Who: Bush Tetras, the Bongos, Tape Hiss What:Free concert Where:David Rubenstein Atrium, 61 West Sixty-Second St. When: Thursday, August 25, free, 7:30 Why: There will be quite a hum Thursday night at Lincoln Center’s David Rubenstein Atrium when two quintessential local ’80s bands and a groovy new retro group come together for “Turn It Up Two!!” On August 18, Ivan Julian & the Magnificent Six, Gary Lucas, and the Veldt took the stage for “Turn It Up!!,” part of Lincoln Center’s free summer season. This week it’s New York City’s own Bush Tetras, Hoboken legends the Bongos, and the all-star Tape Hiss. The shows are curated by Hoboken musician Jared Michael Nickerson, who will also join in onstage.
“Turn it Up! is a celebration of my too-lit-to-mention ’80s New York City club scene memories,” Nickerson, who played bass for Human Switchboard, said in a statement, adding that the shows are “an acknowledgment that in 2022 there are rockers from that scene, some forty, forty-five years later, still kicking out the jams and turning it up.”
Formed in 1979, Bush Tetras initially broke up in 1983, then reunited in 1995 and 2005; original members Pat Place and Cynthia Sley — cofounder and drummer Dee Pop passed away last October, while cofounder and guitarist Laura Kennedy died in 2011 — will be accompanied by former Sonic Youth drummer Shelley and multi-instrumentalist R. B. Korbet. The band’s video for “Too Many Creeps” helped define the 1908s underground music in NYC.
Over in Jersey, the Bongos burst through with the seminal album Drums Along the Hudson and such singles as “In the Congo,” “The Bulrushes,” and “Numbers with Wings.” Cofounders Richard Barone on guitar and vocals, Frank Giannini on drums, and Rob Norris on bass, with master guitarist James Mastro, who signed on after the first record, will serenade the atrium with classic originals and some sweet covers. Tape Hiss consists of Shelley, Ernie Brooks from the Modern Lovers, and Peter Zummo from Arthur Russell and the Lounge Lizards, along with David Nagler and Pete Galub, performing songs from those bands and more.
Volunteers fall under the spell of master hypnotist Asad Mecci in HYPROV (photo by Carol Rosegg)
HYPROV
Daryl Roth Theatre
103 East 15th St. between Irving Pl. & Park Ave.
Wednesday – Sunday through October 30, $55-$195 www.hyprov.com
There’s a curious aspect to ticket prices for HYPROV: Improv Under Hypnosis, which opened tonight at the Daryl Roth Theatre. The highest-priced tickets are in the first row and on the aisle in the lower rows, nearly double the price in the second row center. After seeing the hilarious show, I understand why.
HYPROV, a combination of hypnosis and improvisational comedy, has been traveling across the US and Canada, along with stops in England and Scotland, since 2016. Canadian master hypnotist and motivational life and performance coach Asad Mecci contacted Scottish-Canadian improv legend Colin Mochrie via an email he sent through the comedian’s website. Mochrie’s manager, Jeff Andrews, discussed the idea with Mochrie and HYPROV was born.
The evening begins with Mecci describing to the audience what they’re in for. Twenty volunteers will come onstage and be hypnotized, locking out their brain’s penchant for self-reflection and embarrassment so the participants will be much less inhibited and able to invest themselves fully in improv comedy sketches. No one will be made to do anything they don’t want to do; instead, they’re so relaxed that they can release their inner performer. Mecci whittles down the twenty volunteers to about five who will then be part of the main show.
So, back to the ticket prices. When Mecci announces that anyone interested in being hypnotized should come to the stage, there’s a mad dash from all over the theater. Thus, if you are sitting in the front row or the lower aisle seats, you have a much better chance of making the twenty-person cutoff than someone sitting, say, in the middle of the twentieth row. My guess is that those paying the premium price are determined to make it to the stage; a woman in the center of my row hesitated just enough to miss the cut by a few people. But no worries; like the rest of us, she was about to have a rousing good time nevertheless.
Asad Mecci and Colin Mochrie set up the next scene in hypnotic improv show at the Daryl Roth (photo by Carol Rosegg)
Part of the fun is watching the muscle-bound Mecci, who studied under hypnotist Mike Mandel and life and business strategist Tony Robbins, do his thing as you try to predict who he will ultimately select. He tests how relaxed and hypnotized the volunteers are by putting them in a few unusual situations; he doesn’t make anyone bark like a dog or act like a chicken, but he does have them search for one of their missing body parts. The night I went, he asked one of the volunteers why he needed it. “Because my mother gave it to me,” he responded, as if it were a family heirloom. He made the cut.
After Mecci chooses that evening’s cast, Mochrie, who has been a regular on several iterations of Whose Line Is It Anyway? for more than twenty-five years, working with Ryan Stiles, Wayne Brady, Greg Hoops, and Brad Sherwood (as well as hosts Drew Carey and Aisha Tyler), takes over. For the next hour or so, Mochrie selects a series of scenes — there are about ten standard setups in the repertoire, with more to be added — and asks the audience to call out prompts, from locations and professions to animals and props. Mecci throws in an extra twist by deciding which of the hypnotized cast will play what role.
Then the sketches unfurl, with Mochrie ready to pick up any pauses and Mecci holding the mic for the volunteers while making sure they don’t snap out of their trancelike state and, even more important, don’t cross any barriers, either psychological or physical. For example, when one young man began a surprisingly entertaining dance, mixing contemporary with ballet, Mecci watched closely to make sure he wasn’t going to whack anyone in the head or take an unintentional dive off the stage. In another scene, two characters were in the midst of a romantic moment when Mecci jumped between them right before they were about to kiss. “That was a close one,” Mochrie acknowledged. Mecci, who has to be careful not to become too much of an audience member himself — he tries his best to contain his own outbursts of laughter — heartily agreed.
Mochrie, who was one of the first popular social media gifs, appears to be having a ball through it all, though he admits that it is scary for him too; he’s used to working with trained professionals, so his instincts have to be even quicker here with the amateur comedians. He also had to sing, quickly noting that music is not his forte, but the hypnotized woman he duetted with knocked it out of the park.
Speaking of music, Rufus Wainwright, who was born in New York but raised in Montreal, has composed an original score for the induction scene, a steady, breathy drone that is heard as the volunteers are being hypnotized. (Mecci had helped Wainwright’s husband quit smoking through hypnosis.) Meanwhile, music director John Hilsen sits off to stage left, improvising at the keyboards as the scenes play out.
Just about anything can happen in HYPROV, with a few important exceptions (photo by Carol Rosegg)
The line of the night didn’t come from Mecci or Mochrie but instead from one of the volunteers who, while portraying a sound effects engineer for an old-time radio show who gets each noise wrong, called out in a high-pitched voice when he was cued for an owl: “owwwwwwwwlllllllll noooooooooooiiiiiiiiiiiise!”
Jo Winiarski’s set features a giant circle on the back wall, right behind a curved bench where the volunteers sit when not part of the show. The colors on the circle change ever so slowly, with a calming effect; the lighting designer is Jeff Croiter, with sound by Walter Trarbach. Longtime television writer and producer Stan Zimmerman (The Gilmore Girls,A Very Brady Sequel) is left with the near-impossible task of directing a production that thrives when it veers toward a certain amount of chaos.
While there are sure to be skeptics who think that at least some of the volunteers have to be plants, Mecci and Mochrie declare that they have never before met any of the people who have made it onstage, and I spoke with two of the participants after the show who both assured me that it was all legit, that they were aware all the time exactly what they were doing but free of any lack of self-esteem or worry that they would embarrass themselves in public.
HYPROV can be a little ragged at times, and there are occasional hiccups and lapses as the improv sketches get under way, but the show is a tribute to what we are all capable of, persuading each of us that maybe we should get on the stage next time and give it a go. Maybe you’ll come home having delivered the line of the night — but you’ll probably need to splurge for those more expensive seats.
Three minutes of footage tell a remarkable story in documentary
THREE MINUTES: A LENGTHENING (Bianca Stigter, 2021)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
August 18-25
212-255-2243 quadcinema.com www.threeminutesfilm.com
“For the Jewish inhabitants of Nasielsk in Poland, nothing remains,” narrator Helena Bonham Carter says in Bianca Stigter’s astounding documentary, Three Minutes — A Lengthening. “The only thing left is an absence.”
In 1938, David and Liza Kurtz, Polish immigrants who had come to New York in the 1890s and found success, took a trip to Europe, where they visited Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, France, and England, on the cusp of the Holocaust. In an unusual move for Americans making a Grand Tour, they visited David’s hometown of Nasielsk in Eastern Europe that August. There, David used his brand-new movie camera to shoot footage in 16mm Kodachrome and black-and-white of the men, women, and children of the village, smiling, goofing around, and preening, of course unaware of what was to come in a very short time.
In 2009, David and Liza’s grandson Glenn Kurtz donated the three minutes of footage to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, for preservation and research. The museum posted it online, hoping that perhaps some of the people in the film could be identified. Glenn further researched the excerpt for four years, detailing his journey in the 2014 book Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film.
“Nasielsk was not an important town, unless you lived there. It was just a town,” Kurtz explains in the documentary. “But of all the Polish towns destroyed in the Holocaust, Nasielsk is among the very few that exists in moving pictures, among just a handful preserved in color.”
In 2015, Dutch historian and cultural critic Stigter made a short work-in-progress film based on the footage (Three Minutes Thirteen Minutes Thirty Minutes), and now she has expanded it into her feature-length debut, Three Minutes — A Lengthening, opening August 18 at the Quad. It’s a haunting investigation of time and memory that focuses exclusively on the 180+ seconds of David Kurtz’s Nasielsk footage; there are no other images in the seventy-minute film. Stigter and editor Katharina Wartena perform a kind of forensic analysis of each moment, zooming in on specific individuals or locations, trying to figure out the name of a grocery store, even determining what kind of trees lined the cobblestone square, understanding that anything could provide critical information.
The style of the film is reminiscent of what filmmaker Peter Greenaway did with Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, and Veronese’s Wedding at Cana, fantastically close examinations of every face and detail on the canvases, but the subjects of Three Minutes are all too real.
“These three minutes of life were taken out of the flow of time,” Bonham Carter says. That becomes particularly apparent when thirteen-year-old Maurice Chandler, born Mozek Tuchendler, is recognized by a family member, and Stigter visits him in Detroit; we hear him as he watches the footage, remembering some of the other residents and telling a charming story of some trouble he and a friend got into one day.
The only misstep, and a minor one at that, is a section in which Stigter slowly fills the screen with thumbnails of every face in the footage; while the point is to give each individual their own moment of identity, proof of their existence, it takes away from the overall flow of the film and its compelling detective-procedural-style pacing. However, stick around to the end of the credits for a little bonus.
Although Stigter, who previously served as an associate producer on Widows and Twelve Years a Slave, both directed by her husband, Steve McQueen, who is a co-producer on Three Minutes, speaks with Kurtz, Chandler, survivor Andrzej Lubieniecki, historian Zdzisław Suwiński, translator Katarzyna Kacprzak, and two of Chandler’s relatives, they are never shown; this film is about the three thousand people who lived in Nasielsk in 1938, fewer than a hundred of whom survived the Nazi invasion. It’s also about all such Eastern European Jewish towns that were decimated in the Holocaust.
“By defining the loss of that world, we might succeed in keeping the memory alive,” Kurtz says. In addition, it’s about the power of the medium of film, how it can capture the past and preserve culture and history that might have otherwise disappeared forever. Stigter has noted that there were other surprising elements that she could have pursued, some of which are included in Kurtz’s book, but she wanted to concentrate solely on what could be discovered and interpreted from the celluloid itself.
Last year, Ruth Katcher, a colleague of mine, found 8mm footage of her family holding a Passover seder in Philadelphia in April 1932, led by her great-grandfather, who, with his wife and children in 1906, had fled Donetsk in what is now Eastern Ukraine. It is a remarkable three-and-a-half-minute scene, which she discusses in an article in the Forward. “The film has special resonance, showing nearly the last seder with the family intact,” Katcher writes.
After experiencing Three Minutes, don’t be surprised if you find yourself going through closets and basements, looking for recorded remnants of your family’s past.
Stigter and Kurtz will participate in a series of Q&As following screenings on August 18, 19, 20 (all at 7:00) and 21 (2:00), moderated by Dr. Ori Z. Soltes, Aviva Slesin, or Annette Insdorf. The film will also be presented September 8 and 12 at the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan.
Who: Paul Auster, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Tina Brown, Kiran Desai, Andrea Elliott, Amanda Foreman, A. M. Homes, Siri Hustvedt, Hari Kunzru, Colum McCann, Douglas Murray, Andrew Solomon, Gay Talese, more What:Public reading of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses Where:The New York Public Library, Fifth Ave. and Forty-Second St., and online When: Friday, August 19, free, 11:00 am Why: “‘To be born again,’ sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, ‘first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly. Ta-taa! Taka-thun! How to ever smile again, if first you won’t cry? How to win the darling’s love, mister, without a sigh? Baba, if you want to get born again . . .’”
So begins Salman Rushdie’s 1988 Booker Prize finalist and Whitbread winner, The Satanic Verses, which famously led the Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa on the Indian-born British-American novelist, calling for his death, complete with a multimillion-dollar bounty. While others associated with the publication of the book have indeed been murdered (Italian translator Ettore Capriolo, Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi; Norwegian publisher William Nygaard and Turkish translator Aziz Nesin survived attacks), Rushdie spent years in hiding but ultimately emerged to become a leading international literary figure. But on August 12, Rushdie was stabbed ten times as he prepared to give a talk and lecture at the Chautauqua Institution; the alleged assailant, twenty-four-year-old Hadi Matar, claims to have read only two pages of The Satanic Verses but decided to try to kill Rushdie after watching numerous speeches of his on YouTube.
Rushdie, who has been writing and speaking about human rights and free speech around the world for decades, will be celebrated on August 19 at 11:00 am when a group of his friends and colleagues gather on the steps of the New York Public Library in Midtown for a public reading of his most famous book; there was also a public reading of the work a few days after the fatwa was declared, some thirty-three years ago. Organized by PEN, the NYPL, PenguinRandom House, and House of SpeakEasy, “Stand with Salman: Defend the Freedom to Write” will include such authorial stalwarts as Paul Auster, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Tina Brown, Kiran Desai, Andrea Elliott, Amanda Foreman, A. M. Homes, Siri Hustvedt, Hari Kunzru, Colum McCann, Douglas Murray, Andrew Solomon, and Gay Talese. The grassroots event is open to all and will be livestreamed as well; in addition, you can post your own reading of a short passage on social media using #StandWithSalman and tagging @penamerica.
“We are again facing a watershed moment,” Foreman wrote in a statement. “The war against freedom of expression is gaining strength. Globally, over two thousand writers and journalists have been murdered since Rushdie was sentence to death by Iran. On August 19 we have an opportunity to make a stand: courage breeds courage.”
A 4K restoration of Keane, starring Damian Lewis, comes to Lincoln Center beginning August 19
KEANE (Lodge Kerrigan, 2004)
Film at Lincoln Center, Francesca Beale Theater, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
144 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Opens Friday, August 19 www.filmlinc.org grasshopperfilm.com
Lodge Kerrigan’s remarkable third feature, Keane, is mesmerizing, always teetering on the brink of insanity. Damian Lewis, years before Homeland and Billions, stars as William Keane, whom we first meet as he rants and raves in the Port Authority, filled with anger, paranoia, and a twitchiness that immediately sets you on edge and never lets up. He is trying to figure out what went wrong when his daughter was abducted from the area, but he now acts like just another crazy at the bus depot. As he befriends a desperate woman (Gone Baby Gone’s Amy Ryan) and her daughter (Little Miss Sunshine’s Abigail Breslin), you’ll feel a gamut of terrifying emotions rush through your body. The cast also features such familiar faces as Liza Colón-Zayas, Christopher Evan Welch, Chris Bauer, Frank Wood, Stephen McKinley Henderson, and others in tiny roles.
With Keane, Kerrigan, who made a big indie splash with his 1993 debut, Clean, Shaven, has created a brilliant psychological film centered on one man’s obsession that will leave you emotionally and physically spent. Filmed on location in 35mm with a handheld camera (with only one shot per scene) and natural sound, Keane has a taut realism that will knock you for a loop. You’ll love this film, but it will also scare the hell out of you.
A selection of the 2004 New York Film Festival, Keane is back at Lincoln Center beginning August 19 in a brand-new 4K restoration supervised by Kerrigan and TV and film editor Kristina Boden; Lewis and Kerrigan — who has made only one film since Keane, 2010’s Rebecca H. (Return to the Dogs), instead concentrating on directing episodes of such series as Homeland,The Killing, and The Girlfriend Experience — will participate in a Q&A following the 6:30 screening on August 20, moderated by Christopher Abbott.
Limitless AI immerses audiences in a barrage of digital imagery (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
LIMITLESS AI
ArtsDistrict Brooklyn (AD/BK)
25 Franklin St., Brooklyn
Thursday – Sunday through November 20, $44.50 – $49.50 artsdistrict.live online slideshow
There’s a big-time new artist in town, but it’s not a human being.
Apps such as DALL-E 2, Craiyon, Artbreeder, and Deep Dream offer anyone the opportunity to create a virtual masterpiece by feeding descriptive text into an artificial intelligence generator that then uses an algorithm to output a digital image. The app Midjourney recently found itself in the news when a user named #postpoopzoomies made a series of works in which Emmy-winning Last Week Tonight host John Oliver married a cabbage.
Meanwhile, immersive art experiences have taken off around the world, large-scale, Instagram-friendly installations in which canvases come to life, filling massive rooms with pieces by van Gogh,Magritte,Klimt, and other international favorites.
Turkish artists Ferdi Alici and Eylul Alici of Istanbul’s Ouchhh Studio take both to the next level with Limitless AI, the centerpiece of the new ArtsDistrict Brooklyn (AD/BK) in Greenpoint. The twenty-five-thousand-square-foot space on Franklin St. features three immersive experiences along with a café and an outdoor bar; the cofounders and executive producers of the NYC destination are the Toronto-based David Galpern and Charles Roy.
Limitless AI is a sixty-minute experience divided into five sections; visitors can sit on benches or movable chairs or wander around the ten-thousand-square-foot room, where an ever-changing panoply of spectacular images are splashed onto walls, pillars, and the floor by more than sixty 4K laser projectors. There’s also a mezzanine with a nifty view. Be sure to walk to the various corners to enjoy different perspectives, but be warned that if you look down at the floor as you proceed, you might get a little dizzy, but in a good way.
The show begins with “Poetic AI,” consisting of a barrage of words, letters, and phrases from Galileo, Sir Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, and others, in black-and-white. “Data is the paint. Algorithm is the brush. Architecture is the canvas,” a robotic voice announces. “Twenty million lines of visionary text, unspooled into data, processed by a mechanical mind.”
“Leonardo da Vinci: Wisdom of AI Light,” set to an original score by beloved Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi and multidisciplinary Turkish-Canadian musician, composer, and DJ Mercan Dede, celebrates the genius of Leonardo and such other Renaissance artists as Michelangelo and Caravaggio with digital re-creations, using billions of pieces of data from the paintings, of some of their most famous works, from the Mona Lisa to the Pietà to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; here, Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, in which the fingers of God and the first man nearly touch, evoke the future of artificial intelligence, as if the Supreme Being is passing the torch.
Classic Renaissance paintings are re-created through AI algorithms for immersive Brooklyn installation (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
“Data Gate” repurposes millions of images taken by NASA’s Kepler space telescope, while “Dark Machine” uses data compiled by the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The voice asks, “What goes through the mind of an atom when it explodes? Maybe this.”
Limitless AI concludes with “Superstrings,” which adds a human component. A wide column opens up to reveal a three-piece band performing live; one of the instrumentalists is wearing a headset that monitors her real-time EEG brainwaves, while the algorithm is also picking up information from the people in the crowd, resulting in what the voice describes as “the flickering waves of human consciousness, transformed into light.” The finale is unique for every show.
As with the dueling immersive van Gogh presentations, I find it a strange way to experience classic art; even in the age of Instagram and TikTok, there’s still nothing quite like seeing the originals up close and personal in museums and churches. But the non-art sections of Limitless AI don’t have the same restrictions, letting loose with the unexpected.
It’s sort of like the old days of Laser Floyd and Laser Zeppelin, psychedelically grooving out at planetariums, but replacing rock and roll with visual and mathematical data as the baseline for the imagery. It can be ultracool and beautiful as well as repetitive and head-scratchingly bizarre; it’s best not to get too caught up in taking photos and videos and let the sound and images waft over you, literally.
There are two other immersive installations at AD/BK, set in a pair of side-by-side forty-foot-long white shipping containers in the outdoor back patio. Created by London’s Darkfield, Flight and Séance each takes place in complete darkness, with the audience wearing binaural headphones that make it seem like characters and events are actually present in the real space around you. The twenty-five-minute Flight is reminiscent of Martín Bondone’s Odd Man Out, in which the seated, blindfolded audience goes on a mock plane trip narrated by an Argentine guitarist returning home from America, as well as Simon Stephens’s Blindness, a postapocalyptic tale about strangers trying to survive after an epidemic robs most people of their sight.
Digital images flash on walls and floors in Limitless AI (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Flight involves a meticulously constructed replica of a plane interior. The setup is definitely economy class, right down to the uncomfortably small distance between seats, but the production values are first class, with a series of sounds and videos that all-too-convincingly simulate a sketchy airline and life-changing outcome. Musings about Schrödinger’s cat and the nature of reality make for an enjoyable if puzzling ride.
For the twenty-minute Séance, the audience is arranged on two sides of a long, narrow table, with chandeliers hanging from above and lots of red velvet. Everyone has gathered to attempt to contact spirits; a medium guides the Victorian story as creepy things start to occur, and not just through your headphones. Be sure to sit near the end of the room if you think you might need to suddenly run out.
So, what’s the future of AI art? In 2019, the US Copyright Office ruled that AI art cannot be copyrighted because it “lacks the human authorship necessary to support a copyright claim.” Attorney Ryan Abbott, representing AI pioneer and Imagination Engines president and CEO Stephen L. Thaler in his request for a new hearing, recently told Artnet News, “We disagree with the Copyright Office’s decision and plan to appeal. . . . AI is able to make functionally creative output in the absence of a traditional human author, and protecting AI-generated works with copyright is vital to promoting the production of socially valuable content.”
If the flurry of immersive art presentations have proved anything, it’s that these experiences are all about socially valuable content, particularly when it comes to marrying a Brassica oleracea or other species of wild vegetable.
Interactive experience immerses fans into the creepy world of Stranger Things (photo courtesy Netflix)
STRANGER THINGS: THE EXPERIENCE
Duggal Greenhouse
63 Flushing Ave., Building 268, Brooklyn
Wednesday – Sunday through September 4, children $64 – $96.80, adults $84.90 – $129 strangerthings-experience.com
If you’ve been watching or are up to date with Stranger Things on Netflix, you might have found yourself occasionally having trouble sleeping, especially after certain particularly frightening episodes of the sci-fi horror hit, set in the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana, in the 1980s. Unsurprisingly, the citizens of Hawkins are having their own slumber issues, which is the premise behind Stranger Things: The Experience, an immersive adventure that continues at the Duggal Greenhouse at the Brooklyn Navy Yard through September 4.
The Hawkins National Laboratory (HNL), part of the US Department of Energy, is conducting a sleep study to find out just what is going on in “the Best Small Town in America” — as if they didn’t already know that it has to do with killer creatures and the Upside Down, an alternate dimension where evil, unexplainable events are happening, brought about by the lab itself.
Subjects — er, ticket holders — are led through a series of rooms that begins as a scientific research study into paranormal powers, testing various skills, but quickly turns dangerous. Suddenly the soothing, instructive words of Dept. of Energy executive Sam Owens (Paul Reiser) and HNL head Dr. Martin Brenner (Matthew Modine), affectionately known to his patients as Papa, seem disingenuous as new perils await around each corner.
Beware the demogorgon at Stranger Things experience (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Meanwhile, a group of kids are trying to help, consisting of the goofy but determined Dustin Henderson (Gaten Matarazzo); the always serious Lucas Sinclair (Caleb McLaughlin); the fiercely independent Max Mayfield (Sadie Sink); the deeply sensitive Will Byers (Noah Schnapp), who went missing in season one; Mike Wheeler (Finn Wolfhard), who undergoes the biggest coming-of-age changes over the course of the show; and, at the center of it all, Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), a mysterious young girl with special powers who appears virtually out of nowhere in the first episode. Just as an fyi, you won’t encounter Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder), Sheriff Jim Hopper (David Harbour), Nancy Wheeler (Natalia Dyer), Jonathan Byers (Charlie Heaton), Steve Harrington (Joe Keery), Eddie Munson (Joseph Quinn), Erica Sinclair (Priah Ferguson), or Murray Bauman (Brett Gelman) during the journey, but to say any more would venture into spoiler territory.
Stranger Things: The Experience is like a series of escape rooms, except there is always a way out. The show, created by the Duffer Brothers, has presented thirty-four episodes over four seasons since its premiere on July 15, 2016; each of the uniquely detailed spaces in Duggal Greenhouse is like a new episode, with its own storyline as well as prompts to make sure participants make it through safely.
Although children as young as five are allowed to enter, there are four-letter words, and several of the cool special effects can be legitimately scary for some people of any age, so be prepared. Netflix clearly went all-in on this sixty-minute production, which includes a 3D room that, like the show, makes you question reality. Everything is original to the experience; it does not repurpose existing material. It also knows exactly what fans want, so arrive with an investigative spirit that can lead to a few little bonuses that others might miss. But you won’t be lost if you haven’t finished season four yet. (The fifth and final season is not scheduled to air until 2024 or 2025.)
The experience concludes with a re-creation of the Starcourt Mall, complete with the Scoops Ahoy Ice Cream Parlor, Surfer Boy Pizza, the Time-Out Arcade, a video store, a 1980s-style telephone booth (alas, there’s a dial tone but you can’t make a call), the Hellfire Club merch shop, Rink-O-Mania, the Byers living room (with fab details that need to be seen up close), and the Upside bar, where you can order such drinks as the Demogorgon, the Upside Down, Friends Don’t Lie, the Hopper, and Yuri Gonna Love This and check out a few original costumes and props. There’s also a bonus photo opp room.
Tickets are expensive — $64-$84.90 for standard admission, $96.80-$129 for VIP skip-the-line access, which includes a free drink, a tote bag, and a discount on merchandise — so it’s really meant for the true Stranger Things fan. But for those loyal devotees, some of whom come dressed as characters — everyone is encouraged to dress like it’s the ’80s — it’s wicked fun, a bitchin’, righteously gnarly good time.
To keep up the strangeness, Stranger Sings! The Parody Musical returns to New York City in an updated, immersive, in-the-round production starting September 12 at Playhouse 46 at St. Luke’s. Directed by Nick Flatto and with book, music, and lyrics by Jonathan Hogue, the hundred-minute show features such songs as “Welcome to Hawkins,” “The Dad I Never Had,” “Getting Closer,” “In These Woods,” and “Where There’s a Will.”
