The No Proscenium Podcast

This week host Noah Nelson is joined by esteemed members of the NoPro New York Review Crew: Curator Allie Marotta, East Coast Editor at Large Blake Weil, and Senior Correspondent Nicholas Fortugno for an often feisty conversation about what's happening in the NYC immersive scene in what has been a very busy year. (I mean, look at those Show Notes!) But first the gang digs into the recent, and some...

This week on the show, a very Season One style episode wherein host Noah Nelson talks to Ellie and Alex DiBerardino of Say Nothing and Leave , the creative team behind the Test Pilots series, along with their oftentimes collaborators Sarah Lew and Danthony , the director and creator of Baby Man. All of which was at Second Place Studios at the Hollywood Fringe Festival last month. We get into what...

This week we're talking about the state of XR -– from what's happening with the new tech to the out-of-home experiences that are actually drawing audiences – with a ridiculously talented panel of practitioners, professionals, and press. Joining host Noah Nelson in the virtual NoPro studio Scarlett Kim (Center for Unclassifiable Technologies and Experiences) , Ray Mosco (General Immersive), Ro...

This week on the show host Noah Nelson is joined by The L.A. Times' Todd Martens, ARGNet owner Michael Andersen, and NoPro's own Kathryn Yu to spin stories from Knott's Ghost Town Alive, do some close reading of a new Harvard Business Review article on immersive experiences, and react to the big Sphere-related news of the week. SHOW NOTES Mr. Todd's Wild Ride (L.A. Times) ARGNet ‘Rocky Horror Pict...

Out of the blue, we're back, with season 2 of the podcast. This summer we're catching up with our favorite folks, hanging out and talking what we've seen, what they've been making, and generally celebrating the fact that immersive is here and not going anywhere. To kick us off in the new era we're joined by: associate producer of the podcast, and an immersive creator in her own right Parker Sela,...

Our guest on this special edition this week is Charles Melcher of the Future of Storytelling who you might know from his own podcast and who is the author of the new book The Future of Storytelling: How Immersive Experiences Are Transforming Our World which is available now. Charlie’s book is really a fantastic snapshot of the world of immersive storytelling as it stands today, containing both an...

This week, a visit to Dungeons & Dragons The 20-Sided Tavern in Los Angeles – where the show is wrapping its current stand this weekend before heading off to Scottsdale, Arizona and Dallas, Texas. We sit down with Alex Stompoly, one of the Tavernkeepers of the Tavern to talk about the unique role he plays in the production which is part MC, part rules lawyer, and carries with it some creative...

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 exp...

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.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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, No...

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 fr...

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 (appropri...

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 Sp...

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...

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 fe...

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 Resle r — 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...

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 immersiv...

This week writer and director Eliza McNitt joins us to talk about Venice Immersive , the annual XR extravaganza inside the Venice International Film Festival, where at this year’s event she is the President of Venice Immersive's International Jury, which will judge the 30 pieces in competition. SHOW NOTES Venice Immersive Venice Immersive 2025: XR Experiences To Stoke Your FOMO (A NoPro Guide) Anc...

This week we’re joined by Gillian Leitten , CEO of The Lumen Prize because today is that day that the 99 finalists for the Prize are announced (check the Show Notes) and Leitten is here to talk with us about the prize which celebrates artists forging new systems of meaning through technology’s evolving creative frontier. We give a special focus on the Hybrid and Experiential categories, the later...

This week on the show Franki Chan , founder and chief creative officer of IHEARTCOMIX , the award-winning creative marketing agency who joined us last weekend at The Next Stage Immersive Summit along with the team from #METAFORYOU of Terence Leclere, Dasha Kittredge, and Annie McGrath, to talk about the 2-night overnight horror horror experience at the legendary Stanley Hotel dubbed The Overnightm...

Zach Morris of Third Rail Projects and Charlie Miller of The Denver Center for the Performing Arts’ Off-Cente r join host Noah Nelson to talk about the upcoming Sweet & Lucky: Echo — a companion story of the 2016 hit  Sweet & Lucky –– which helped put Denver ’s immersive scene on the map. SHOW NOTES Sweet & Lucky: Echo Third Rail Projects The Denver Center for the Performing Arts’...

This week Parker Sela takes over the show to talk about Pompeii , no not the ancient Roman city that was destroyed by Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD, but the Fosse-tacular immersive by Detour Productions that is coming to San Francisco at the end of this month. Billed as “part Fosse fantasy, part queer cabaret, part end-of-the-world dance party,”  Parker checks in with returning guest, Detour co-found...

This summer a spectacle has bloomed at Meow Wolf’s Convergence Station in Denver and Omega Mart in Las Vegas, bringing a new interactive performance layer that unfolds on a continuous loop and new characters from uncharted corners of the multiverse in the form of dancers, puppets, and shimmering creatures called Flickerwermz. It’s called Phenomenomaly and it’s running now through August 9th, and t...

This week on the show it’s a hangout show as members of the NoPro Review Crew — namely Toronto curator Katrina Lat , New York correspondent  Nicholas Fortugno , our associate producer Parker Sela , and catching up part way through NYC curator Allie Marotta as we chat about a whole lot of things including the brisk sales on Masquerade — that’s the immersive Phantom of the Opera that goes into...

This week on the show we’re joined by long time friend of the show Brent Bushnell — co-founder of Two Bit Circus , scion of the famed Bushnell family, and one of the earliest subscribers to the No Proscenium newsletter — who is here to talk about a new venture he is a co-founder of along with Aidan Wolf  and Kevin Habich — DeamPark which turns mixed reality headsets into a configurable v...