Do Yourself a Favor and get Tickets to "Sleep No More" An Unparalleled Interactive Theatrical Experience.

Sleep No More. @ the McKittrick Hotel, Manhattan.

A Review of Tonight's Performance.

5 stars!!!  Two thumbs up!!!  Broke through the "fourth wall" with flying colors!  Imagine being in a movie that combines Stephen King's "The Shining" with "Eyes Wide Shut" and you're pretty close to the actual experience of wandering the halls of "Sleep No More".

The Setup.
The venue is an old hotel in Chelsea that is no longer in service and probably looks just as it did back in it's heyday in the 1920's. You enter into a speakeasy style bar where they serve shots of absinthe, among other things, and wait for your number to be called.  Bar area reminded me of the movie Midnight in Paris when Owen Wilson travels back in time (great flick BTW).

Interactive Theater. 

The hotel contains 5 floors of fabulous bone chilling themes and actors, each containing multiple rooms and tons to explore.  No blood or gore, just old fashioned creepiness. Rooms included: A maze of trees. A graveyard. An insane assylum right out of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest".  embalming studio, funeral home, ballroom, lounge, bedroom, bars, taxidermy, operating room, the list goes on and on.

My Comnentary.
Hands down one of the coolest experiences I've had.  Everyone was anonymous and free to roam.  You really got out of your own head and just went with the flow.  No rules (except for no talking), you really had the run of the place.  All guests were given masks upon entering and were instructed not to speak while going through the hotel.  We all wore the same white mask with a beak and couldn't tell one person from the next.  I went with three friends and didn't see them all night. 

Such a personal experience, like a choose your own adventure psychological thriller.  Just did whatever you felt like doing..could go off on your own and explore the various floors or follow actors who were engaged in various scenes from MacBeth.  You could read letters on desks, check out evidence tagged in drawers, read labels on old bottles, leaf through books, touch, examine, and pick up anything you liked.  No one but the actors were allowed to talk and they barely did either. Old timey music (and sometimes techno or ambient noise) playing in the background.  Was the epitome of "do what you feel".

Speaking of birds, it dawned on me at one point, as probably 30-40 of us fellow masked guests followed an actor couple around the lounge/ballroom, perched on the stage/bar/sofas, anywhere...that THIS must be what it is like to be a bird (minus the whole flying thing). We flocked around the actors as they moved through the rooms and floors. Never uttering a word. Just observing and taking in the unfolding scenes and scenery. We each had our own experience and no two were the same.

Scenes that I took in include the following:
-Creepy guy singing in high pitched voice on stage in lounge
-Taxidermist stuffing and sewing up a dead raven
-Bar fight
-Sex scene that turns into all out brawl followed by the woman falling into a bathtub full of water
-Pregnant woman being poisoned by a voodoo lady.
-Woman surgeon using scalpel to cut shapes out of pages in bible in a totally weird and OCD manner.
-Finale: A remake of the last supper in the ballroom, in slow motion, with all the actors. Totally bad ass! Culminated with a hanging.

Overall Thoughts.
Fantastic!  Amazing!  Creeptastical!  Can't say enough good things. Sleep No More is already living up to its namesake and causing me to lose sleep.  But really, who cares, was sooooooooooo worth it!  If I could go again tomorrow, I would, hands down.