The Grand Paradise NYC Reviews and Tickets
Show-Score Member Reviews (73)
See it if The club singer had a great costume, and the soundscape was gorgeous. Too touchy immersive production of Hotel California.
Don't see it if Inconsistent design elements, indulgent performances, and a real desperation to come across as deep or relevant.
See it if You live for immersive theatre, love playing detective, and enjoy movement based pieces with minimal dialogue but a lot of symbolic meaning.
Don't see it if You can't stand for 2 hours straight or want a linear story-line. Most of the dialogue is philosophical with movement telling the story.
See it if You like beautiful production design, you like immersive theater, you want to explore a feeling more than a set narrative, you like disco
Don't see it if You want a traditional narrative, you don't like walking around, you hate disco, you're feeling cynical, you don't like being touched
See it if Like the one-on-one interactive experience.
Don't see it if Don't want to be single-out. Looking for an actual story.
See it if you just want to have a drink and go with the flow without thinking too much
Don't see it if you want three-dimension characters, you don't like cliches
See it if You enjoyed Then She Fell and want to see something in the same vein
Don't see it if You need lots of structure in your theater
See it if You liked "Then She Fell" and are looking for another immersive show by the same company...
Don't see it if You don't like dance theater. Read more
See it if your appreciation of immersive theatre isn't dependent on such elements as "plot" and "dramatic arc."
Don't see it if you need some sort of a plot line to find your time well spent.
Critic Reviews (24)
"'The Grand Paradise' the latest and lushest of the many immersive theater spectacles to set up camp in New York in recent years, traffics in instant nostalgia...The effect is of taking and remembering a wild vacation at the same time...Using the ’70s as a time frame turns out to have been an inspired idea...It winds up hitting home. Your stay at the 'Grand Paradise' lasts a precisely measured two hours. But I can promise you that when it’s over, you’ll have little idea how long you’ve been there."
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"The piece is a captivatingly sensual interactive adventure. After an initial group welcome, you wander through a labyrinth of locations, immersed in a whirl of music, dance and ’70s atmospherics...The show’s running themes are love, death and the space where they meet, otherwise known as nostalgia. This escapist world is our oyster, where each grain of sand in an hourglass has a shot at becoming a pearl."
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"'The Grand Paradise' is somewhat more structured than 'Sleep No More.'...During my two-hour stay, I caught (among other things) a dance party, a bar fight, and a young man dancing and disrobing on a beach...Some parts are more engaging than others. But on the whole, 'The Grand Paradise' is extremely impressive in the scope of its detail. Personally, I wouldn’t mind taking in another show to observe different characters."
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"As a piece of engineering, 'The Grand Paradise' is fairly impressive...But all this effort has resulted in a largely vacuous event...At least at a play -- a good one, anyway -- you get something to think about. 'The Grand Paradise' is rather like going to a party where the guest list consists of eccentric strangers."
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"One of the beauties of 'The Grand Paradise' is that it allows for so many of these smaller, intimate moments. The cast, all trained as dancers, effortlessly and elegantly guide the audience through the evening and truly make you feel as if the performance was being done exclusively for you...Audiences escape for two hours that both fly by and yet feel satisfyingly endless."
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“What this theatrical experience, conveyed by the brilliant minds at Third Rail Projects, gets right from the very start is that there is always an element of the forbidden when it comes to finding pleasure…The concept beautifully epitomizes what has become more than clear when it comes to the arts, which is the notion that in the digital age plot has truly become irrelevant when you could offer guests an experience instead.…The path followed by this reviewer was both erotic and moving.”
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"This immersive show holds the promise of a sensual, boundary-pushing adventure, but in reality it suffers from tiresome repetition and without a solid dramaturgical core there’s limited bang for your substantial buck...It's challenging to give over completely to an environment that is tightly controlled, vaguely executed, and lacking in any real risks...Nostalgia can only get you so far if it’s denuded of meaning...For a show about sex and desire, it was quite tepid and tame."
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“'The Grand Paradise' can be a fun, hip and sensuous two-hour holiday...One difference could be crucial to your enjoyment...The context in 'The Grand Paradise' is less specific (the 1970s), its cultural allusions less direct and less substantive (Fantasy Island comes to mind)...What’s on offer here may be a kind of faux-nostalgia, and a hip factor that may exert a kind of peer pressure."
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