them in the dark waiting for the show to start. But when Four Tet started playing, the ping-pong balls started lighting up in different colors, flowing in waves and rhythmic lines in time with the music. You didn’t look at the DJ during the set. You watched a 3D visualization of color as it moved around and through you with the sound.
The animations, designed by SquidSoup, were impressive although perhaps a bit thin at times. The parts that were more tech experiments, such as having a block of white light zip around the space like a train as the surround audio created an approaching and departing effect, was fine but got old quickly. I’m not sure watching it by itself would have held up. But when it fired with the music, what you got was a kaleidoscopic rain or eddy or pulsing mix of colors that became a synesthetic experience. It was a dance concert where I just swayed because I didn’t want to miss the visual experience. And that was kind of awe-inspiring, just losing all sense of time literally surrounded by an audio-visual art piece.
I didn’t go to this one looking for an immersive show. I saw this for the music and then knew it had been immersive and had to write about it. And if this is where concerts are heading (or are if I’m a noob to this), NoPro friends, concerts are for you.
– Nicholas Fortugno, New York Correspondent
Foul Play
$9.99 Per Episode, $39.99 Season Pass; Online Live and On Demand
Somewhere between the giddy vicarious thrills of my beloved Korean game shows, the YouTube mugging of Escape the Night, and FMV schlock classic Night Trap lies Foul Play, a new, high-budget murder mystery game. Featuring stars of stage and screen from Stranger Things’ Gaten Matarazzo to Tik-Tok’s favorite Beetlejuice Alex Brightman, each episode presents a campy comedy murder mystery. Players jump between camera feeds, jumping between different rooms to try to scour for clues and confirm alibis.
The themes are charming and varied; ranging from a cult dinner party to a murder on the set of a Mr. Rogers-esque show, there’s something for everyone. Still, there’s a slightly uncanny quality for those who aren’t fans of the actors. The production is so strongly devised from their personas and fandoms, it felt at times as if I was lacking context, especially when actors would occasionally corpse or struggle with improv. The production can also occasionally feel a bit trapped in non-sequitur humor.
Still, as a way to revive a forgotten mechanic, Foul Play is a great update on the Night Trap formula. A murder mystery works well for the multi-room camera switching, and the red herrings are fun little oddball conversations. Much in the way the original Night Trap distracted from multiple murderers with a notorious musical number, I found myself fighting to trace the murder mystery as subplots kept grabbing my attention. The writing reminds me of some of the best structured sandbox immersive theatre, weaving multiple plotlines in and out with opportunities to either follow a character, or observe a room.
The whole thing feels like a fantastic idea executed mostly well, but also a little bit unfit for its nature as a live event. There are far too many plotlines to follow in a single night, and the mystery feels impossible to solve in one watch. A downloadable shell might avoid some of the lag that made switching cameras a bit frustrating on occasion. Still, with live players able to return on-demand, this isn’t the most pressing issue.
For a quick evening’s entertainment, you could do a lot worse than Foul Play. With a little bit of expansion and refinement, the structure could be used for all kinds of multi-track immersive, and as a clean way of digitizing sandbox style shows. You could even see this shell being used to preserve immersive shows for further generations. I look forward to a potential season two, and variations on this structure to come.
— Blake Weil, Editor at Large
HOME — Re:borN Dance Interactive
PRICE; Los Angeles; Run Concluded
Before HOME, which director and choreographer Boróka Nagy bills as “an immersive dance experience,” begins the audience is instructed — both through notes in the playbill and from the mouth of the MC like “House Mother” — that the show is meant to be “felt, not analyzed.”
Well, it is the burden of the critic to do both and so the work must be done.
In this case there are three lenses to bring to the piece, as the show is aiming to operate on three levels: first on the level of individual dance pieces featuring members of the company, then as a collection of same, and finally as the “experience” that is in the subtitle.
Piece by piece the set of fifteen compositions has more highs than lows, as Re:borN, with whom Nagy dances for many of the works, is an exceptionally tightly skilled company. Nagy’s choreography is explosively kinetic, with the compositions at their finest in duets and group pieces that seamless mix modern, classical, and folk phrases into illustrations of family dynamics. Strong, broken, reforged: a full range of what it means to be part of a family, and part of a home are on display across the works. On this level the company scores a win, and ensures their spot on our ongoing radar.
It’s the next two levels where things get on less firm ground.
While Nagy and company have a solid sense of what to do with the grounds of Sugar Bank/Monk Space at the edge of Koreatown, the anti-narrative flow of the evening (which is intentional, mind you) doesn’t quite elevate itself to the level of commentary in contrast. Dancers shift broad roles “Father” to “Son” to “Husband” from scene to scene, sometimes one after the other. There could be commentary here in that juxtaposition, instead it often feels like switching of channels.
The “House Mother,” the lone speaking part of the evening, announces the names of the pieces ahead of them, often with a line of prose that sets the theme. I’m not sure the pieces, which communicate their themes so well through movement, need it. If anything it pushes one to seek narrative while one is being told there isn’t one. Signals that are at cross purpose with each other, but never raised to the kind of fever pitch that would generate a cathartic frenzy. Instead it leaves things feeling half-said.
An opening brace of videos introducing each of the performers solo dancing and sharing prose & poetry manages to extend the length of the night and putting off getting to the good stuff: the in person performances that speak so well for themselves. We are told it is meant to give us a sense of connection to the performers, but I found myself feeling more alienated instead.
From an immersive point of view the missed opportunity is that the flow of the audience from space to space has been “solved” by anchoring us to the MC, as opposed to taking time used by the videos at the start to “teach” the audience how to follow the actors and when we should hold back. In short: there’s no real sense of who we are in the space. Not that we need an active role, but a dash of “nosy neighbor” or “fleeting memories” in the minds of the dancers would go along way to integrating us into the space so that the choreography flowed around. All without having to teach us a step.
I note this because I could easily see Nagy doing this. The skill of the company is there and the way Nagy moves bodies through space is fascinating enough all on its own. As Re:borN continues to work in this mode I hope to see them shake off the supporting exoskeleton and let the work flow through us. This would take the work form “experience” to “Experience,” a delineation that I spent a lot of time thinking about in the wake of the piece, as opposed to just being nestled in the potent vibes that the performers had conjured.
— Noah Nelson, Publisher & Podcast Host
Discover the latest immersive events, festivals, workshops, and more at our new site EVERYTHING IMMERSIVE, new home of NoPro’s show listings.
NoPro is a labor of love made possible by our generous Patreon backers. Join them today!
In addition to the No Proscenium website, our podcast, and our newsletters, you can find NoPro on Facebook, LinkedIn,YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, in the Facebook community Everything Immersive, and on our Patreon Backer exclusive Discord.
