There will be a bag and coat check when you enter the space.
Purchase the earliest show time. No matter what ticket time you bought, show up 45 mins before the first entry time, and be closest to the front of the line as possible. If the Queen herself knows, she’s not talking.There are multiple entry times throughout the first hour of the show. After Queen of the Night’s revels are over (and the diners have tossed their cutlery into giant bins and taken a final turn on the dance floor), it’s hard to know what to take away from the evening, aside from a good pork dinner and a lot of new friends in heavy mascara. Stop Hitting Yourself includes some pretentious babble about environmental responsibility and the greed of society, but it’s too muddled and haphazardly inserted to carry any real weight. As impressive as Sleep No More is as a piece of installation art, any glimpses of coherent drama (or Macbeth) are few and random.
What’s missing from all the fun and games - not to be a spoilsport! - is a little content. The fellow who drops his underpants onstage in Stopping Hitting Yourself is, I have to assume, an audience plant - but the scary thing is that I’m not entirely sure. The amazing thing about the patrons who become part of the show in Queen of the Night is how willingly and well they play their parts. It’s also a reflection of the increasingly fuzzy line, in the age of YouTube, between performer and audience. Immersive theater is a healthy reaction to the stodginess and predictability of so much conventional theater, and it’s provided a new palate for innovative choreographers and designers ( Queen of the Night is directed by Christine Jones, a set designer for Broadway’s American Idiot and the Met’s Rigoletto). The show has been drawing sellout crowds for nearly three years in New York City, and has inspired more producers and theater companies to lure hip young audiences into the theaters by getting them out of their seats. The explosion of immersion shows can be traced to the phenomenal success of Sleep No More, the Punchdrunk company’s riff on Macbeth, in which theatergoers don masks and wander through a spooky abandoned hotel, occasionally encountering shards of Shakespeare.
A third person is called up and asked to strip naked. A second is asked to show off his belly button. All of this is the jumping-off point for some lively song-and dance numbers, and interludes in which the actors step out of character and coax members of the audience onstage. He’s the narrator, a self-described “wild man” who is dragged into some sort of society-ball contest, in which he’s dressed to the nines and taught etiquette, amid a circle of rich swells who might have stepped out of a 1930s Mitchell Leisen film. It opens with a bedgraggled, half-naked man lying onstage and pleading for someone to help him get up. Stop Hitting Yourself is a more conventional theater piece (actors on a stage, audience members in seats, actual dialogue), though it doesn’t make much more sense. That show, too, wallows in decadent deco-era opulence - ornate chandeliers, gold statuary - and there’s even another Queen, though this one is a dowager played by a guy in silver wig, who travels around the stage on a miniature scooter. The show opened just a few days after another interactive piece, Stop Hitting Yourself, from the Austin-based theater collective Rude Mechs. Queen of the Night is the latest entry in what is fast becoming an epidemic of “immersive” theater in New York and around the country. Except for a brief appearance by a Vegas-style emcee, there is virtually no dialogue, and the Queen has little to do except for a climactic solo dance, in which she writhes in anguish, tosses her blonde hair wildly, and shows off more body flexibility than any of the ice dancers in Sochi.
#Sleep no more running time series#
Mainly it’s a series of circus acts and other pantomimed stunts - jugglers, acrobats, rope climbers, a fellow with a bullwhip threatening a naked girl - sort of a highlight reel of Cirque du Soleil, downtown performance pieces like Traces and Blue Man Group and 1970s softcore porn, all set to a pulsating rock underscore and a decadent-deco mise-en-scene. The show (the creation of Randy Weiner, producer of the downtown theater hit Sleep No More) supposedly draws characters from Mozart’s The Magic Flute, but no ordinary theatergoer without production notes will be able to tell. The occasion for these festivities? That’s a little harder to say.
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