Las Vegas’ Majestic Repertory Theater is making a splash in Los Angeles this Winter, bringing some Vegas’ heat to the southland with two of their hit plays: THE CRAFT'D: An Unauthorized Musical Parody, based on the 1996 cult film The Craft, and Aaron Mark’s Empanada Loca, in an intimate staging.
The later, inspired by the legend of Sweeney Todd, leans on Majestic Rep Artistic Director Troy Heard’s extensive immersive theatre background — Heard has brought many an immersive project to life at Majestic Rep and done extensive work under the Table 8 Immersive including for clients like Cirque Du Soleil and Usher.
Empanada Loca takes the audience into the tunnels below Manhattan, for “Grand Guignol horror that will crawl under your skin.” Marks play has had many incarnations, and Heard tells us about the evolution of the show ahead of the LA premiere of this all new staging starting February 5th in North Hollywood.
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No Proscenium: Tell us a little bit about your experience! What’s it about? What makes it immersive?
Troy Heard: Empanada Loca is a fricking delicious horror tale/solo show written by Aaron Mark. I was intrigued by its description of a gender-flipped Sweeney Todd set in modern day Washington Heights, and I completely devoured Dolores’s tale of love, loss, weed, and oh-so-bloody revenge.
In an abandoned tunnel far below Manhattan, Dolores spins a story of falling in love with a charismatic drug dealer; her thirteen year prison sentence for taking the fall for him; her release and return to her newly gentrified stomping grounds; her reunion with the quirky owner of Empanada Loca, the eponymous restaurant; and her new occupation: giving basement massages to unlikely customers. But when the bodies start piling up…well, surely you know where this is going…
Our production puts you face to face with Dolores herself with an intimate, immersive design.
NP: What was the inspiration for your upcoming experience?
TH: When the lockdown ended way back in 2021, I was looking for a small show to reopen Majestic Rep. One of our longtime company members, Amanda Guardado, was hungry to sink her teeth into something meaty - so we staged Empanada in our main space. However, we didn’t know that Aaron, the writer, was living in Los Angeles at the time until he surprised us by driving over and attending a performance. Fortunately, he absolutely loved the production and our friendship grew from there.
Jump ahead several years: Dolores haunted Amanda and me so frequently we wanted to tackle it again. However, I didn’t want to do another traditional staging of what is really a very intimate tale. So I pitched Aaron on a small production that would seat no more than twenty-five guests squeezed cosily within Dolores’s subterranean lair. He got excited about the concept and shared lots of visual resources he’d collected over the years during the various iterations of Empanada as a stage show, Audible podcast, and Amazon Prime series.
So for Halloween 2025, we transformed Majestic’s back space into a New York City subway utility tunnel (and Dolores’s lair) with lighting by Cory Covell and a haunting soundscape by Aldair Callejas.
NP: What do you think fans of immersive will find most interesting about this latest experience?
TH: Although Empanada Loca isn’t typically what I consider “immersive,” the intimacy of the space combined with the technical elements really traps us in Dolores’s world. The most frequent (and gratifying) response we received from individual audience members was that they were so drawn into the experience, they completely forgot there was anybody else present besides Dolores and themselves.
NP: Once you started designing and testing what did you discover about this experience that was unexpected?
TH: We leaned into the jump scares during our first staging of the show in 2021, employing a great deal more movement. This last time, however, we took a cue from Aaron and found the slow burn - using stillness to create the kind of terror that creeps up your spine and leaves the theatre with you. So much of his writing is deliberately hypnotic, through the rhythm of his dialogue and the vividness of his descriptions, that we found ways to heighten the isolation further through extremely minimal, and well chosen, lighting.
Although the scenic elements we’re bringing to Los Angeles are scaled down from the Vegas production - due the height difference of the After Hours Theatre Company venue - the lighting and sound design are going to transfer intact. And Amanda’s performance is so entrancing, we’re looking forward to bringing new audiences even closer to her grasp.
NP: What can fans who are coming to this, or thinking about coming to this, do to get into the mood of the experience?
TH: Check out Mark Singer’s documentary Dark Days, about the original “Mole People” in New York’s subway tunnels. As you’re driving to the show in NoHo, bump along with a curated playlist of Boogie Down Bronx classics (Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, Beastie Boys, etc.). And if Dolores’s tale leaves your mouth watering after (you sicko), you can find a delectable selection of hot empanadas at Bodega Delights just a brief walk away!
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