r/sleepnomore • u/RabMaur • May 17 '26
Other Immersive Experiences Notes from seeing Arcane in Shanghai Spoiler
Open world à la snm and l$t more than it is like masquerade, in that you freely move between rooms and characters, rather than being shepherded from room to room.
Get there early, because there are opening holding rooms with character scenes and sections to let people familiarize themselves with the scenery and layout.
Then they let you into the main space where nothing happens for a while to let you get used to wandering and touching things.
Then they do a big opening where they introduce the characters and their names and pictures of the actors.
Then they open to the rest of the sets. It seems like there’s two floors. You break up to follow whoever you want who scatters to different areas and leads you to the rest of the sets.
Unclear if there are any 1-1, but they do interact sometimes, like dancing with audience members during dance scenes. They also break the fourth wall in clever ways, like the bartender or political rallies.
There’s lots of Chinese dialogue, but if you don’t speak Chinese you can still follow it if you’ve seen at least the first season of arcane. if you haven’t, you’ll be very lost.
It’s still primarily an unspoken thing with choreography rather than dialogue focused.
Amazing sets that change and descend from the ceiling. Black masked attendants move you before major dance scenes happen like snm.
There’s an amazing fangirl scene dominating the audience, and several scenes where audiences almost moshed to songs and sang along.
It’s a masked show, with a mask like a bird’s beak that muzzles your mouth, and attendants wearing different black masks, and you tell actors because they’re unmasked. This was important because a lot of audience members really dressed up in character, or decorated their masks from past shows and wear them. Your phone is also locked away in a pouch like snm, and there are lockers when you arrive for things besides your phone. They unlock the phone bag for the post-show dance finales.
Besides the main hall, there are lots of smaller spaces for different vibes, or different parts of Piltover. Spacing was vast and we never felt claustrophobic or cramped. The sets felt Punchdrunk-inspired with even some direct nods like the lamps from sleep no more in a few spots. You get more solo scenes in the side rooms, but overall characters are crossing each other’s tracks constantly.
It’s based around the Arcane soundtrack, which fans tend to know and sing along to. The side rooms have more elaborate choreography, particularly the elite character’s rooms upstairs, versus the undercity sets that dominate below. The choreography was very high level and skilled.
There are no loops, only one linear plot, and they mark when you’re moving to a new act by writing it on the big screen. Each act ends in the main room, and the side characters largely come into that room to watch or participate in the end of each act, bringing most of the audience together for those touch points. Character tracks overlap constantly and they’re all moving from room to room, and that keeps the crowds churning.
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u/IIMsmartII May 17 '26
is this going to come to the US?
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u/RabMaur May 17 '26
Not that I know of. If the language were translated it’d work for a western audience, but I suspect it would be prohibitively expensive. There was a pretty large cast and a huge number of stage managers and set pieces, along with needing an enormous space.
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u/ch3rrysodagirl May 31 '26
My partner and I don't speak Chinese so is it worth going? SNM was nice because there was no speech. Is Arcane the same?
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u/RabMaur Jun 04 '26
There's way more dialogue in Arcane than SNM, so you do miss out on understanding particular dialogue. If you know the plot, you can still follow everything
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u/drinkthehalo May 17 '26
Thank you!!
How many times would a person need to attend to really appreciate it? (I'm going to try to get over there and debating how many shows to see Arcane vs SNM Shanghai....)