Review: Monopoly Lifesized, the Real Estate Board Game as Immersive Theater

Few creations better encapsulate both the exhilaration and aggravation of American capitalism than Monopoly, the 90-year-old Parker Brothers board game (now owned by Hasbro) that invites players to imagine themselves as Atlantic City landlords. Its heady mixture of strategy and chance, fate and free will, has always inspired emotionally charged gameplay—but could it also be the basis of great theater?

The creators of Monopoly Lifesized, which is now playing an extended run at Charlotte’s Blume Studios, think so. The show is already a hit in London, where it has performed since 2021. In Charlotte, where it appears under the title Monopoly Lifesized: Travel Edition, it proves that immersive theater can be fun for the whole family—not just the obsessive gay uncle with a moldering BFA.

As someone who spends an inordinate chunk of his life in the theater, I could tell from the outset that Monopoly Lifesized attracts a different crowd. Ticketholders are divided into four teams before the game begins. I was placed with “the Irons” alongside four boys roughly age 8-9 (all with extravagantly southern names) and the father of two of them, who gave a bravura performance in the role of undaunted adult chaperone. They referred to me as “Mister Zach,” exhibiting an antique courtliness that, I’m delighted to see, has been passed down to Generation Alpha North Carolinians.

Veterans know that a typical game of Monopoly can last for hours and sometimes days—impractical for a stage production and impossible for the under-10 set. But the adapters have come up with several solutions, reducing the board so that there is only one property per color (which gives you an instant monopoly and ability to build on the next turn) and limiting gameplay to one hour, after which the net worth of each team is tallied to determine a winner.

It’s not just a matter of landing on a property and paying up. To obtain a deed, teams must enter a small room off the game square and complete a time-limited challenge, some of which are genuinely thrilling (Park Place made me feel like I was in a Bond film).

Of course, the first such challenge for our group, which involved pressing a series of buttons in the correct sequence, resulted in a total wipeout for a group that found the sight of any unpressed button irresistible. The Irons were off to a bad start.

But it’s hard to feel glum when faced with the exuberance of our token guides, actors with character names like “Madame Gascar” who distribute chance cards, oversee puzzle challenges, and keep the game running smoothly. Television producers looking for America’s next favorite gameshow host really ought to look to Charlotte’s improv community, from which quite a few of the token guides originated.

We may not have been the most dexterous team, but the Irons greatly benefited from the leadership of our team captain, a young man who proudly introduced himself to me as “Tyler Austin Calhoun III” (name changed to protect the innocent, but you get the idea). While “captain” is an official role, one of several like “builder” and “real estate agent” to be divvied up among the teammates, Mr. Calhoun’s enthusiasm was such that he ended up claiming most of these jobs for himself—the Robert Moses of Monopoly Lifesized. And the rest of us wallflowers gladly let him, passive board members silently assenting to a visionary CEO.

It proved a winning business model. The next time we landed on a property we won—a feat we repeated three more times until we controlled the entirety of the most expensive side of the board. Surely, luck played a role in our rolls. We only made it around the board one-and-a-half times before the end of the game, and we only paid rent once—maddeningly, on St. Charles Place, the property we failed to acquire in the first turn. Shrewdly, Dad convinced his young charges to immediately build houses and hotels, a decision that ultimately led to our triumph as we amassed a portfolio worth millions in fake money.

And isn’t that the ultimate promise of capitalism? Even fidgety little boys can one day, with a little luck and help from Dad, become masters of the universe.