Alien Invasion: Connecticut is Crowd Interactive Fun From Start to End (4 stars)
The Haunted Trolley is an annual Halloween production that takes place at the Shore Line Trolley Museum in South Central Connecticut, and this year, it’s an alien invasion!
It’s a nighttime Halloween show that takes place aboard a historic electric rail trolley, which could be 100 years old. Over 40 minutes, you head out on a 1.5-mile track and come back. It’s non-scary, suitable for even young children, but you will need to mount a couple of steep stairs to get into the trolley.
Alien Invasion: Connecticut is perhaps the most crowd interactive Halloween show that I’ve ever been to. Every second involves your host, Dean, “a professor from Roswell University”, engaging with the audience and getting them to respond back. He told us that he was an alien hunter, and that some of us in the audience could be aliens in disguise. Fortunately, he could protect us, if only we sang along with him and played toy musical instruments, which he and an audience volunteer handed out.
He also led us in a hunt to identify aliens in the audience. The show had the genius insight that, for example, if Dean got us waving our hands in the air (like we just don’t care) or singing, then if someone in the audience didn’t join in, that person… could be an alien! Dean took volunteers from the audience to help and also asked trivia questions, from the theory that any human would know the lyrics to some fun popular song. So anyone who didn’t sing… could be an alien!
What fun. Ultimately three audience guests got tagged as potential aliens, were asked trivia questions, and the audience applauded to choose the most likely alien infiltrator. The show was laugh-out-loud funny and performed admirably by the cast. The crowd bonded with each other and were encouraged to make new friends. We all acted like goofs either trying to look alien or trying to look human.
Unfortunately, the experience did have structural issues. Foremost, there was nothing about the show that required a trolley. A trolley is an interesting venue, but all the action was focused inside the trolley, except for one Halloween statue outside that we moved past. And, the trolley’s bright interior lights reflected off of the windows, making it impossible to see the nighttime around us. So we didn’t get either the trolley feeling of travel or seeing the beautiful night and forest.
The trolley, with limited seating, also limited audience size, and was an awkward, single aisle format from which our host, Dean, had to engage everyone. He had a microphone so that he didn’t have to shout, which was essential for understanding him, but he should have also had a handheld microphone to give to others. The intro video was too long, and some gags like the alien translator could have been tighter. Asking the audience to quiz their neighbors was too vague for the them to bridge social hesitancy. Ultimately the winning audience member voted “most likely to be alien” had no thematic ending. For example, give him or her a soft boffer and have him or her attack and subdue an evil alien, or have him or her challenge the evil alien to a dance-off, which could have led to the evil alien calling off the planet-wide attack, an issue that was left unresolved.
Funny, warm, and impressively interactive, but unpolished and in the wrong venue, Alien Invasion gets a solid but not perfect 4 stars.
See more at thehauntedtrolley.com.