The all-conquering immersive experience was 2021’s hit hi-lo format, taking art masters like Van Gogh and pimping them up with trippy projections for the grateful masses. This year, if any highbrow art needs a popular boost it’s classical music, floored by Covid and then sucker punched by an government funding shakeup that’s pulled funding from ‘posh’ venues and expelled ENO from London.
Enter ‘Handel’s Messiah: The Live Experience’, an intriguing venture from the OG immersive company behind basic good nights out like‘’Peaky Blinders: the Rise’ and ‘The Great Gatsby’. The aim is to ‘bring together the world’s greatest classical musicians with creative and imaginative staging’: not a full-on immersive evening with crowds of extras, or wall-to-wall projections, but a staging that’s more dramatic and less stuffy than the usual concert setting.
It looks promising on both counts: the lead soprano is the impressive Danielle de Niese, and the advance pics of the design look pretty awesome, though not exactly Classic FM Christmassy (under an enormous projected rising sun, singers all in white leisurewear lounge around like off-duty stormtroopers).
Tickets start at a reasonable £25 and if all goes all right on the night it aims to tour. For now, it’s on for one night only at Theatre Royal Drury Lane on 6th December and the edited score runs at 2 hours including a 20 minute interval.