Neil Patrick Harris in a selfie he tweeted from his Hedwig dressing room
Neil Patrick Harris is a very interesting figure: a child star turned adult award-winner whose openness about being gay hasn’t hurt his mainstream success; in fact, he just played that ultimate outsider Hedwig on Broadway and Joe and Joan Six-Pack seem to love him all the more for it.
In addition to his well-established love of musical theatre – which he’s managed to smuggle into everything from his role as suit-loving superbro Barney in How I Met Your Mother to Batman cartoon supervillainy – NPH has longstanding passions for magic, circus and variety performance. He’s also directed a production of Rent (at the Hollywood Bowl in 2010) and a magic show in NYC this year, called Nothing to Hide.
And, as I found out when I interviewed him recently for the Guardian, he’s really into immersive theatre. There wasn’t room in the Guardian article for this particular subject but here’s what NPH had to say when I asked if he wanted to develop his directing career…
“I’m very interested in immersive theatre stuff right now: Punchdrunk; what was the other one in the UK? Down the Glug Glug Tree? Isn’t that what that’s called?”
Um, you mean You Me Bum Bum Train? “Yeah! That’s the kind stuff I want to direct, that stuff’s awesome. I want to bring that stuff here [to New York]. I love [Macbeth adaptation] Sleep No More, and I love a show here called Queen of the Night, which is its own immersive dinner experience. I think there’s room for more of that here. People seem to be liking theatre that doesn’t take place in a proscenium staged house.”
Why might that be? “We live in a world where you can watch a lot of content and you don’t have to be sitting in a single seat. Gone are the days when you can only watch TV on your couch or in a movie theatre or just the stage. You can watch the entire season of House of Cards on your smartphone riding on the subway. Because of that, you have to create opportunities that are themselves exciting [ways] to watch a show, even if it’s a Cirque du Soleil in a tent or a De La Guarda show that happens above you, or Here Lies Love that happens in a dance club all around you. We have to start ramping up the reasons people want to go see it.”
Harris has already co-produced shows called Accomplice, in the US and London, which aim to give a frisson of the unknown. “You buy a ticket and you’re not sure what’s going to happen until the day before and you get a phone call from someone in character and they give you a few different rules and directives and then you’re off. I always just really loved that… I’m certainly turned on by the fact that I go into a space and don’t know what to expect and the show happens around me. You’re looking down and you’re looking up and going up staircases and you don’t know when it’s going to end or what’s going to happen.
“Those kind of images are seared into my brain almost more than sitting in the first row of a mezzanine watching a show that happens that same way every night.”
NPH has a part in David Fincher’s latest film, Gone Girl, and sees connections between Fincher’s earlier work and immersive performance. “That movie he did, The Game, was one of my favourites – the idea that it’s your birthday and this thing is happening and you don’t know how it’s going to end or how to stop it.
“I love that mentality – even it it’s just for a couple of hours or it goes on for a week, innately that is thrilling to me.”
UPDATE: This post was updated to add the link to the Guardian interview, which appeared after this post was first published.
