Review Rundown: The One With Pirates, Shipwrecks, and Playable Art
A legendary director stages opera in Boston with an immersive twist, ‘The Tempest’ storms LA, plus LARPing and dispatches from London. (SEVEN REVIEWS)
Well this week is simply massive. From legendary theatre director Anne Bogart using some of the immersive toolbox for a Boston Lyric Opera production to LARP in Amsterdam. Plus the immersive drought in LA is over thanks to a team-up between the Shakespeare Center LA & After Hours Theatre Company. Oh, and NYC & London are in the mix and I think we may have identified a new trend: Playable Art.
Let’s goooooooo.
Need more to do in London or NYC? Last week’s Review Rundown “Of Hangovers & Hanging Rocks” has some options, and some warnings, for ya.
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Bluebeard’s Castle | Four Songs — Boston Lyric Opera
Tickets starting at $25; Boston, MA; March 22–26 (run concluded)
Boston Lyric Opera regularly uses immersive design to bring opera to the people. This March, director Anne Bogart mashed-up four songs from composer Alma Mahler with Barkók’s one-act Symbolist opera, Bluebeard’s Castle… and brought the people to a cruise ship terminal. There’s something perfect about well-dressed opera fans wandering cautiously through an abandoned seaport that really sets the mood for a show about romantic discovery and destruction. From an immersive perspective, Bluebeard’s Castle | Four Songs was all about the blurring of borders: where do fact and fiction intersect? Where does immersion blend into traditional theatre? And what’s the difference between performer and audience?
There’s a lot to unpack between Alma’s life story and Bartók’s text (Mahler was a socialite muse who cut her own composing career short and Bluebeard was a fictional serial killer-cum-metaphor for Bartók’s inability to combine artistic inspiration with functional relationships), but we’re here to talk about this production’s immersive elements. I’m phrasing it this way because, despite having a good number of immersive elements, I wouldn’t categorize Bluebeard as immersive theatre. Instead, Bluebeard used immersive elements to dance back and forth between traditional and immersive staging, teasing audiences with moments of inclusion, giving the evening a vivid, dreamlike quality. Silent women in crystalline masks — Bluebeard’s wives — moved through a golden-mylar-draped piano bar before the show. The warehouse had been cleverly split into three spaces, a feminine bar, a subdued, masculine lounge dotted with faux taxidermy, and a theatre-in-the-round style performance area. The audience was left to mingle until being seated for the more traditional staging of this one-act opera.
What made the night sing, apart from Naomi Louisa O’Connell and Ryan McKinny’s stellar performances as Judith and Bluebeard, was Bogart’s use of our crystalline friends from the piano bar as a sort of proxy for us, the audience. The wives spent most of their time positioned at bar tables around the stage. They watched. They reacted with increasingly erratic movements to Judith’s increasingly disturbing discoveries. And, in the final moments of the show, they reclaimed their agency by storming the stage and disemboweling Bluebeard. This happened moments before the audience made our transition from passive observer back to active reality. It was spellbinding. I left Bluebeard feeling energized in ways that I can’t usually access outside of sandbox-style theatre — and excited about what evocative stories and unexpected settings BLO might explore next.
— Leah Davis, New England Correspondent
Burn Bright Young Thing — Quicksandbox Larp
200 Euro; Amsterdam, Netherlands; Run Concluded
Surrounded by aristocrats returning from the funeral of a dear friend, fake laughter rings out around the 1920s tram cart we sit in. I eye up those around me, notepad and pencil in hand, ready to jot down any of the awful and crass things my supposed friends might say next. After all, what’s the use of uniting all your friends together, if you can’t enjoy (and profit off) a little bit of gossip?
Run by Quicksandbox LARP Burn Bright Young Thing takes inspiration from a real-life friendship circle of the bohemian elite in the 1920s, and encourages participants to make believe as a member of the 1% celebrating the life of Jonny in the one way we know he would have wanted us to — with a diabolically debaucherous party.
Richard Thomas Tompkins, otherwise referred to as the Mongoose in this animal foodchain, is a journalist and gossip columnist trying to play nice in this world of riches, despite having some deeply personal reasons for wanting to burn everything and everyone around him down to the ground. As big band hits fill the air, I seek secrets from everyone around me, as I dive deep into their messy personal lives. Politics, affairs, scheming the downfall of each other. While there is no singularly “bad” character in the room, none of these people are good people at all. Snobbish, egotistical, and entitled, the moneyed elite in the room has a variety of grievances with the “friends” around them, and this seems like a good time as any to air the dirty laundry.
The players however were indeed a fantastic assortment of talents, coming from almost far and wide to attend this event (which had been postponed several times since 2020). My American compatriots had given me some insight into the different playstyle that European LARPers tend to exhibit, which was a fascinating learning experience to be a part of. Everyone in attendance came to play and was fully prepared for the intense and dark subject matters that would inevitably arise during the game, with every player being expected to self-manage and self-care appropriately to ensure their own comfort level with the emotional nature of the game. Being a one-day event (9.00am-1.00am!), this encouraged bigger swings and greater ambition of play, as the time crunch necessitated story development to happen quickly. By the end of the game, no grudge was left untouched.
As a visitor to the country, and to this player base, I felt incredibly welcomed within the world we were creating together. Costuming and commitment to character were of the highest caliber, meaning that immersion into this century-old world was not just easy, but a delight. Clever characters, a collaborative concept, combined with magnificent players have helped to make this one of the most fully immersive LARP events I have ever experienced. Stepping into the shoes of these characters was not only fun to play, but a rewarding exercise in collaboration, as well as a learning experience for me as a person. A bright beacon of the potential of LARP indeed.
— Edward Mylechreest, New York City Correspondent
The Bureau- RADA Technical Theatre Arts
£10, RADA, London, UK; Until April 1st.
(Ed. Note: NoPro London curator Shelley Snyder works for RADA. Shelley had no editorial input on this review, but did arrange the tickets.)
The Bureau of Standard Habitual Convention is looking for new recruits. We are enlisted into the Bureau and told that, if we pass a test, we can join and will be given a very normal name, our options being Norm, Norma or Norman. But the resistance want us to find out what this shady group is up to. We have one hour to solve puzzles and take down the Bureau.
The Bureau is an escape room created by Foundation and Bachelor students studying Technical Theatre and Stage Management and is the fourth of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art’s annual escape rooms.
Equipment and support has been provided by Clockwork Dog, who supplied their COGS control system for the students to use. COGS is a centralised system of software and hardware which can be programmed to respond to audience interactions, control sound and lighting, video and even unlock doors. This system is being used by other immersive experiences in London, such as Monopoly Lifesized, Peaky Blinders: The Rise and Secret Cinema’s Guardians of the Galaxy. That said, when talking to the crew afterwards they confessed that rather than trust a set of gears to push out a new puzzle they just gave the panel a shove from backstage. Sometimes the simplest solution is the best.
The puzzles have a good range of scope and lack any moments of wild guessing (what puzzle fans call ‘moon logic’). Multiple times we would quickly solve a clue and yell “Good! That was good!” It is nice to see there are no cheap answers; everything made sense.
A small hitch affected one task, a sliding panel puzzle, that held us for a good portion of our time with no option to let one of our team try to move the panels to make the pattern.
Our impassioned yelling into the room after our tablet, otherwise used as our timer, asked if we wanted to skip the puzzle resulted in our team name ‘Just Two More Minutes’. (We did get there in the end.)
Ultimately, this is one of the stronger escape rooms I have experienced. There are moments of genuine delight as hatches fly open or one of our party rolls like a sausage across the floor.
These young students should be proud of creating such a delightful, fun and worthwhile experience.
— Thomas Jancis, London Correspondent
Nightforms: Infinite Wave — Klip Collective
$22; Hamilton, NJ; Through April 2
Using 3D projection mapping and LED devices, Nightforms: Infinite Wave, by the Klip Collective, fills the already spectacular Grounds for Sculpture’s space with new energy. Sculptures that strike daytime viewers as structural exercises in substance, like Masayuki Koorida’s Memory, a granite mound of bulging surfaces, roll and blink and pulse with grotesque fleshy life as mind.fract. Substance shifts and transforms, occasionally glitching out, bursting into an explosion of static.
Most of the exhibition has a deft and playful touch, bridging the aesthetic of yesterday’s internet with the fairy-garden of earlier imagination. Take one of the earliest installations you see, cheat.code. You stand at a podium facing a reflecting pool, with projections tracing the edges of a large silver sculpture that looks a bit like a polygonal spaceship from the earliest Star Fox game (Dorion by Bruce Beasley). The trees and hedges surrounding you abstract into pixelated cubes, with elaborate Japanese style emojis (think (●´⌓`●) and other such faces) swarming down like space invaders. Quick! Grab the joystick in front of you and tap out the Konami code. Kaboom! Lights, explosions, triumphant fanfares.
The sinister tension of an upcoming boss battle delights audiences watching the ever changing dias of channel.surf, a projection onto Carlod Dorrien’s The Nine Muses, turning the raised platform and titular obelisks into a glowing, thrumming disk ready to summon the final baddie. Of course, which final baddie remains to be seen: sometimes the platform has falling matrix code, sometimes organic skittering critters and vines. The audience fell into an easy rhythm of letting members approach the largest obelisk and feel the overwhelming tension of what felt like a summoning.
There’s peace too. Perhaps the most delightful installation of the evening was resonance. In an isolated glade, surrounded by tall straight trees, with bare branches reaching straight up, a circle of LED lights spun and shifted. Audiences would lean back, or even lie down on the picnic table in the center of the ring, and stare up at the infinite starry sky, the ring a portal into the cosmic unknown. The elegance and simplicity of the piece, while maintaining a specific emotion across audiences was unbelievably striking.
I know I’ll be back again.
–Blake Weil, East Coast Editor at Large
Rock Bottom — arebyte & Abe Sugarman
Free; London, UK; through 29 April 2023
As more of a theater junkie than a fine arts enthusiast, I occasionally wander through a gallery or a museum and deeply admire the static art but I can’t say that I’ve been to many truly moving exhibitions. These days, the overuse of the words “immersive art exhibit” is enough to make an person cringe and slink in the other direction, away from the herds of insta-Tok-’fluencers who these installations tend to serve: sweeping environments with nothing to do but take pictures.
Rock Bottom is different.
arebyte’s mentorship of emerging artists establishing a career in the industry means that young talent gets real sponsorship, real funding, to do something bigger than they might manage in university or in their own home.
Devised from a miasma of queer, ecological, and Northern English influences viewed through a Spongebob-shaded glasses, what you experience is a sandbox-style gallery of different game experiences (with custom-designed handheld tentacle controllers), video works, and sculpture. And while on the surface a casual visitor might take Rock Bottom as maybe an underwhelming compilation of several artists’ work on the same theme, what impressed me is that the whole thing came from one creator.
Modest in scale but expansive in scope, Abe Sugarman’s solo exhibition Rock Bottom shows promise. Rock Bottom offers a fleshed-out taster of future delights: it’s not quite at “I’d pay money for this”, but it’s an excellent hands-on pitch to investors, which is likely exactly what arebyte is hoping for with their program.
Rock Bottom is free to enter and would be a lovely hour’s diversion for anyone around the Canning Town / East India neighborhood.
— Shelley Snyder, London Curator
Rube G.- The Consequence of Action — JODY OBERFELDER PROJECTS
$25 Donation; New York; Run Concluded
Gibney Dance Center has been home to many experimental pieces of dance over the years, but today I enter one of the studios to a playful experiential piece from choreographer Jody Oberfelder. Invited to pick a kindergarten-style stool from a pile, I make my way around the room to find a dot to sit upon. As the audience gradually takes their places, we have formed a long snaking S shape around the room. A dancer moves to the edge of the line and begins to play with the audience member next to them.
Dressed in brightly colored, mismatched overalls, a ragdoll instantly comes to mind. She smiles brightly as she stares at the first person in the chain. A simple movement implies motion and for it to be passed along to the next person in line. Once the pattern is established, quickly we become the human dominoes in this lovely experiment of cause and effect, and our bodies become a delightful version of the childhood game Telephone.
This idea of energy being transported from person to person continues throughout the piece, with more complex and impressive choreographed moments from the team of three talented dancers. Their movement feels childlike and improvised, but the quick transitions to tight line movement show the strict choreography that has clearly been worked on greatly in this 60-minute performance. Beautiful dance by the professionals is interspersed with these playful moments of movement which the entire audience is interacted with, using various visual and sound cues to help us improvise our addition to the piece. A cameo appearance from the more senior choreographer herself is a fun addition with her playful movement quality that defies gravity.
Having been part of the immersive world for some time, I did find myself awaiting the “twist” or moment late in the performance where a dark undertone might arise, or a deep meaningful message suddenly appear. Instead the piece continued with its childlike wonder, and joy seemed to be the purest possible consequence of the actions that we as the audience decided to take. A delightful performance of interactive dance, from a company of well respected dancers, I look forward to seeing where and when we are invited to play next.
— Edward Mylechreest, New York City Correspondent
The Tempest — Shakespeare Center LA & After Hours Theatre Company
$49–129; Los Angeles, CA; Now — April 16
It’s felt like there’s been a bit of an immersive drought in LA for the past few months, but The Tempest has rolled in and brought storms to the area. The collaboration between Shakespeare Center LA and After Hours Theatre Company is a combo of immersive and traditional theatre that offers something for fans of either form.
The immersive section makes up the first hour or so of the performance, starting with the first scene of The Tempest. The teams behind this have impressively transformed a section of the Shakespeare Center LA into the deck of a ship where attendees can chat with the crew or get a themed cocktail before the first scene plays out.
After escaping the storm, you’ll wash up on the island at the center of The Tempest. Around the stage and seating, there are different areas related to characters from the play, each offering a puzzle to be solved. The puzzles are relatively simple, but packed with a lot of Tempest flavor that ties into the show. After getting all of the answers, attendees may be able to access a secret area that ties a bow on the immersive section.
The immersive stuff here won’t blow the socks off of people who are in deep (read: me, probably you), but it is a great entry point for, let’s say, people who are attending The Tempest at Shakespeare Center LA. It’s all very immersive beginner friendly and offers a way to get new people playing with core elements of the immersive sandbox including interaction with actors, sets you can explore and move through, and some puzzle-y type stuff. Plus, it all provides a nice segway into the show proper by setting the tone and establishing some of the characters people are about to meet.
Once that section wraps up, it’s onto The Tempest proper, performed in a theatre-in-the-round style where the sets from the immersive section help round out the rather large theatre space, but there’s nothing immersive about this part. I’ve never actually seen this piece of Shakespeare before, so can’t speak to the way this one might be traditionally performed. To me, it all seemed pretty solid, but the show is very dependent on the actor playing Prospero. Here, that’s Chris Butler, whose performance felt modern and on a different wavelength than the rest of the cast. It took a bit for me to gel with Butler’s style, but by the end it was working for me as a way to contrast Prospero with everyone else.
I walked away impressed by what Shakespeare Center LA and After Hours Theatre Company have put together here. It’s a fun way to use immersive elements to enhance a traditional theatre production rather than trying to shoehorn in some audience interaction just to slap immersive on the poster.
— Kevin Gossett, LA Reviews Editor
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