Secret Cinema are back! It’s been three years since the immersive London legends had a show on in the capital – with 2022’s Guardians of the Galaxy – but we’re promised we’ll get a production a year for the next three summers as they set up shop in their new temporary home of Battersea Park.
The company’s trajectory has essentially seen it go from atmospheric screenings of vintage movies to monolithic articulations of massive blockbusters, in which audiences spend hours in an immersive theatre experience themed around the movie before actually watching it (this last bit was even optional in Guardians of the Galaxy).
Grease: The Immersive Movie Experience sounds like it’s going for something slightly different, being a two-and-a-half-hour show in which the film will play around you as you move through the show’s environment. Truly it’s hard to get one’s head around it without seeing it, but it basically sounds like the film and the tehatre elements will be fully integrated rather than a case of first one, then other.
Grease is, of course, the immortal 1978 film musical starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John as star cross’d teens Danny and Sandy, who meet cute at high school in a pastiche of ’50s America. As ever you’re encouraged to dress up as an extra from the film. And if you worry you’re too young to pass as a pupil at Rydell High then don’t worry – that didn’t stop the film’s casting director.
