Immersive theater, the growing trend to blur the lines between performers and audience, will reach an apotheosis of sorts on New Year’s Eve with the opening of Randy Weiner’s “Queen of the Night,” at the Diamond Horseshoe supper club in the Paramount Hotel in midtown Manhattan. Hotelier Aby Rosen has poured $20 million into renovating the 6,000-square-foot space, where the legendary Billy Rose once held sway in the 1930s and ’40s, to prepare for the lavish spectacle, which is loosely based on Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.” A press release describes the show thus: “The Marchesa presents Queen of the Night, a dark debutante ball for her daughter Pamina. Queen of the Night is a fusion of performance, music, circus, cuisine, design, and nightlife that welcomes the audience into a wholly interactive entertainment experience.”
Theatrical impresario Weiner has made no bones about the fact that he finds traditional theater too hidebound. This has been perfectly clear since 1999, when he and his wife, the director Diane Paulus, placed “Midsummer Night’s Dream” in a disco setting in “The Donkey Show.” “I think when there are no rules, then the experience is endowed with curiosity and heightened theatricality,” Weiner told me recently. “I think in those circumstances, it’s not a bad thing to feel lost and confused.” He added that emerging from such an experience “makes you think about your life in a new way.”
Weiner has explored those elements in productions that meld the contemporary with the retro, from The Box, his burlesque place on the Lower East Side, to “Sleep No More,” Punchdrunk’s smash hit at the McKittrick Hotel, which gives a 1930’s noir sheen to “Macbeth.”
For “Queen,” Weiner has assembled a first-class team of artists, including Tony-winning set designer Christine Jones (“American Idiot”) and Shana Carroll, the co-artistic director of Les 7 Doigts de la Main, the troupe that has embellished the current revival of “Pippin,” directed by Paulus, with its dazzling circus arts. Adding the fashion element to the extravaganza are creative director Giovanna Battaglia and fashion designer Thom Browne. Leading the 33-member cast in the genre-bending spectacle are Martha Graham dancer Katherine Crockett as the Marchesa, and Steve Cuiffo (“The Elephant Room”) as Sarastro. The creative team includes Simon Hammerstein, the grandson of Oscar Hammerstein. His participation adds a nostalgic luster to this immersive experience, given that Billy Rose and Oscar Hammerstein were early 20th-century titans in the history of New York’s nightlife. The producers have announced a six-week engagement, which will be followed by other spectacles in the same space.
