This week we've got three reviews for you, two of productions which have already run their course in L.A. and NYC (the curse of pop-ups) and one which is just settling in to a strangely parched London.
(I would have made this week's theme "shows in/with bars" but the middle review isn't set in a bar.)
NoPro is 100% reader & listener supported. Support our work by becoming a subscriber, which comes with access to our newsletter & Discord, or drop a one-time gift in the Tip Jar of any amount to share your love of immersive experiences.
Want more? Check out our most recent edition and our REVIEWS section.
Check out our How To Get Covered By NoPro guide to submit your events & experiences for review. Want the opportunity to get your work listed in our newsletter & socials? Submit a listing to Everything Immersive.
In Closure (New York City)
Waxwing Productions
$45; The Urbane Arts Club, NYC; July 23rd to July 26th
Waxwing Productions has been in the space for a while with their Immersive Trilogy series, each a set of three quickly devised immersive works. The Trilogies were interesting and original, so I was intrigued to see what Waxwing would bring with its first full length piece, In Closure. Unfortunately, the move to the larger format did not maintain the charm or quality of the shorter work.
I don’t know where to begin critiquing In Closure. The performers were all competent, specifically a live cellist (Rachel Rice), so the fault didn’t lie there. But nearly everything else was flawed. The audience was too large for the small rooms, so many visitors were locked out of parts of the performance. Music choices were extremely cheesy – whole scenes were scored to Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” or the clichéed “Auld Lang Syne”, songs heard so often they are stripped of emotional meaning. And the content was ridiculous – characters danced with display skeletons on metal rods for several minutes or handled actual leeches. In the aforementioned skeleton dance, I personally missed getting hit by a falling metal pole by inches when the skeleton was tossed on to a table nearby.
The writing was the most egregious error. In Closure seemed to be about domestic abuse and child loss, but it told that story through the vaguest poetic language and the most banal choreographies (i.e. run to embrace and then throw each other away). The characters were a couple who interacted and a third observer who I guess was an older version of the woman in the couple; this was never explained. I only think there was child loss because there was a projection of an ultrasound in one room. There was a phone that no one was supposed to pick up that when lifted was meaningless garbles; a chime sounded occasionally, marking time pointlessly.
In Closure was trying to evoke universal emotions of suffering and loss, but with no specific details - no biographies, no context, no features – it just all became generic and I couldn’t connect with any of it. Ultimately, In Closure fails because it’s about nothing. When the content is this vague, there’s no humanity to experience and thus nothing to feel. It’s sad to see Waxwing miss so hard here given their earlier success, but if you have nothing to say, the correct answer is to say nothing.
— Nicholas Fortugno, New York Senior Correspondent
Peaky Blinders: Underworld (London)
PB London Experience Limited and Banijay Rights Limited
From £25.00; near London Bridge Station;
Booking through December 2026
Longtime NoPro readers may recall, my first-ever review was for a Peaky Blinders immersive show, Peaky Blinders: The Rise, located in Camden Town. Well, the more things change, the more they stay the same, and I recently found myself re-entering the world of the Peaky Blinders, this time at London Bridge for the 60-minute open-world Peaky Blinders: Underworld.
Unlike my previous Peaky experience, this is less a show and more of an attraction. Guests enter through the show's own Garrison pub, where the soundtrack seemingly always includes "Red Right Hand," and you first meet the costumed actors doing their best "Brummie" accents and encouraging you into the spirit of things. Duck behind a discretely-placed curtain, and find yourself with two possible "missions" to solve in the elaborate set, which includes the Shelby's place, Chinatown, a fairground, and so on.
Guests can do as much or as little as they want in their allocated hour, although that proves plenty of time to solve both puzzles to complete the "missions," one of which involves facilitating some smuggling, while in the other, a snitch in the organization must be caught. There are also some fairground games with prizes, but these are nastily difficult to win. As a vintage playscape with some puzzles and plenty of Easter eggs for Peaky Blinders fans, it's a fine time. But don't expect to actually meet Tommy, Arthur, or any other named characters, and while the cast are giving their all and having fun as assorted gangsters, they're spread relatively thin on the ground, so you'll be left to your own devices much of the time.
Is this all groundbreaking theatrical art? No, it isn't. But a pint of "Shelby Lager" sure does taste better after cracking a safe and having a go at the darts game, and I can tip a flat cap to that.
–Ellery Weil, London Correspondent
Romeo & Juliet (Los Angeles)
EverFound Arts/New Forms LA
$45 Sassafras Saloon; Aug 28 - 30
With a weekend Shakespeare pop-up at a bar venue with a lot of character like Hollywood’s Sassafras Saloon one doesn’t necessarily look to assess what the show is as a finished product so much as looking at the shots that are being called and the strengths — and weakness — on display.
The good news for New Forms LA and director Marissa Pattullo is that there are a lot of evident strengths, and the short run in the New Orleans styled bar turned event venue has highlighted what should be addressed for a potential longer run, be it at the Saloon or elsewhere.
We’ll start with what works — which is a lot — and which begins with the well articulated cut of the play itself, which brings in enough of the script to flesh out the world of fair Verona where our scene is laid to give weight to the context of the ill fated lovers. I’ve seen full Shakespeare festival runs of the play that have done a poorer job of setting up the global stakes of the story with more of the text, and whoever cut the play should give themselves a pat on the back for this. (Not something I expect to be writing in an immersive review, but we don’t get full Shakespeare all that often.)
The cast also has some truly standout performances, with Sarajane Bradford’s turn as Romeo being one of the strongest I’ve seen, and I’ve seen a lot over the decades. Mason Conrad, to no surprise to those who are familiar with his work, articulates Friar Laurence’s agency in the story with a degree of clarity that felt like the Bard’s original intent. Victoria Strange, our Juliet, is a cinematic knockout whose scenes with her Nurse — Ashley Busenlener in a great turn in her own right that makes me wish I got to see the Last Call Theatre Executive Director act more often — and family hit both the comic heights and elevate the emotional stakes of the show.
Also fit for praise is the chemistry betwixt Mercutio (Danny Hermon) and Benvolio (Michelle Takla) which felt like it could sustain a spinoff, Bradford’s dance choreography in key sequences, and the parking lot sword showdown between Mercutio and a surly Tybalt (Ian Roettger, who choreographed the fight) that moves us into intermission (there’s a bar minimum to meet, after all) and put the Saturday night audience’s manic energy into a bit of check as the tragic elements of the play kicked in, recentering the focus where it needed to be: on a pretty damn good production of the play in a non-traditional space.
What was at issue the whole way through is the tension between the action of the play — smartly rendered in site-responsive ways that took advantage of the Saloon’s many spaces and hidden features — and the actions of the audience, who had the verve of the junior high class shipped in to see Twenty Sided Tavern when I saw that last Fall.
It’s not the audience’s fault that they were into the show and felt at liberty to cheer, jeer, and shout. Indeed the show gave them permission to in the preamble by having characters talk with them and elicit their loyalties to Montague or Capulet. Which is fun, but an expectation that a fairly straight — no pun intended as the production itself is very proudly queer in a refreshingly matter-of-fact way — site-responsive staging of the play can’t really pay off.
A “hot” audience in a theatre isn’t that much of an issue, whether it is the Globe or your local 99-seater. But here, the actors are two feet away and not putting their voices on blast so as not to blow away the closer folks, while some drunk dudes with running commentary are directly competing with the action of the show. (Afterwards I noted they were friends of a performer. Way to go, bros.) Creating the portal between the real world and the play is the purpose of a proscenium, but this show — as the name of this website implies — has no proscenium and so even the audience chatter actually inspired by the show served to pull focus and obscure some excellent character work.
If the production had wanted to go full camp this tension would have been less of an issue, indeed it could have been leaned into. But that would’ve sacrificed the core performances which were worth giving over our attention to.
The good news is that if the ensemble wants to take another bite of the apple these are solvable issues in whichever direction they want to turn the dial — be it more interactive and wild or more site-responsive and dramatic in direction.
Given what they manifested this last weekend, they should give in to the temptation to take a bite.
– Noah "Word Limit? What Word Limit?" Nelson, Publisher
Discover the latest immersive events, festivals, workshops, and more at our new site EVERYTHING IMMERSIVE, home of NoPro’s show listings.
NoPro is a labor of love made possible by our backers. Join them today and get access to our Newsletter and Discord!
In addition to the No Proscenium website and our podcast, and you can find NoPro on Bluesky, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and in the Facebook community also named Everything Immersive.
Discussion