We're still on hiatus, but we recently got a chance to visit the new home of The Willows in LA and talk with Justin Fix and Stephanie Turek of JFI Productions as we toured the new home of one of LA's favorite immersive shows. The show has gotten a glow up in this new production, and fair warning that there are a few audio spoilers of new elements. If you're not deterred by that, come along and explore the new space with us, maybe encounter a real ghost, and get a bonus mansion tour thrown in as part of the bargain.

• The Willows

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We've reached the end.

Of Episode 500 and Season One.

Which means one last word from our host.

See you in Season Two.

(But don't act too surprised when we pop up a few times for some specials between now and then.)

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This one is for the diehards.

On Friday, August 29th, 2025 we held a Launch Party for Episode 500 in the NoPro Discord. We had no idea who would show up.

To our delight Jacob Patterson, who you had a chance to hear in the last part of the marathon, ARGN’s Michael Anderson — who gives us a spoiler-free expectation set on Masquerade, the immersive Phantom currently in previews in New York City, NoPro correspondent Briana Roecks who shares some Spooky Season anticipation for both LA and Las Vegas, and drop-ins from Laura Hall and Cameo Wood as well.

It’s a hangout episode and fair warning: the audio quality is sub-par in the extreme! I’m even on my Airpods because I was so exhausted from editing and being on the Yeti for hours on end that I just jammed the Pods in my ears and forgot how bad they would sound. So if you skip this because it sounds mid, I won’t take offense. This one, as they say, is for the sickos.

But if you do stick around, well: you’re a real one, and all the copious links in the show notes below are going to make sense.

• Tammany Hall is a Petco: Zohran's Summer Scavenger Hunt
• Masquerade
• Majestic Rep Las Vegas
• People In the Dark: An Immersive Ghost Story
• The Willows
• The Haunted Soiree
• The Wild, Citywide Scavenger Hunt That Ate San Francisco (Wired)
• Santa’s Village 
• Where Dark Things Dwell
• Junior’s at Resorts World
• The Beast @ Area 15
• DASH – Different Area, Same Hunt
• ‘The Long Walk’ Turns Screening Into Endurance Test With 3 MPH Treadmill Rule (The Wrap)
• 'What the f--- is this?': What Darren Aronofsky has to do with new payphones in NYC (Gothamist)
• Why Did the Indie Film Studio A24 Buy an Off Broadway Theater?

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We start Part 7 off where the show began, way back in Episode ZERO, which we first released on SOUND CLOUD as a pilot for a potential series, with an interview with Annie Saunders of Wilderness, whose The Day Shall Declare It jump started that renaissance era and got the local performing arts world taking things seriously.

Annie and I look back on that, and on the roadblocks that have kept her from making work here at that scale since. And then I talk to some of the other folks who come up in our conversation and those who helped shape the way I thought about and moved through the LA arts scene — like Lauren Ludwig and Monica Miklas of Capital W, and designer Tommy Honton who did so much work on the permitting crisis that hit LA in the wake of tragic events in Northern California in 2016. 

And, of course, Jacob Patterson, who ran Think Tank Gallery in DTLA and gave countless projects and artists a home… including this podcast for a while.

One last jaunt through LA for Season One. Because you know we had to.

• Annie Saunders
• Wilderness
• The Day Shall Declare It
• 14th Factory(NPR)
• Jacob Patterson
• Monica Miklas/Aviary Creative Works
• Capital W Performance
• Tommy Honton
• Lauren Ludwig

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And now is the part of the Episode 500 Marathon where we get to some lasts.

In this case, the last Review Crew of Season One.

For this one, which was the last we recorded, and the last thing we officially recorded for Episode 500, LA Reviews Editor Kevin Gossett and Chicago Curator/Remote Editor Patrick McLean join me for a chat that ranges from haunts, to the Golden Age of LA Immersive (appropriate, given where we're going next), and I ask the fellas the questions I've been asking everyone over the course of the marathon: when you first started down this road, did you think it was going to be such a big deal for you?

Plus: Overlook Film Festival's Landon Zakheim takes his turn in this part's Spotlight section.

• You Can't Scare Me (Meta Quest)
• Walkabout Mini Golf Passport Tokyo
• BurnerSphere (The New Burning Man VR experience)
• People In the Dark: An Immersive Ghost Story (The thing from the Limos people)
• Overlook Film Fest
• Overlook Film Festival Submissions - Including Immersive (For The First Time)
• The Manikins
• Purrgil
• Du-Par's
• Diner Grill

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Welcome to PART FIVE of the Episode 500 marathon "An Unstructured Conversation About Immersive Theatre," which, really, could also be the title of the whole dang podcast but that might just break the very ontological concept of SEO.

Come to think of it, that might not be a BAD thing.

On this part of the Megasode we touch base with Episode One guests Genevieve Gearhart & Julianne Just of The Speakeasy Society, who are about to launch their new show Family Meal this October, the first new Speakeasy Society show in LA in some time! Plus we're joined by Jay Bushman, who in so many ways, is responsible for us interviewing Gen and Julianne in the first place.

• The Speakeasy Society
• Family Meal (Seed & Spark Campaign)
• Jay Bushman

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In Part Four of our celebration of TEN YEARS of NoPro, Noah taps into his alternate-dimensional form as a Morning Zoo radio host, unbeknownst to London curator Shelley Snyder, her London cohort Thomas Jancis, or NYC curator Allie Marotta.

But before that chaos is unleashed, we check in with The Wild Optimists — Ariel Rubin & Juliana Moreno, whose first appearance on the show was way back on episode 38 — and after the Zoo closes its doors for the day, have a quick hangout with Little Cinema’s Jay Rinsky.

• The Key of Dreams
• Arborlogues
• Viola's Room @ The Shed
• Lander 23
• Bridge Command
• Alien War Documentary
• Uncle Barry
• The Wild Optimists
• Little Cinema

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Look: when you do a thirteen or so hour long retrospective on a ten year long project you’re going to wind up with a part that stands out to you as the center of it all, and I knew going into the recording process that the central interview for this part would be that for this run.

The only real question was where to put it and what to pair it with.

There were a lot of options, as over the past few weeks I’ve had a lot of great conversations, but at the end of the day I had to follow my heart…

We lead off with what was supposed to be an interview with Kathryn Yu, Anthony Robinson, and Zay Amsbury — three of the folks who have shaped what No Proscenium into what it is. But the technology had other ideas. 

Then: another jaunt through the immersive cosmos featuring Afterhours Theatre Company founder Graham Wetterhahn, IKantKoan’s Jessica Creane, and game designer and researcher Nicholas Fortugno, all of whom both Kathryn and myself traveled aboard the Galactic Starcruiser with.

Episode 500: it's about the friends we made along the way, and the ones we talked into joining us for the ride.

• Stone Xocoveza
• Afterhours Theatre Company
• IKantKoan
• Nicholas Fortugno

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Welcome to PART TWO of No Proscenium’s Episode 500 Celebrating TEN Years of the NoPro Podcast with the first of three REVIEW CREW MIX TAPES… this first one features SF Curator Brian Resler — whose couch is integral to the origin story of an entirely different website that covers immersive things… our associate producer Parker Sela, who also hails from San Francisco, but who like many a Bay Area kid answered the siren call of LA, our Toronto curator Katrina Lat, who I think may be on a plane to Venice right now, or soon, and Scott Gillies, long time friend of the show who did some special assignment work for us this year in Japan.

And then you get some BONUS POD with friend of the show David Spira of Room Escape Artist and Reality Escape Pod with a VERY NoPro After Dark style segment that, honestly, I thought we’d be saving for like HOUR six or seven of the show, but there’s A LOT of moments like this and… well it all makes sense why these go together.

• The Last Chevy's On Earth
• Rainforest Cafe River Adventure Ride
• Boston Slide Cop
• Boston Slide Cop: Sixteenth Minute of Fame
• Dr. Botcher's Medical School (aka the thing with the puppet at Two Bit Circus Noah couldn't remember the name of)
• Alien War Documentary
• Vanished ARG write-up at ARGN
• Room Escape Artist
• Reality Escape Pod
• A Visit to the 2025 Osaka World Expo

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For the past ten years NoPro has been your guide to Everything Immersive… and this is the first part of the multi-part celebration - slash - victory lap that is EPISODE 500.

Over the course of this weekend, for about TWELVE HOURS, give or take, okay maybe closer to THIRTEEN HOURS we will be checking in with over two dozen of our favorite people to chat about this thing of ours — this immersive, experiential, spatial thing of ours …

It’s a series of conversations that is nostalgic, silly, sometimes profound, often rambling, that covers theatre, technology, theme parks, games, defunct restaurant chains, roadside attractions, margaritas, and puppets.

These are, in fact, the friends we made along the way and more than a few of the friends we dragged along with us for the ride over the course of the TEN YEARS of making this show.

And at the end… well, I guess we’ll both just have to stick around because even I don’t even know yet.

For this first part — entitled a A Quick Jaunt Through The Immersive Cosmos — we take a stream of consciousness trip through experiential hyperspace with 5 interviews.

Actors Siobhán O'Loughlin & Dasha Kittredge, Tender Claws co-founder Samantha Gorman, Producer Scarlett Kim, and director Rory Mitchell.

• Siobhán O'Loughlin
• Dasha Kittredge
• Tender Claws
• Scarlett Kim
• The Mercantile Agency (Rory Mitchell)

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