★★★
“The stage version of Paranormal Activity delivers more thrills, chills, and screams than Broadway has seen in years,” said Frank Rizzo in Variety. Horror rarely succeeds on New York City’s biggest stages, but this show works because its story is built around two appealing characters, their fear that their home may be haunted proves justified, and the whole experience is sold by “hair-raising” illusions provided by the same man who created the Tony-winning supernatural effects for the current stage adaptation of Stranger Things. Though the story doesn’t match the plot of any of the Paranormal Activity movies, it produces “an exhilarating fun-house night in the theater.”
The show, which debuted in the U.K. and has toured widely, arrives on Broadway “polished to a cold shine,” said Helen Shaw in The New York Times. Wisely, it jettisons the movies’ signature use of found video footage as a source of frights, leaning instead on “pre-cinematic scare techniques like an abruptly loud doorbell and a hypnotic sequence of storytelling in the dark.” Cast as an affectionate young couple who’ve newly relocated, Cher Álvarez and Travis A. Knight “carry the whole thing with an unaffected naturalism” as they fight to shake off the suspicion that a supernatural force has followed them to their new home. Sure, “the story wobbles if you think about it after the lights come up—so don’t think about it too much.”
It may seem odd that the audience routinely applauds after each big scare, said Jackson McHenry in NYMag.com. Yet the scares are “indeed applause-worthy.” I could complain that playwright Levi Holloway’s attempts to add thematic heft to the story “grow tedious quickly” and that the show’s grisly horror-movie-style ending lands awkwardly in a live theater setting. Until then, though, sharing the company of a thousand strangers while watching the home’s haunting play out “gives the thing an odd and interesting warmth.”
August Wilson Theatre, New York City
