HAPPY NEWS YEARS
Greetings gourds and ghouls! Wait— what— it’s JANUARY?!
Well, we live in Los Angeles so our porch pumpkins are still looking OK and we love ghosts year-round, so… we’re sticking to it.
Greetings gourds and ghouls! Welcome to the Mister and Mischief Missive! Yes, this one is a long one as we have a lot to catch up on through the fall and winter, as well as into the new year.
Here’s what you’ll find below:
Happening Now and Coming Soon
Looking back at 2024
A Big Pile of Thanks
Excited to be Alive in 2025
We’ve got lots of projects we can’t share just yet, but here is some upcoming work you can look forward to in the New Year.
The Bureau of Nooks and Crannies continues
The 2024 Los Angeles Public Library Creators-in-Residence exhibit may have closed, but all 8 installations are still available for you to enjoy.
Check out one of the 6 Experience Kits at select LAPL branches, take an odd audio tour of Central Library, or set off an Audio “Ponder-Wander” at any small library you’d like.
Night at the Library: Building Stories — Feb 1, 2025
The Library Foundation of Los Angeles is inviting Mister and Mischief to bring our unique brand of misbehavior to their big after-hours event on February 1st. Grab a ticket and join the party! If you need a better excuse to go to this– look no further than some of the announced line-up.
Next Stage Immersive Summit Features a Class in Oxymoronic Magic
Andy is teaching a workshop on writing for unscripted performance. Writing for Unscripted. Sounds crazy, no? But in our little village of Anatevka (Immersive Performance), you might say every one of us is writing for unscripted. Trying to scratch out a simple tune without breaking our neck. It isn’t easy. You might ask, why do we stay up there if it is so dangerous. We stay because making weird art is our home. And how do we keep our balance? That I can tell you in two words... and neither of them are “tradition”.
Summer 2025 – Choo Choo Revue at the Bob Baker Marionette Theatre
While not a Mister and Mischief production, Andy has been tapped by the Bob Baker Marionette Theater as a creative facilitator for their Summer 2025 show, which will be the theater’s first entirely new show in forty years. Go give them a follow, get a ticket to their upcoming shows, and get ready to ride the rails this summer!
World Premiere of 40 Watts From Nowhere: The Documentary
The real Sue Carpenter has been hard at work making a documentary about the real KBLT and in February, her hard work will have it’s world premiere at the Slamdance Film Festival in Los Angeles.
If you got to come through our version of KBLT, you will not want to miss this incredible look at archive video footage of the real people and places that made KBLT what it was. Check out the new trailer here.
Thank you for joining us this year!
We started this year with a pair of University campus visits that fueled the same project: the first was to ASU for the Worlds in Play conference, where we ran a workshop and early playtest for The Apple Avenue Detective Agency (among MANY other great workshops); and a few short weeks later, we premiered the Apple Avenue Detective Agency at UCSD as part of La Jolla Playhouse’s Without Walls Festival.
Meanwhile, heading north up the California coast, we were lucky enough to collaborate with the wonderful team at the Santa Barbara Zoo. We helped design two experiences— the live Cal Trails Rangers, who engage visitors throughout their day at the Zoo; and we helped design the new Richard Block Conservation Hub.
We loved collaborating with the whole team at the Zoo, as well as Michael Boskovich, Silvie Zamora, Myles Nye, Sam Roseman, and Dani Thomson.
To our surprise, August was a huge month last year.
As mentioned above, the Bureau’s work remains available across Los Angeles, but in August the Creators-in-Residence project had a launch event. We appreciated all of you who came out to experience Burearians live and in-person at LA Central Library.
Andy gave a talk called “Empowering Your People” at the Reality Escape Convention (aka RECON) to an enthusiastic crowd of Escape Room designers, owners and enthusiasts. It was a total whirlwind blast to share some of that Mister and Mischief mayhem with the kindest puzzleheads and experience hounds you could ever wish for, and learn so much from them as well.
And of course we can’t ignore the return of Mister and Mischief’s very first experience— Escape From Godot.
Were you one of the 400 people that joined us for a fresh new run of Escape From Godot this year? We had a blast presenting this experience again for the first time since 2019 welcoming folks in town for RECON, as well as from all over Southern California.
Our final in-person presentation this year was remounting The Apple Avenue Detective Agency for Indiecade Night Games at the Music Center Plaza in downtown Los Angeles.
Nice words from other people
When creating things that are designed to be experienced in real life, accurately capturing the essence of the piece is a herculean effort in and of itself. Sometimes this work feels like strange messages in oddly shaped bottles, thrown out into an unpredictable sea. We are incredibly grateful for Todd Martens of the Los Angeles Times for his lovely, evocative and accurate coverage of our work this year, as well as Noah Nelson and Kathryn Yu of No Proscenium for not only including us in their Best-Of-2024, but taking the time to feel the feelings, think the thoughts, and share them with our community.
What inspired us in 2024
This year was… a lot of year. We would have loved to make a gift guide, a best of, a rundown… but here we are— it is January— and all we really want to do is shout from rooftops about all the things that kept us going, hoping they will do the same for others. So here is a totally non-comprehensive but nevertheless very tasty sampler platter of what was feeding our hearts and heads for the past twelve jam-packed months.
Books
Some were evergreen re-reads, some were new faves, all informed our work profoundly.
Newsletters
These brought joy into our inboxes and kept us in the loop all year.
Podcasts
Particularly inspiring episodes of the series we could not shut up about. Sorry.
EXPERIENCES & SHOWS
Moments that will echo in our minds for years to come. Thrilling, heartbreaking, and incredibly fun.
UNCATEGORIZABLE DELIGHTS
Other selected fonts of joy.
Myles Nye / Yannick Trapman O’Brien - A houseguest that doubles as an incredibly supportive collaborator? We’ll take two, please.
Fortune Lasagna - part of a one-on-one clowning experience by Ben Nicholson. It was back in November of 2023 but Andy kept dreaming about and then trying to explain it to Jeff for twelve solid months.
Crosswalk Clown - There is a clown that practices his craft in the middle of the road at Fletcher x San Fernando. He is, without a doubt, the best possible reason to be late to a meeting. Never change, Crosswalk Clown. Stay safe out there.
LOOKING AHEAD
We’re pre-ordering Danny Ricker’s WOW, YOU LOOK TERRIBLE!
We’re buying tickets to Darrencorp’s DINNER THEATRE
We’re getting SO hyped for East West Player’s CAMBODIAN ROCK BAND
We’re trying to snag tickets to UNDERSIGNED before it is all sold out!
We’re donating to BLACK IMMERSIVE CREATOR’S GRANT!
A Big Thank You to Our Collaborators
And finally, we’d love to drop a few big thanks for 2024:
Amy, Mia, Gabe, Eric, and the folks at La Jolla Playhouse, thank you for championing our work and including us in Without Walls. It means the world to us to have support from folks we admire so deeply!
The PR team at Roger Charlie for helping coordinate so much wonderful spreading-of-the-word, and your insight and questions help evolve how we talk about the creative work we’re doing.
Silvie Zamora, for being our beloved voice of reason and narration, and being so game to jump onto a train or into a meeting. We’re so lucky for your big ideas, big heart and kind determination.
Ellie Kuhlke, our expert ampersand. A masterful left/right brained juggler, friend, confidant, problem solver and eagle-eyed storyteller. We could NOT do this without your support, strength, patience, and humor.
An enormous thank you to the astonishing regiment of folks that we collaborated with this year. For all of you that joined us in conference room creative sessions, living room rehearsals, backyard playtests, up and down the coast, across the country, around the globe, sang songs, wrote songs, harmonized, took phone calls, zoom calls, load ins, substitutes and understudies, producers and collaborators, social media mavens, lunch dates, brain-pickers, every single performer, every guest and audience member that purchased a ticket, anyone that spread the word, shared a photo, or was inspired to do their own hard-to-explain art: Thank you for being a part of the engine that drives us forward.
Let’s go farther in 2025! We look forward to seeing you out in the world and hearing what’s got you excited.