Lifestyle
Las Vegas' new must-see show plays with animation, dance and what it means to be human
There are multiple dance duets in “Particle Ink: House of Shattered Prisms,” a mixed-media theatrical production that debuted last month on the Las Vegas Strip. They are highly acrobatic and borderline risqué — this is Vegas, after all — and they are also feats of wonder, for the dance partner is not another human but an animated character.
Particle is his name, and he’s a glowing white figure with a circular head and a rectangular body, a mix of simple shapes that can convey an array of human emotions via elastic, exaggerated movements. Animation, rooted in imagination, has long had the power to amplify human feelings and heighten reality. But in “Particle Ink,” animation enters our reality, as Particle, for instance, leaps from wall to pillow, dashes across a bed curtain and even cries into a physical bucket.
“I wish I was 3-D,” Particle scrawls at one point on the wall, but the show makes us believe that he is vaulting among us. Look into a mirror, and Particle sits and walks atop our heads, becoming essentially a virtual animated pet. At one point, a dancer contorts herself as she carries Particle, tucked in a birdcage, across a room. Actors appear to hold Particle’s hand, and Particle even does battle with metaphorical demons, his projected body bounding across a room and swirling in and out of a toilet bowl.
Animation, with “Particle Ink,” has entered its live-theater era. It’s doing so via an exploration-focused production, meaning guests wander from room to room following actors as the acts unfold — or, in the case of “Particle Ink,” guests may be trailing animated figures or a puppet.
Think of it, then, as a sort of next-generation “Sleep No More,” New York’s long-running immersive production that is set to close this year. Only here, the theme is an original fairy tale rather than “Macbeth,” one where animation and augmented reality tools are used to explore our inner world, bringing it to life on walls, floors and furnishings with whimsical, highly active drawings that appear born of light.
Created by an enigmatic three-person creative team known as the LightPoets, a group with roots in Las Vegas, “Particle Ink” dates to 2017, when a proof-of-concept installation was shown at the Sundance Film Festival. It caught the attention of entertainment industry vets Jennifer Tuft and Cassandra Rosenthal, who, with their mixed-reality company Kaleidoco, have been working to bring “Particle Ink” to life. The show had a brief run in 2022 in downtown Las Vegas, but pre-pandemic it was planned for New York, where Kaleidoco once had a 10-year lease on a five-story Manhattan building targeted for the show.
The character of Lilith (Dani Maloney) shares a dance with animated Particle on a bed in “Particle Ink: House of Shattered Prisms,” a new immersive show in Las Vegas.
(Particle Ink)
“We went big,” Tuft says, noting the group was about six weeks from loading when the COVID-19 lockdown began and altered the “Particle Ink” plans. Most of the initial costs proved to be recoupable or able to be redirected to a different space. “Particle Ink” now is committed to the Luxor Hotel & Casino for at least four years, residing in what used to be the hotel’s wedding chapel.
The inward-looking fantasy is set in multiple black-box rooms with minimalist furnishings — a communal, ritualistic hub, a library, a bathroom, a bedroom and a mini forest among them. The dancing is rigorous, with performers often seeming to be wrestling with themselves as they do battle with sometimes hidden (and sometimes not) existential demons. Fast-moving digital artwork comes alive on walls, much of it drawn via a wand, by a nameless artist, portrayed by Elenah Claudin, who serves as the show’s protagonist.
His rainbow-colored creations spring from a chest, and in one moment he turns a couch into a piano and in another sketches out a mystical horse and appears to gallop through his invented world. The images split the difference between something childlike and fanciful street art. Strategic use of projections among the sets allows the animation to appear tangible.
This merging of tech and animation into a believable landscape — what the LightPoets refer to as the “2.5 dimension” — is the triumph of “Particle Ink.” But it’s not the show’s heart. This is ultimately a story about loss, and searching to regain one’s footing after extreme grief. A black-lighted scribble on the wall in the show’s lobby spells it out: “Some of us are dead,” alluding to characters in the show that may live on only as memories or creative visions.
“It’s about everything from childhood wonderment to grief and loss, to really accepting yourself,” Tuft says. “It’s about striking a balance about reaching within and understanding oneself. These are concepts that don’t necessarily lend themselves to what people generally consider ‘Las Vegas entertainment.’”
Times Game Critic Todd Martens interacts with the animated character of Particle in the new Las Vegas immersive show “Particle Ink: House of Shattered Prisms.”
(Todd Martens / Los Angeles Times)
And yet here it is, complete with nods to mysticism, as well as tarot and oracle art. “Particle Ink” ultimately strives to tell a personal narrative about the journey to regain one’s creativity, relying primarily on movement and animation to do so. There is little dialogue outside a wandering puppet, a sort of wise man who can exist between worlds (or fill in narrative gaps for those who choose to focus on one of the show’s touchscreen-like walls and handful of augmented reality devices that further the adventures of Particle and his pals).
“Particle Ink” is a story of heartbreak. It follows the artist, his partner, Lilith (Dani Maloney), and the world he conjures. It pulls from age-old tales of light and dark, and how our minds are factories of fascination but also places of imprisonment. It also wants to remix the theatrical experience, as it not only heavily relies on technology but also takes influences from the world of gaming. A projection of a sword being drawn emerges on a wall, and then it becomes a prop for a battle scene. Its narrative too is quest-based, a journey for Particle to recover pieces of his creator’s shattered heart.
Animation comes alive via light and projections in “Particle Ink: House of Shattered Prisms,” a show that explores how an artist (Elenah Claudin) harnesses the power of creativity in overcoming grief and heartbreak.
(Todd Martens / Los Angeles Times)
Jo Cattell, a Chicago-based theater director and one third of the LightPoets, sometimes even intermingles the word “player” and “audience member,” noting that immersive theater only works if attendees quickly understand the rule-set of the creative work. While there’s no real onboarding in “Particle Ink,” the first scene builds to a communal ritual centered around light-gathering stones, one that allows our distressed artist to briefly tap into his creativity only to quickly lose it again. Particle, then, prods the audience on a journey of recovering his splintered heart.
I saw “Particle Ink” twice, the first night focusing heavily on interacting with the animation. Throughout the theatrical space are tablets that are reconfigured to look and feel like magic mirrors, further glimpses into the so-called 2.5 dimension. The second night, however, I decided to zero in on the narrative, and found both charm and anguish in the way Particle strives to heal his creator’s broken heart — Particle’s tiny size, playful nature and purposefully hand-drawn feel created a sense of fragility. Grief can be a stubborn place, but I felt moved in the way “Particle Ink” used creative tools — painting, creating and animation — to show how what we lose continues to live with us.
Thinking about the future of theater, Cattell wonders about today’s younger generations weaned on smartphones and games. While she says this isn’t a LightPoets thesis, she’s eager to experiment with ways to make theater a more active experience. The tradeoff is that the experience is less controlled, but those who go along for the ride can home in on certain characters or emotions. In theory, it creates a more personal show.
“I don’t want to call it a playground because I think that has connotations,” Cattell says. “But we definitely want people to play and create and have fun and enjoy, but at the same time watch something that might move them. Depending on who they are, or what moment of their life they’re in, it might break their heart.”
‘Particle Ink: House of Shattered Prisms’
Manifestations of grief and inner turmoil here emerge as giant characters outfitted as ink blots. The metaphor isn’t terribly difficult to uncover: With depression, and a loss of purpose, life is depleted of color. But it’s how the story is told that matters, and with a mix of animation and highly athletic dance, “Particle Ink” is 75 minutes of unexpected theatrical interactions. Cattell, for instance, estimates that there are about 10 hours of original animation, and creating a show in which performers would be interacting with walls and objects was a challenge.
“When you go to theater school, you don’t get taught to play with the walls,” Cattell says. “It’s been interesting coming from a theatrical background. We’re going to break rules. We’re breaking rules in storytelling, in genre and format. But there’s a reason those rules exist. How do we still make sure the performer is connecting with the audience when the performer is now turning away from the audience?”
The solution: Find a way for those wall-bound animated characters to break free. And then let them dance.
A model of the statue of Barbara Rose Johns pictured in 2023, two years before the real thing was unveiled at the U.S. Capitol.
Amy Davis/The Baltimore Sun/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters
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Amy Davis/The Baltimore Sun/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters
In 1951, a Black teenager led a walkout of her segregated Virginia high school. On Tuesday, her statue replaced that of a Confederate general in the U.S. Capitol.
Barbara Rose Johns was 16 when she mobilized hundreds of students to walk out of Farmville’s Robert Russa Moton High School to protest its overcrowded conditions and inferior facilities compared to those of the town’s white high school.
That fight was taken up by the NAACP and eventually became one of the five cases that the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed in Brown v. Board of Education, whose landmark 1954 ruling declared school segregation unconstitutional.
“Before the sit-ins in Greensboro, before the Montgomery bus boycott, there was the student strike here in 1951, led by Barbara Johns,” Cameron Patterson told NPR in 2020, when he led the Robert Russa Moton Museum, located on the former school grounds.
Johns’ bronze statue is the latest addition to Emancipation Hall, a gathering place in the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center that houses many of the 100 statues representing each state.
Every state legislature gets to honor two notable individuals from its history with statues in the Capitol. For over a century, Virginia was represented by George Washington and, until a few years ago, Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
Lee’s statue was hoisted out of the Capitol — at the request of then-Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat — in December 2020, the year that a nationwide racial reckoning spurred the removal of over 100 Confederate symbols across the U.S.
The same month, Virginia’s Commission on Historical Statues in the United States Capitol voted unanimously to select a statue of Johns to replace it. Johns, who died in 1991, was chosen from a list of 100 names and five finalists, including Pocahontas and Maggie Lena Walker, the first Black woman to serve as president of a U.S. bank.
Exactly five years and a multi-step approval process later, the 11-foot statue — created by Maryland artist Steven Weitzman — has finally moved in. It shows a teenage Johns standing at a podium, raising a book overhead mid-rallying cry.
Its pedestal is engraved with the words: “Are we going to just accept these conditions, or are we going to do something about it?”
Johns is credited with helping end school segregation
Johns was born in New York City in March 1935, and moved to Virginia’s Prince Edward County during World War II to live on her grandmother’s — and later, father’s — farm.
According to the Moton Museum, Johns — the niece of civil rights pioneer the Rev. Vernon Johns — grew increasingly frustrated by the lack of resources at her school. Classrooms were located in free-standing tar-paper shacks that lacked proper plumbing, with no science laboratories, cafeteria or gymnasium at all.
She later wrote in an unpublished memoir that when she finally took her concerns to a teacher, they responded, “Why don’t you do something about it?” She felt dismissed at first, but gave the idea more thought and decided to unite the student council members to coordinate a strike.
“We would make signs and I would give a speech stating our dissatisfaction and we would march out [of] the school and people would hear us and see us and understand our difficulty and would sympathize with our plight and would grant us our new school building and our teachers would be proud and the students would learn more and it would be grand,” Johns wrote, according to the museum.
On April 23, 1951, Johns gathered all 450 students in the auditorium and convinced them to walk out, to protest their school’s conditions and campaign for a new building. The strike lasted roughly two weeks and caught the attention of the NAACP.
NAACP lawyers Spottswood Robinson and Oliver Hill filed a lawsuit (Davis et al. v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, Virginia) in federal court, challenging the constitutionality of segregated education in the county’s schools.
The court ultimately sided with the county, but did order that its Black schools be made physically equal to white schools. A new Black Moton High School — known as “Moton 2” — was built in 1953 to avoid integration.
The following year, the Supreme Court declared school segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Ed, based on the Farmville case and four others from across the country. But it took years for the ruling to actually be enforced throughout the U.S., especially in Virginia, which enacted a set of anti-integration laws that came to be known as “Massive Resistance.”
Prince Edward County schools were officially integrated in 1964, after being closed for five years in an attempt to avoid it. Moton 2 was reopened as the Prince Edward County High School and remained in use until 1993.
As for Johns, she was sent after the walkout to live with relatives and finish her schooling in Alabama due to safety concerns. She attended Spelman College and graduated from Drexel University before working as a librarian for Philadelphia Public Schools. She married the Rev. William Powell, with whom she raised five children before her death at age 56.
Johns has been recognized in Virginia over the years. Her story is now a required part of lessons in the public school curricula. In 2017, the Virginia Attorney General’s Offices were renamed in her honor. And the following year, the Virginia General Assembly designated April 23 — the anniversary of the walkout — as Barbara Johns Day statewide.
Johns’ sister, Joan Johns Cobbs, told member station VPM last year that their family is honored by this newest tribute in the nation’s capital.
“I think Virginia is trying to correct some of its inequities,” Johns Cobbs said. “I think the fact that they chose her was one way they are trying to rectify what happened in the past.”
Bucking a trend in 2025
Plans for Johns’ statue have been in motion since well before President Trump’s second term, which has been marked by a rollback in diversity initiatives and the reinstallment of Confederate monuments.
One of Trump’s executive orders along those lines, aimed at “restoring truth and sanity to American history,” calls on the secretary of the Interior to restore public monuments and markers on federal lands that have been changed or removed since 2020.
In October, a statue of Confederate Gen. Albert Pike was reinstalled in a D.C. park, five years after protesters tore it down and set it ablaze.
As is customary, state leaders and members of Congress will be in attendance at Tuesday’s statue unveiling. Among them will be House Speaker Mike Johnson as well as Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican who campaigned in part against critical race theory and has eliminated DEI initiatives in office.
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., who also plans to attend the ceremony, issued a statement beforehand praising Johns’ “incredible bravery and leadership she displayed when she walked out of Moton High School.”
“I’m thrilled that millions of visitors to the U.S. Capitol, including many young people, will now walk by her statue and learn about her story,” he added. “May she continue to inspire generations to stand up for equality and justice.”
‘Stranger Things’ Noah Schnapp
Tears Flowed After Filming Wrapped …
Finale Is Super Sad!!!
Published
TMZ.com
Noah Schnapp says the “Stranger Things” cast and crew had tears in their eyes when they filmed the final episode of the hit Netflix series … and he’s expecting fans to get emotional when the finale drops.
We got Noah in New York City on Tuesday, and our photog asked him if the tears were flowing when the final ‘ST’ season was wrapping up.
Noah confirms our suspicions and says the upcoming finale is going to be super sad … and he’s even nervous for it.
The cast is gonna get together one last time to watch the finale, and Noah’s anticipating more tears there, too.
The “Stranger Things” finale is set to be released on Netflix — and in theaters — on Dec. 31 … so the end of an era is near.
Rob Reiner at the Cannes film festival in 2022.
Andreas Rentz/Getty Images
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Andreas Rentz/Getty Images
When Rob Reiner spoke with Fresh Air in September to promote Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, Terry Gross asked him about Being Charlie, a 2015 film he collaborated on with his son Nick Reiner. The film was a semiautobiographical story of addiction and homelessness, based on Nick’s own experiences.
Nick Reiner was arrested Sunday evening after Rob and Michele Reiner were found dead inside their California home.
The father character in Being Charlie feels a lot of tension between his own career aspirations and his son’s addiction — but Reiner said that wasn’t how it was for him and Nick.
“I was never, ever too busy,” Reiner told Fresh Air. “I mean, if anything, I was the other way, you know, I was more hands-on and trying to do whatever I thought I could do to help. I’m sure I made mistakes and, you know, I’ve talked about that with him since.”
At the time, Reiner said he believed Nick was doing well. “He’s been great … hasn’t been doing drugs for over six years,” Reiner said. “He’s in a really good place.”
Reiner starred in the 1970s sitcom, All in the Family and directed Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally and A Few Good Men. Spinal Tap II: The End Continues is a sequel to his groundbreaking 1984 mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap.
“After 15 years of not working together, we came back and started looking at this and seeing if we could come up with an idea, and we started schnadling right away,” Reiner recalled. “It was like falling right back in with friends that you hadn’t talked to in a long time. It’s like jazz musicians, you just fall in and do what you do.”
Below are some more highlights from that interview.
Interview Highlights
Carl Reiner (left) and Rob Reiner together in 2017.
Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for TCM
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Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for TCM
On looking up to his dad, director Carl Reiner, and growing up surrounded by comedy legends
When I was a little boy, my parents said that I came up to them and I said, “I want to change my name.” I was about 8 years old … They were all, “My god, this poor kid. He’s worried about being in the shadow of this famous guy and living up to all this.” And they say, “Well, what do you want to change your name to?” And I said, “Carl.” I loved him so much, I just wanted to be like him and I wanted to do what he did and I just looked up to him so much. …
[When] I was 19 … I was sitting with him in the backyard and he said to me, “I’m not worried about you. You’re gonna be great at whatever you do.” He lives in my head all the time. I had two great guides in my life. I had my dad, and then Norman Lear was like a second father. They’re both gone, but they’re with me always. …
There’s a picture in my office of all the writers who wrote for Sid Caesar and [Your] Show of Shows over the nine years, I guess, that they were on. And, when you look at that picture, you’re basically looking at everything you ever laughed at in the first half of the 20th century. I mean there’s Mel Brooks, there’s my dad, there is Neil Simon, there is Woody Allen, there is Larry Gelbart, Joe Stein who wrote Fiddler on the Roof, Aaron Ruben who created The Andy Griffith Show. Anything you ever laughed at is represented by those people. So these are the people I look up to, and these are people that were around me as a kid growing up.
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On directing the famous diner scene in When Harry Met Sally
We knew we were gonna do a scene where Meg [Ryan] was gonna fake an orgasm in an incongruous place like a deli, and Billy [Crystal] came up with the line, “I’ll have what she’s having.” … I said, we need to find somebody, an older Jewish woman, who could deliver that line, which would seem incongruous. I thought of my mother because my mother had done a couple of little [movie] things … So I asked her if she wanted to do it and she said sure. I said, “Now listen mom, hopefully that’ll be the topper of the scene. It’ll get the big laugh, and if it doesn’t, I may have to cut it out.” … She said, “That’s fine. I just want to spend the day with you. I’ll go to Katz’s. I’ll get a hot dog.” …
When we did the scene the first couple of times through Meg was kind of tepid about it. She didn’t give it her all. … She was nervous. She’s in front of the crew and there’s extras and people. … And at one point, I get in there and I said, “Meg, let me show you what I meant.” And I sat opposite Billy, and I’m acting it out, and I’m pounding the table and I’m going, “Yes, yes, yes!” … I turned to Billy and I say, “This is embarrassing … I just had an orgasm in front of my mother.” But then Meg came in and she did it obviously way better than I could do it.
On differentiating himself from his father with Stand By Me (1986)
I never said specifically I want to be a film director. I never said that. And I never really thought that way. I just knew I wanted to act, direct, and do things, be in the world that he was in. And it wasn’t until I did Stand By Me that I really started to feel very separate and apart from my father. Because the first film I did was, This Is Spinal Tap, which is a satire. And my father had trafficked in satire with Sid Caesar for many years. And then the second film I did was a film called The Sure Thing, which was a romantic comedy for young people, and my father had done romantic comedy. The [Dick] Van Dyke Show is a romantic comedy, a series.
But when I did Stand By Me, it was the one that was closest to me because … I felt that my father didn’t love me or understand me, and it was the character of Gordie that expressed those things. And the film was a combination of nostalgia, emotion and a lot of humor. And it was a real reflection of my personality. It was an extension, really, of my sensibility. And when it became successful, I said, oh, OK. I can go in the direction that I want to go in and not feel like I have to mirror everything my father’s done up till then.
On starting his own production company (Castle Rock) and how the business has changed
We started it so I could have some kind of autonomy because I knew that the kinds of films I wanted to make people didn’t wanna make. I mean, I very famously went and talked to Dawn Steel, who was the head of Paramount at the time. … And she says to me, “What do you wanna make? What’s your next film?” And I said, “Well, you know, I got a film, but I don’t think you’re going to want to do it.” … I’m going to make a movie out of The Princess Bride. And she said, “Anything but that.” So I knew that I needed to have some way of financing my own films, which I did for the longest time. …
It’s tough now. And it’s beyond corporate. I mean, it used to be there was “show” and “business.” They were equal — the size of the word “show” and “business.” Now, you can barely see the word “show,” and it’s all “business.” And the only things that they look at [are] how many followers, how many likes, what the algorithms are. They’re not thinking about telling a story. … I still wanna tell stories. And I’m sure there’s a lot of young filmmakers — even Scorsese is still doing it, older ones too — that wanna tell a story. And I think people still wanna hear stories and they wanna see stories.
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