It’s hard to imagine a more appropriate place in New York to spend Halloween than the McKittrick Hotel. For years, adventurous spirits have donned masks and screwed their courage to the sticking place, wandered its dimly-lit corridors, sifted through its secrets and encountered its silent and seductive denizens, to a spooky soundtrack of music from a long-bygone era. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, look up ”Sleep No More.” Also, where have you been?)
But then, as I’ve written before in this space, there are wicked and wondrous things happening at The McKittrick every day of the week. A recent series of visits has confirmed my suspicion that the Chelsea venue offers more enjoyment per square foot than any other location in the city.
Every Friday at midnight, “Bartschland Follies” takes over The McKittrick’s Club Car space. The brainchild of New York after-hours royalty Susanne Bartsch, it’s as if all the dramatic tension of “Sleep No More” is absorbed and detonated in one riotous orgy of a variety night.
With a rotating roster of nightlife miscreants and misfits, the one thing you can count on is naughtiness befitting the time-slot. You’ll be treated to break dancers or ballerinas, clowns or contortionists, acrobatic dancers or dancing acrobats, any number of gender-bending superstars, or perhaps the yoyo expert who reportedly dangles the plaything from a part of his body other than his index finger.
The night of my visit, even before the show begins proper, drag queens and pasty-wearing beauties with millinery the size of satellite dishes roam the room. Drag artist Shequida Hall wields the mic like a weapon, by turns teasing and flirting with audience members. One obviously expert multitasker juggles while taking off his clothes, while another performer blows up a balloon—before inserting herself entirely in it. Then Shequida herself delivers an unexpected rendition of “Nessun Dorma” that, just as unexpectedly, blows the roof off.
“Strangely, and eerily as well, the times in which we’re living are beginning to feel very ominously like a parallel of Weimar culture,” Bartsch told Forbes recently. “So, ‘Come to the cabaret!’” Truly, getting rude and crude is not just a time-honored tradition in New York, it’s an art form, and “Bartschland Follies” is pretty much as freaky and far out a Friday night as the city has to offer.
Elsewhere, The McKittrick’s intimate dinner theater-mentalism show “At The Illusionist’s Table” is an altogether quieter, less kinetic affair, but is no less enthralling.
In a room that feels very far away from the mingling and merrymaking going on in The McKittrick’s bar and restaurant, some 28 guests take their places at a long candlelit table under glowing, moon-like orbs. It’s a dinner party, except one with a palpable sense of excitement and unease in the air, the tension of a room full of people suspiciously guarding their inner most thoughts from being gleaned.
But if the mentalism powers possessed by Scott Silven, crisp of suit and long of hair, are themselves intimidating, the man himself is a preternaturally warm and welcoming dinner party host, whose first magic trick is absolutely winning over even the most chin-strokingly skeptical of guests. (Guilty.)
Born in the U.K., Silven’s boyhood love of traditional magic evolved into a passion for mentalism after he read the Roald Dahl short story “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” in which Henry develops the ability to see through magic cards and see the future. Silven imagined “the fantastical things the character could achieve and the remarkable ways he would inspire people.”
“We’re all driven by memories, decisions, relationships, and dreams,” Silven has said. “[T]he show investigates these aspects of ourselves, how they make us who are and how they will continue to shape us.”
“At the Illusionist’s Table” unfurls elegantly in between courses of a very fine three-course meal and whisky tasting, with Silven telling tales and waxing philosophical in tones that would not be out of place on a meditation app. Woven into the show, Silven’s actual mentalist feats are, of course, best only hinted at. Suffice it to say that they involve a deck of playing cards, the label on a whisky bottle, a chalkboard drawing, a randomly selected page in an old book, a tense game of telephone, and the icing on the dessert course.
All of it is awe-inspiring. (The night I went, I met a couple of return visitors, who were quietly hoping to get a chance to figure out some of Silven’s tricks. They left possibly even more confounded.) Even for the most naturally guarded of minds (me again), the sense of wonder is irresistible. Judged by the sheer number of gasps, grins, wide eyes and stunned laughter it generates, “At the Illusionist’s Table” is surely one of the most awing and effective theater productions on offer in the city.
Finally, there’s nothing subdued about The McKittrick’s annual Halloween event, “Inferno.” It’s a frothing cauldron of a party, overflowing with decadent delights. The way that it appropriates spaces familiar to past visitors to “Sleep No More” feels, thrillingly, like the inmates have taken over the asylum.
On Level 5, dancers gyrate in bathtubs (and make sustained eye contact with guests); on Level 3, arachnoid acrobats maneuver around spiderwebs under blacklight; while Level 1, typically the McKittrick Hotel Ballroom, the venue for the climactic scene of “Sleep No More,” is a heaving mass of dancing bodies. (Let’s just say that I wondered if the nightclub aromas would pervade the following day’s performances.)
Elsewhere, there are opportunities to get face painted—my guest gets made up like a space warrior apparently with a bit of Darth Maul in her DNA—and music and dance around every corner, from sultry standards in the Manderley Bar to gritty punk covers just one floor up.
In the bustling McKittrick lobby space, the MK Groove Orchestra belt out a ballsy rendition of “Superstition” that sounded less Stevie Wonder, more Nirvana, then let rip with “Monster Mash,” replete with vocalist in a lab coat and gloves. The group’s mastermind, Michael Kammers, is every bit the mad scientist, conducting and cueing the musicians in a frenzy, seemingly delirious with his own creation.
An immersive, participatory spirit pervades all the events at The McKittrick, so it’s fitting that the Halloween guests themselves are part of the attraction on the night: costumes verged from the familiar (dominatrix, sexy nun, zombie nurse, Ruth Bader Ginsberg) to more purely surreal and sexy sartorial expressions.
The truth is, there’s always something new going on at The McKittrick. Over the years, they’ve offered Supercinema (parties themed to popular films), live music aplenty (as well as their house bands, everything from the Preservation Hall Jazz Band to acts as diverse as Karen O and Sting), smaller-scale immersive theater productions, even gardening classes for youngsters. Recently, every other week, it seems, Scott Silven is using his hypnotic gifts to assume control of ever more of the building. (Shout-out to the marketing department’s design team, too, whose eye-pleasing posters complement the antique aesthetic of “Sleep No More.”)
It’s probably time to consider your plans for New Year’s—and perhaps bookmark The McKittrick’s special events page. There’s guaranteed to be enough to keep you wanting to come back tomorrow. And tomorrow. And tomorrow.
