Presidential Crowd Work in ‘FDR’s Very Happy Hour’

AMERICAN THEATRE: Almost alone among American presidents, our 32nd, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, is still remembered not for a single incident or tic but for a cluster of iconic landmarks and attributes: the New Deal and World War II, the ivory cigarette holder and pince-nez glasses, fireside chats in an arch mid-Atlantic accent, the wheelchair.

Masks, Portals, and Non-Museums

ExhibiTricks: The Museum Exhibit Design Blog: Every few years, someone outside the museum world builds something that makes all of us inside the museum world squirm a little. People line up around the block. They pay real money (often more than museum admission). They come back again and again. And they tell their friends with the kind of breathless enthusiasm we'd love to hear about our galleries. So instead of grumbling about "those immersive things," let's look at what a few of them do right and steal (er, borrow) their best ideas.

CABARET: THE KIT KAT CLUB Experience Now Open at Balthazar Restaurant

BroadwayWorld: For six weeks only, Balthazar Covent Garden will partner with the seven-time Olivier Award-winning musical, Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club to create one of the West End's most exciting dining experiences. From 21 September to 1 November, the legendary French brasserie will become home to an exclusive takeover celebrating one of the most successful musicals of all time.

Majestic Rep stages the best night of our lives with 'Prom Night ’99'

Las Vegas Weekly: Teenage rom-coms of the ’90s romanticized prom to an almost religious degree. Anything could happen on this fateful night. Life-altering makeovers could turn the nerdy girl glamorous. Grads could form new alliances over a shared joint in the alley. And that school bully might finally take a beating—if we’relucky.

Hendrick’s brings an immersive gin experience to NYC this April

www.timeout.com: If your ideal night out includes both a perfectly balanced cocktail and a slightly surreal fever dream, Hendrick’s has you covered. The famously eccentric booze brand is bringing a full-blown immersive theater experience to the West Village this month—and naturally, there will be gin. A lot of gin.

Ayrton Diablo shines in “Masquerade”

LightSoundJournal.com: Five-time Tony Award-nominated lighting designer Ben Stanton chose Ayrton Diablo S fixtures for the latest interpretation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s iconic “Phantom of the Opera”: an immersive production called “Masquerade” staged on West 57th Street in Manhattan. ACT Entertainment is the exclusive distributor of Ayrton lighting in North America.

Trans Rights Rising: 2 Shows Revisit the Compton’s Cafeteria Riots

AMERICAN THEATRE: Where can you go where it feels safe to sit with relaxed shoulders? When I first moved to Seattle in 2005, it was Bauhaus, a coffee shop on the corner of Melrose & Pine. My first visit was spent upstairs, reading Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World straight through. I left feeling exposed, as if Clowes had read the most private entries from my Livejournal and put them to print. A few months later, a friend and I stood in line to order, eyeing a barista perched on a counter, changing an LP in the record player. My friend turned to me and said, “I’m going to be the mother of his children someday.” By 2007, I was nannying their firstborn.

Gatz review – the Great Gatsby performed in eight and a half hours of attentive, immersive joy

Adelaide festival | The Guardian: A man enters his office in the morning, finds his computer on the fritz and, after a few attempts to turn it on and off again, comes across a copy of F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. So he starts to read and when his colleagues enter they find themselves taking on the characters, and soon the novel unfolds around us, word by word. The New York theatre company Elevator Repair Service has produced a work that is not quite adaptation – given it doesn’t really adapt the novel at all – but that is utterly transfixing nonetheless.

With virtual characters in real life, 'An Ark' experiments with mixed-reality performance

NPR: One of the first plays written for mixed reality recently opened in New York. "An Ark" is about the joys and terrors of being human, and it's all-British cast includes acting royalty Ian McKellen. But if you go to a performance, you will discover that Mr. McKellen and his fellow actors are not actually in the theater with you.

Coming Soon: Lonely Hops

www.noproscenium.com: Birch House Immersive's annual Valentine's Day show Lonely Hearts returns to Chicago for its ninth year this week in the for of Lonely Hops, which moves the action to Forbidden Root brewery’s Cultivate Ravenswood brewpub, which becomes the Pfeltenhopps Brewery in the world of the show.

Refreshed, Modern & Engaging: The Innovative Design For An Immersive Adaptation Of "Phantom of the Opera"

ProSoundWeb: “Forget everything about how you would typically do this, and then let’s figure out how we are going to do it.” This was theatrical sound designer Brett Jarvis’s instruction to his audio team when they began work on the sound design for Masquerade, a cutting-edge, immersive adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera, directed by Diane Paulus.

A Play Without Live Actors: Is ‘An Ark’ Theatre’s Afterlife?

AMERICAN THEATRE: As An Ark opens, actor Golda Rosheuvel enters stage right and sits down in one of four chairs. She looks directly at you, maintaining deep, expectant eye contact. She smiles at you and nods understandingly. Do you smile back? I did. Almost involuntarily. A human reflex: subconscious mirroring.

Hitchhiker’s Guide, London: Inside the mad genius of making an immersive Douglas Adams stage show

The Independent: Arvind Ethan David remembers the very first time he encountered Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. “A copy was lying about in my grandmother’s house,” he explains. “I must have been about 12, and I distinctly recall going, ‘Can books do this?’” Adams’s words, he says, “do something different to you”. “More than any other novelist, he reaches into your brain, sort of tickles it, and stirs stuff up.”

Howard Sherman on Masquerade and Andrew Lloyd Webber

www.thestage.co.uk: The Andrew Lloyd Webb-aissance rolls on. Following such highlights as Jamie Lloyd’s Sunset Boulevard in London and New York, Jesus Christ Superstar at the Hollywood Bowl, the ballroom Cats at Performing Arts Center NYC and Lloyd’s Evita in the West End, the latest entry is set up not in a theatre, but in a four-story, former art supply shop down the block from Carnegie Hall in New York.

Experiential entertainment is having a gold rush but commercial success is far from certain

Business | The Guardian: When the first ever stage adaptation of the global book and film franchise The Hunger Games opens its doors in London next week, fans paying up to £200 have been promised an “electrifying” and “immersive” experience.

Research on Mystery Escape Room Finds “Fun” May Be the Best Way to Create Stronger Corporate Teams--and Families

Business Wire: University researchers are learning that participants having fun breaking out of Mystery Escape Rooms (www.mysteryescaperoom.com) are also capturing best practices for leadership styles, productivity and diversity. Carnegie Mellon University is reviewing data from 1,381 teams; initial findings show the most successful teams have collaborative leaders, open communication and diverse teammates.

Where Does Immersive Theater Go From Here?

Dance Magazine: It's 9:30 pm on a Thursday night in November; my eyes close as I hear the familiar, haunting notes of the closing music for Then She Fell. Music I've heard thousands of times before. Eerie, swelling strings that have signaled the beginning of a dinner break with fellow castmates, or the end of a long night. In this particular moment, on this particular evening, my mind begins to unwittingly sift through memories like yellowed papers in an old filing cabinet, the ink smeared just barely, the pages crumbled in a perfectly satisfying and familiar way. I have been here countless times before and yet this time is remarkably different.

Stove becomes stage in Playful People's interactive cooking class with theater twist

Datebook: Broadway actor and San Jose native Aaron Albano had his stage set: garlic, onion, distilled white vinegar, soy sauce, chicken legs, spices and a rice cooker. And it was important to have a rice cooker filled with good rice — none of that “cheap garbage rice,” he instructed his audience in advance.

3D Immersive Sound: Blending Art and Science

Church Production Magazine: A key element in the powerful worship services of Pastor David Cooper at Atlanta’s Mount Paran Church is great audio. So, when the church’s aging sound system started experiencing failures, Mount Paran’s technical director, David Mendoza, started looking for solutions. “The 15-year-old sound system was original with the building,” Mendoza recalls, “and its failures and weak points were becoming more and more obvious.”

The Virtual Arena: The Ascendance of Arena-Scale Entertainment

VRFocus: While some pontificate that location-based VR has probably taken a terminal hit from COVID – at the same time we have reports on the reopening of venues in Asia and Europe and even America, and see the return of the audience, though in tentative numbers. One aspect of the successful growth of LBE VR before the ravishes of the global health crisis closed all forms of social interaction and entertainment, was the growth in interest of “Arena-Scale”, also dubbed “Free-Roaming” or in Asia “Walking Attractions”.