This week finds the Crew in London and New York City, with Nick on a bit of an epic run in the later and Thomas living out some childhood daydreams in the former.
Which is how we wind up with reviews of two wildly different staples of British culture – The Crystal Maze and Romeo & Juliet – in this week's rundown.
Quick: to the Immersmobile! -NN
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The Crystal Maze LIVE Experience (London)
Little Lion Entertainment
Tickets from £52; Ongoing
In the 1990s, ‘The Crystal Maze’ was a mainstay of television. A team travelled through the maze around various themed worlds, solving puzzles in order to win crystals that would allow time in the Crystal Dome. With a cry of “Will you start the fans, please!” gold and silver tickets would be lifted into the air and the team would try and grab gold in order to win a grand prize. With points deducted for pieces of silver collected, I recall host Richard O’Brien sighing that with negative points it really was a waste of everyone’s time.
Please enjoy the ways the show’s games have gone wrong.
While participating in other large puzzle experiences I have felt like I was in the Crystal Maze and now this is my chance. For its tenth year, the Experience has added the Ocean Zone.
My team of four is guided by our delightful Maze Master, Felix, who explains rules and keeps our spirits up for over an hour while we run down corridors from zone to zone and peek in windows, to support each other as we try and win a crystal. The sets are well made and very atmospheric.
Like the show there are four different styles of games. Mental (solving riddles or memory puzzles), Mystery (problem solving), Physical (obstacle course) and Skill (hand eye coordination). Of course there are crossovers between these challenges which had us solving riddles for the Sun God or climbing around a soft play area to hit buttons.
In the original show a failure to complete the challenge or leave the room in time resulted in a ‘lock in’, which cost a crystal to save the person. Fortunately we always got out in time.
By the end we have 10 crystals, allowing us what I describe as “50 seconds of screaming” as the industrial fans in the Dome fling the tickets in our faces. This version scores you by weight of tickets caught and avoids the show’s punishment for getting silver tickets.
(Obtaining 109 points, we would have won the show’s Grand Prize.)
We only do two rooms in the Ocean Zone, a shame as that is what we had specifically come to see. But we carry on. With room time limits of two minutes we play an interesting variety of different challenges and we all get moments to shine in this fun, active series of adventures.
— Thomas Jancis, London Correspondent
Footnotes (NYC)
Theodora Skipitares
$35, La Mama, Feb 27 - March 15, 2026
Puppetry is a fascinating form that I find offers a unique set of aesthetics for storytelling and political commentary. La Mama Experimental Theater has long been a host for innovative and cutting edge puppetry and its latest foray into the medium is Theodora Skipitares’s immersive performance, Footnotes.
Footnotes is a meditation on walking inspired by Rebecca Solnit’s 2001 essay exploration of the topic. The show takes place on several stages in the theater which the audience must (appropriately) walk between. A series of unconnected scenes happen on the different stages, each featuring a different reflection on walking, a different set of puppets, and often a different take on puppetry, whether using shadows, marionettes, screens, or full-body costumes. A live band with two singers provided the audio score and delivered the text of the pieces while about 10 performers manned the puppets.
There were a lot of good elements in Footnotes. The sheer variety of the types and styles of puppetry was fascinating and there were a few moments of really interesting experimentation in the piece. Having a live audio component was a definite plus; the performed narration had a propulsive power that brought some needed energy. And the show was accompanied by a terrific zine-style booklet of images and slogans that was almost worth the price of admission alone. The scenes themselves were mixed, largely due to content. Better scenes leaned into experimentation with puppetry and abstraction, where scenes that either tackled cliched stories or targeted political messages were often too literal and cringy..
But as an immersive work, Footnotes failed. The audience periodically had to turn around or walk to another stage to see the next scene. Footnotes handled this by stopping the action of the story and having a stage manager bluntly deliver the next location to watch via loudspeaker. Immersive has been developing ways to move audience attention since as early as The Donkey Show and this piece certainly had affordances (such as light cues and performers) they could have used to move us. While it was only the bridge between stages, it was shocking how underconsidered and jarring this element was.
I left Footnotes feeling mixed. As a puppet show, it’s uneven but inspiring in moments about what that form can deliver – please do follow La Mama for more amazing work in the medium. But as an immersive show, Footnotes failed to find any interesting stride.
— Nicholas Fortugno, New York Correspondent
Romeo & Juliet Suite (NYC)
Benjamin Millipied & LA Dance Project
$50-$250, Park Avenue Armory, March 3-21, 2026
The Park Avenue Armory is a gallery and performance space known for its capacity to host large events and thus it’s been a regular site of immersive work, although quality has been hit or miss.. Their latest foray is Benjamin Millipied’s take on Prokofiev’s classic ballet Romeo and Juliet. Reimagined as a multimedia showstopper, Romeo & Juliet Suite uses technology in a stunning way to reverse the traditional dance-in-haunted-house format of masked immersive.
I’m not a consumer of ballet, but Prokofiev’s suite was immediately recognizable and powerful, even as a recorded score. The dancers of the LA Dance Project seemed to my naive eye to be universally great; specifically the dancers playing Juliet (Emma Spinosi), Tybalt (Addison Ector), and Mercutio (Kyle Halford) were incredible. There’s a central choreographic concept where the dancers run on and off stage constantly, which worked for me as a metaphor in a classic tragedy whose moral could easily be “everyone please take a second and think.”
But you came to this review for the interactive stuff and here Romeo & Juliet Suite does something fascinating. The Armory is a large, beautiful building with many stunning rooms outside of the main stage. Dancers during the show leave the stage and dance in those areas, some set with mirrors and colored lights, some unadorned. However, the audience doesn’t follow them – instead an incredible live camera operator (Sebastien Marcovici) follows them and films the dance to be displayed on a screen over the main stage. This is a simply breathtaking reversal of what we expect from immersive dance. We get to see the dancers in different spaces, moving in relation to the locations, but we remain seated the entire time. And the use of the camera means cinematic techniques can be applied, so dancers can retreat into the distance, mirrors can create infinite images, and camera movement and zoom can change a scene’s energy.
All this came together into a dynamic narrative performance that even a ballet incompetent such as myself could appreciate. I haven’t liked all of the experiments I’ve seen at Park Avenue Armory, but Romeo & Juliet Suite delivers in every way. It’s a powerful performance and a revelatory take on locative dance.
— Nicholas Fortugno, New York Correspondent
Secrets (NYC)
Drama on the Rocks
$71.45, Secrets Bar at Drai’s Until March 28th
My husband and my’s favorite kind of date is someone else’s. What I mean is, we are Professional Eavesdroppers – if someone else in the restaurant is spilling juicy gossip, 9 times out of 10 we’re also listening. Secrets is an immersive theater experience built upon this exact concept — the audience is cast as people at a bar where a number of scandalous things are unfolding around you. This concept is super strong, I love how it takes a performance studies angle of showcasing the inherent performance gossipers take up when dishing their details, and the setting feels rich for immersive and participatory story building. However, the execution is pretty poor. The script is cringeworthy (and portrays causal racism in a troubling way), audience members are engaged in participation without pay off or intentionality, and the format is very much a structured play in a bar as opposed to a meaningful, intimate immersive experience.
My chief concern is the lack of onboarding in conjunction with the blurry audience behavior expectations. I found myself wondering what the production wanted me to do at multiple points, either because the task I was presented with was confusing or lacking context, or because the experience hadn’t made it clear what behavior was permitted in the world of the play. Some audience members were yapping through the piece (like you would in a real bar, so A+ to them for authenticity), but most others, including myself, found the stage lighting and sound design to indicate that were supposed to quietly observe and direct our attention where they wanted us to. This was further complicated by some performers facilitating participatory moments with tables during some scenes but not in others. But when brazen audience members spoke to a character in the midst of performing blocking, they were quickly shut down. This all added up to a lack of thought about audience experience, which should always be the first concern of the production.
The disappointment here is largely because I saw glimmers of gems in the piece that I wish the production focused on and pursued instead. At the very beginning of the show, as a structured scene was unfolding on the other side of the room, the table next to us asked if we had to wait on a line to get in because their parents were running late. We responded and then continued to watch the couple at this table as they anxiously chatted about the tardy parents. My husband and I spent a while quietly debating whether they were performers or not (they were, which I knew but he didn’t believe). This was incredibly interesting, and was closer to what I thought the show would be like.
I found another area of missed opportunity in the show’s inability to lean into the idea of secrets as a theme in a meaningful way. When I went to the restroom during the show, there was an asynchronous engagement asking you to write secrets down, but I couldn’t help thinking how effective a secret experience with a performer in the bathroom or just outside of it would have been. There was audio of the live show playing over the bathroom speaker, which could have also been modified to be another secret experience, what if the bathroom audio was sharing secrets about the characters or even the audience?
Overall Secrets feels like it needs a back to the drawing board on intention and structure. The concept is really compelling, but the execution issues are too extensive for this gossip girl to look past.
— Allie Marotta, NYC Curator
The Silk Society/Women Who Cut (NYC)
RJ Theatre Company & Ariella Carnell
$35; Williamsburg, Brooklyn; March 1 - 28, 2026
The Silk Society is the immersive salon wrapper around Women Who Cut, a feminist satire exploring three women who attempt to change the world by throwing a sex party. The two pieces form a cohesive narrative experience that largely succeeds at building its world and telling a funny, relevant story.
Guests arrive in a pop-up style salon with food and art that’s being created live. Everyone gets a card for a game where you have to match your card’s quote with someone else’s in the space. All this feels pretty standard to 2020s-era art salons, but Silk Society spins it in a darkly comic way. My quote was about only allowing German luxury cars to merge into my lane; my conversation question is about who I feel is inferior to me. The actors of the show attend the party and interact with you, further reinforcing this parodic and aggressive tone.
After an hour, you are led into the show and watch the play. Women Who Cut features three women throwing a sex party and three men attending it as the hosts slowly reveal their utopian and unhinged idea of what the party is for. The action travels from the basement back to the salon and onto the street as the actors diegetically leave the party and meet again later. I’m not generally a fan of clownish satires, but Women Who Cut surprised me. The story critiques all of its characters, doing a good job skewering the women hosting as much as the men attending. The script drags in places and needs to move a bit faster, but some of the jokes are quite funny and the plot resolves well. The lead performer Chelsea LeSage is phenomenal and has a terrific comic command throughout the entire show.
The Silk Society was created by RJ Theatre Company, who had previously launched If Walls Could Talk, a piece I found surprisingly effective in terms of audience flow and showrunning for a first-time immersive group. Silk Society is a step further in terms of their thinking and design of immersive spaces and multimodal theatrical experiences. I continue to be impressed by what they are designing. Your mileage is going to vary here based on your tolerance for a silly satirical comedy about sex parties, but for what it’s trying to do, Silk Society is well-constructed, well-performed, and at times genuinely funny and thoughtful.
— Nicholas Fortugno, New York Correspondent
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