Building the Immersive Theater of the Future at Blume Studios

A short walk from Charlotte’s Bank of America Stadium, nestled near the I-77/277 interchange, there’s a pair of industrial buildings. For over a century they were the home of Charlotte Pipe and Foundry, a company that was founded in 1901 to manufacture cast iron pipes and fittings. But like a lot of heavy industry in America, technological developments and a shifting labor force caused it to outgrow its space near the urban center. In 2020, the company announced its intention to relocate its main plant to rural Oakboro. And for Tom Gabbard, this presented an opportunity.

Gabbard is the CEO of Blumenthal Arts, the not-for-profit organization that is the premier theater presenter in Charlotte, and one of the most prominent destinations for touring Broadway shows.

Blumenthal’s 2,118-seat Belk Theater is its flagship venue, with touring productions of Beetlejuice, Wicked, and Six scheduled for this fall. There’s also the 1,192-seat Knight Theater on South Tryon Street, a popular venue for concerts and stand-up comedy. Attached to the Belk is the more intimate 436-seat Booth Playhouse, which currently features the revamped production of Paul Oakley Stovall’s Immediate Family and will host the November kickoff of Jinkx Monsoon and BenDeLaCreme’s annual holiday tour. Blumenthal also has a black box, the 233-seat Stage Door Theater, ideal for short runs from small local companies. It’s everything a major performing arts complex in a midsize American city could need … almost.

The advent of immersive theater—shows like the long-running hit Sleep No More or the Imelda Marcos musical Here Lies Love—poses both an opportunity and a challenge to producers. The interactive shows have the potential to attract nontraditional audiences who might balk at the idea of sitting quietly in a darkened auditorium for three hours but will quite literally jump at the chance to explore a real-life video game. The challenge is finding a suitable venue.

Sleep No More had the McKittrick Hotel, several floors of converted warehouse space in Chelsea specifically outfitted for the production, which worked well for a 14-year run. But the Broadway run of Here Lies Love, which required extensive alterations to the Broadway Theatre and ended abruptly after four months as a $22 million flop, demonstrates the pitfalls of trying to force the square peg of immersive staging into the round hole of a traditional theatrical space.

Blumenthal’s first foray into immersive work was born out of pandemic necessity, and it took place off campus. Covid shutdowns were particularly brutal on the performing arts, with theaters closed for over a year in some places. Gabbard, who is a big fan of the Paris venue Atelier des Lumières, saw an opportunity in the immersive Van Gogh exhibit that originated there. “I went to the board in January 2021, one of the darkest times of the pandemic, and said, ‘I think there’s a moment here, and we do this now or never,’” Gabbard recalls, “and bless their hearts, they agreed.”

The immersive Van Gogh exhibit ran at the Ford Building in Camp North End from June 2021 through January 2022. It cost Blumenthal $5.5 million, but grossed $20 million in ticket sales. “The key metric,” says Gabbard, “was that 78 percent of buyers were new to file. They had never purchased a ticket from us before.” That proved there was an audience for nontraditional arts experiences in Charlotte that Blumenthal had not previously been reaching.

Gabbard was further inspired by the 2022 immersive production of Next to Normal at Barcelona’s IDEAL, which featured Alice Ripley reprising her Tony Award-winning performance as a mother suffering from bipolar delusions in a 20,000-square-foot venue with surround-sound speakers and 360-degree projections. “I realized these are the coolest performing arts spaces,” Gabbard said, “There was minimal scenery, with the audience gathered around in this digital space. And it attracts a different audience, which from our vantage point, is what this is all about.”

In looking for a venue that could accommodate this vision, Charlotte Pipe and Foundry was a no-brainer: a 32,000-square-foot indoor space on a 55-acre lot near the center of the city. Gabbard signed the lease and Blumenthal officially moved in April 2024, rebranding the larger building “Stage 1” and the smaller building “Stage 2.” Gabbard brags that the “upfit” (the cost to convert this factory floor into a working theater) was about $3.5 million—a pittance when one considers the going price of theater renovation.

“Nimble” and “scrappy” are two of Gabbard’s favorite adjectives, and they are the driving ethos behind the creation of Blume Studios. “We have tried to keep it relatively bare,” says Gabbard, “and when we add things, we want them to be movable.”

When the architects proposed building out a permanent entrance to Stage 1 around a loading dock, Gabbard wondered how that would restrict future creative choices. “We’re in the theater business, so this entrance is just a big piece of scenery,” he says, gesturing to the entry for Stage 1’s current offering, Monopoly Lifesized. The branded entryway is on rollers, allowing for quick removal and replacement should the creatives need that area for loading. “Moving it out of the way takes about two minutes.”

Similarly, the bathrooms are fully furnished shipping containers, attached to the sewer system, but also portable along the drainage line. Instead of metal air ducts, Gabbard opted for fabric “socks” that can be deflated and rearranged. It’s the theater as a Lego set, offering nearly unlimited possibilities for directors and designers.

But who will those artists be? While Gabbard would undoubtedly be thrilled to have first- rate immersive productions specifically designed for Blume Studios, it is more realistic to import productions that have worked elsewhere. Monopoly Lifesized started in London, where it still welcomes players six days a week. The extended run at Stage 1 constitutes the first genuine hit at Blume Studios.

While there is a well-established template for touring Broadway shows to proscenium theaters across North America, nothing similar exists for immersive theater, meaning Gabbard and his associates will have to invent that process in the coming years.

Michael Thomas-Visgar, who was just hired four months ago as director of Blume Studios Events, asks the essential question: “How do we make this sustainable and help support the ecosystem of what everyone believes is the future of the industry?” For now, that means scouting out potential collaborators and building a network of immersive-theater artists across the Atlantic.

The morning I spoke with Gabbard and Thomas-Visgar, they were just hours from boarding a flight to London to take in a number of currently running productions including ABBA Voyage and Starlight Express, which is playing at the relatively new Troubadour Wembley Park Theatre, which opened in 2019.

Gabbard has high praise for Troubadour Theatres and the company’s founders, Tristan Baker and Oliver Royds, calling their approach to developing novel new theatrical spaces both “nimble” and “scrappy.” The Blumenthal delegation’s London itinerary included a tour of the company’s new Canary Wharf Theatre, which is in the final stages of construction and is set to open its doors in October with a new immersive adaptation of The Hunger Games.

It’s telling that Gabbard and Thomas-Visgar chose to take an eight-hour flight to London, rather than a two-hour one to New York. The immersive theater scene across the pond is far more developed than the one here, and the shows we do get in New York mostly originate in London. Sleep No More was developed by the UK company Punchdrunk.

Gabbard envisions a future in which producers choose to skip New York, with its rising production costs and impossible housing situation, altogether. “Frankly, we’ve been a huge advocate of that for a while,” he told Eric White, CEO of TheaterMania’s parent company, AudienceView, earlier this year. And while New York City still holds a monopoly on the Broadway brand, this next frontier of theater is wide open.

In November, The Magicians Table, a popular magic show currently running in Southwark, will be making its North American premiere at Blume Studios.