In fact, the hotel has a 1930s hotel jazz bar called the Manderley where the audience can enjoy the live music and have a drink after the theatrical experience is done. It includes is six floors of indoor/outdoor sets that include typical hotel features like a lobby, but it also has a sanitarium, streets of the fictitious Scottish town Gallow Green, a speakeasy, grand bedrooms, courtyards, a forest, a crypt, a fantastic ballroom and more. The McKittrick Hotel isn’t a typical hotel. The audience can freely walk through the sets and touch items and find clues to the story. The audience walks at their own pace through a series of appropriately designed rooms and environmental theater through a six-floor fully immersive experience. Sleep No More is a mostly non-spoken film noir inspired adaptation of Macbeth with a little witch trials thrown in the mix, that takes place in the McKittrick Hotel (actually a restored warehouse that has been converted into a performance space in the Chelsea neighborhood area of New York City). This experience also has optional rooftop restaurant and bar options called Gallow Green that are not included with the purchase of a ticket to a performance, but worth considering. However, these shows are just things you watch, Sleep No More, is an interactive theater encounter, called “promenade theater” where you don a mask and interact with actors and are immersed into a dynamic once-in-a-lifetime experience. Even a bad show can present a good storytelling option. Of course, there are Broadway, Off Broadway and even Off Off Broadway options and those who love to watch a good play, musical, comedy show or other kind of live entertainment event. Click on any photograph to see it enlarged.Catching a show is a fun and popular way to spend some time while in New York City. Since the show began, “Sleep No More” now plays seven days a week, and it is popular enough that the “McKittrick Hotel,” still not a real hotel, has become a hub for nightlife, with a restaurant, a rooftop bar, a small concert venue, and a place for special event parties, on Valentine’s Day and other occasions, that offer “Sleep No More” in a package deal. I tired of exploration well before the three hours were up - thanks largely to the clammy and creepy Scream/Eyes Wide Shut masks we were required to wear - but spent some 15 minutes trying to figure out how to exit the place the mute masked ushers weren’t much help. Audience members explore at their own pace for up to three hours. There are also drawers full of relevant photographs and letters to riffle through. One can wander on one’s own through the half dozen floors of close to 100 dimly-lit rooms, some of which don’t feel like rooms at all, such as a graveyard that seems to generate its own fog. It’s up to the theatergoers to follow the characters as they rush up and down the stairs, entering into various startling tableaux vivant – Lady Macbeth washing her hands naked in a bathtub, say - or rough-and-tumble dancing. The production depends on theatergoers’ prior knowledge of the Scottish play, generally a good bet, although the more recently someone has read it (or seen a straightforward production of it), the more the disparate images and chaotic moments of “Sleep No More” will cohere. It is the show that started the latest trend of immersive theater in New York, and it is an engaging if dizzying mix of design, dance and drama – or at least a trigger to recall the drama in Shakespeare’s tragedy, since none of the performers recite the Bard’s lines. It has been running since 2011 in a formerly abandoned club in Chelsea renamed the McKittrick Hotel. “Sleep No More” is Punchdrunk Theater’s staging of Macbeth, as if retold by Alfred Hitchcock and Isadora Duncan.
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