Counting Sheep NYC Reviews and Tickets

“The language barrier is a persistent frustration in this participatory multimedia production, performed in Ukrainian and pulsing with live music by the excellent Lemon Bucket Orkestra...The show hasn’t mastered one of the fundamentals of immersive theater...Just like actors, audience members need to know their roles...For the audience, neither the passion nor the threat is real, and for us to feign it feels hollow — like playing at someone else’s protest while the world burns."
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“A highly inventive performance piece, staged with urgency and clarity...The closest most of us will ever get to being caught up in the tumult and the electrifying energy of a government-shaking protest...A headfirst plunge into the experience of a people spontaneously pushing back against a government that is betraying their interests...These intensely committed performers have shaken us out of our daily reality, making us wonder how much we would risk to challenge the status quo.”
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“The self-described ‘immersive guerrilla folk opera’ is extremely effective....It’s an amazing experience...Thanks to the dramatic projected imagery, and the immersion into what is happening, the audience gets to briefly glimpse the highs and lows of political activism...'Counting Sheep' reminds us that we are the change we’ve been waiting for. It's simply up to us to seize the challenge.”
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"It delivers as advertised on the immersive folk opera front. Its guerrilla credentials are a little shaky, but that’s probably for the best...Kevin Newbury gets high-octane interactive performances from his game troupe and displays an innate sense of crowd dynamics. 'Counting Sheep' works well as a euphoric party in the context of a crusade for socio-political change, but it doesn’t do a whole lot to give that crusade historical context or even define what the crusade is."
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"Unsettling, loose in parts, but ultimately effective, this experience will get you thinking about community, collaboration, revolt, violence, and peace...Though there are moments of genuine trepidation, sometimes the slackness of the production weakens the impact. Tableaux battles between police and protesters lack gravity...The participation, so central to the show, can, too, be briefly awkward...But that is all part of the messily rewarding process."
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"Immersive theater at its very best...The audience experiences a visceral rather than a complete or detailed picture of the story into which it has been swept up. Three things, it would seem, were required, then, to speak the burning truth of the Maidan revolution...Most important of all, it must place the audience not outside but inside the action of the revolution itself...For all of its brilliant chaos, energy, irreverence, and passion, 'Counting Sheep' is a work of great delicacy."
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"Immersive isn't quite right. It's closer to the forum theatre of Augusto Boal. We're spect-actors in a simulation–and it's impossible to lose sight of that...Even in this controlled environment, your stomach knots, your adrenaline surges, your body clenches for the fight. It's powerful, play-acting...Screens surround you with scenes from Maidan Square. It's incredibly involving...In its midst, you get a sense of what the reality might be like."
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"This mixture of the passive and the active ends up being the show’s most tricky element. As an experience it’s undeniably powerful and affecting, but it has its own narrative arc, too. It’s a potent and thought-provoking, if at times difficult, piece. The skill with which it’s been created is clear though; the way it fills the space, the way it uses music, and the way it imparts an understanding that this story is part of something larger and far from over."
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