noproscenium.com: Growing up Catholic, it was always a running joke that Sunday mass was a “workout” with the number of times the congregation stands up and sits back down again. It wasn’t until recently that I realized the same standard held true for immersive theatre set inside a church. Rooftop Musical Society’s immersive spin on the Sondheim classic Into the Woods takes place throughout the two floors of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church of Williamsburg, with the “woods” set in the more traditional stage space upstairs and everything else (the Baker’s house, the castle, and Jack’s house) set in the open room downstairs.
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I find this super ironic considering the design of our about to be production of Into the Woods that will be up this spring. However, the real difference between this version done by Rooftop Musical Society and Carnegie Mellon University is the immersive quality of the production described in this article. It sounds somewhat Sleep No More esque within the descriptions, however, considering how starkly different the content is between Into the Woods and Macbeth, this immersive experience might be a tad bit more happy that Sleep No More’s. I think it’s awesome that this particular company has a goal of making “pop up” immersive experiences. What doesn’t work about this experience as the author of this article describes is the size of the audience is too large. Immersive experiences are all about the connections that can be made between audience members and the cast of characters. If you don’t get those small intimate moments than you really lose a lot of the experience.
I think the author of this article pinpoints everything that I would assume to be problematic in an immersive theatre experience such as this one. There are so many ways that it can go wrong, especially because Into the Woods simply was not made to be a walkthrough type musical. To me, it sounds like they just performed a few numbers downstairs, stopped the flow of things to make the entire audience go upstairs, and then finished the show. That's not the worst thing in the world to experience, but it just seems unnecessary. In theatre I feel that it is valid to make creative choices like this, but part of the duty of a designer is to make sure the point of a choice is easily readable to the audience. Otherwise there really is no point in doing it at all. It seems like going to this show would not be very pleasant, and I really think it is impossible to use immersive theatre effectively without changing a script or choosing a show better suited for the environment. I also find it strange they had it in a church, as that seems to have no significance to the plot of Into the Woods.
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