Return of live entertainment in Chicago?
‘Immersive Van Gogh’ has sold tickets to 150,000 people at spacious venue
How much pent-up demand exists for live entertainment that involves leaving your home? Chicago finally has helpful data.
At the time of writing, around 150,000 tickets have been sold to “Immersive Van Gogh,” a show that is cranking out admissions on Chicago’s Near North Side from 9 a.m. until 10 p.m. Right now. No Zoom account required.
Despite its title, ”Immersive Van Gogh” is not an art museum exhibit. There are no Van Gogh paintings whatsoever to see at the former Germania Club. There are no artifacts at all.
What people — a whole lot of people — are buying is a show that lands somewhere between film and theater. It’s a high-definition, environmental movie containing original music, images and storytelling. And it’s adaptable to the shape of the building in which it happens to be playing.
In other words, it’s the kind of immersive, communal experience that conventional wisdom says just got blown away by the pandemic and won’t return for years. Convention wisdom, as usual, is wrong.
“Immersive Van Gogh” is the work of an incredibly savvy Canadian theater company. Starvox Entertainment, which also created “Potted Potter: The Unauthorized Harry Experience,” “Evil Dead — The Musical” “Four Chords and a Gun” and “Faulty Towers the Dining Experience” (note the shrewd spelling change).
While most local companies and presenters were stuck trying to figure out a crisis plan and hitting roadblocks, the shrewd Starvox producer Corey Ross somehow figured out a way to bring to Chicago a hit attraction from Toronto (tricky international borders notwithstanding), get it installed in the former Germania Club building (108 W. Germania Pl.) redubbed Lighthouse ArtSpace Chicago (not a typical live venue), hire a staff and still pass muster with a city regulation that has so far limited indoor gatherings to no more than 50. And a lack of competition means a lot more media coverage.
The show had unusual advantages, of course.
There are no live performers — everything is digital. And that meant Ross did not have to deal with safety-conscious unions, although he did need staffers.
He did run afoul of the International Association of Theatrical Stage Employees Local 2, colloquially known as the stagehands union, explaining why a giant rat could be seen for a day or two at Germania Place. But in an interview Tuesday, Ross said he had settled his dispute with the union, and a call to IATSE confirmed both sides were happy. (An IATSE spokesperson also said people had been feeding its rat.)
Better yet for Ross, Lighthouse ArtSpace has several rooms, so it’s possible to get more than 50 people moving through the environment at once while still social distancing everybody. Because the show is digital, it was also possible to extend the performance hours, although it’s still striking to me that the audience demand is so high, even on weekday mornings. It’s indicative, perhaps, of some vaccinated retirees feeling comfortable about the safety of this particular endeavor.
Buildings without fixed seating are seeing a major advantage at present. So are venues with a lot of space allowing for safer entrances and exits. If you can sell a show as something you can safely enjoy with a single companion, aware of others but not too close to them, you are, in the Blago terminology, golden.
There are a couple of other salient points here.
Ross could get this done precisely because he lacks a Chicago staff. Most venues and presenters still have a lot of staffers on furlough and aren’t about to bring people back without more product (it’s a bit like restaffing a well-known restaurant for a month’s worth of reduced-capacity dinners; it makes no sense and the start-up operator invariably can be more nimble).
At one point in our conversation, Ross, a superb marketer of his shows, was telling me how much his immersive and magnified digital images of the licensed Van Gogh pieces allowed for a superior experience than standing at a respectful distance from the works themselves.
“You can better see the brushstrokes but also the artist’s pain, as compared to peering closely at the painting and hoping you are not getting tackled by a security guard,” he said.
I laughed wryly at what the world has become (especially since Ross often does his shows in Toronto in the cavernous room that once printed the analog version of the Toronto
Star), but I also think Ross has homed in on one permanent pandemic change: increased comfort with digital facsimiles.
If you’ve gotten used to talking only to a digital facsimile of your mom, as so many of us have, you’re probably less inclined to make a fuss about that old distinction between the real thing and some digital representation. If you can love on Zoom, you can adore pictures of things in high definition.
This, to my mind, has huge implications for the future of live theatrical entertainment, although Ross is also skilled at making commercial shows out of real art works too, such as the works of the British artist and provocateur known as “Banksy.” He does the same thing with shows about bands like The Ramones and when parodying literary and entertainment properties.
Ross said he doesn’t plan to abandon live performances, arguing instead that this theory of a new digital comfort will be exploited through the environments in which these humans can be seen. In other words, people are sick of screens and the trick, beginning now, will be to make sure they aren’t so aware of them even if they are present.
On Broadway, of course, that already has been happening for a while. No wonder IATSE was anxious to make sure it had a contract to handle that physical stuff that remains to be handled.
Ross’ point is that our pandemic versions that are inferior to what was experienced before the pandemic will be quickly abandoned. Drive-through comedy will be consigned to the trash as quickly as possible, as will rock concerts heard through your car’s speakers. These experiences might be better than nothing, but they are undeniably worse than the original.
What will abide, he argues — and he’s wellpositioned to know — is live entertainment that is better than what we had before, at least in the minds of an audience. And at least 150,000 people in Chicago already seem to agree.
No closing date has been announced.