Full Immersion

The creature. The monster. Man’s first attempt at playing God. A metaphor for the march of industrialization. A victim of societal othering. A big green bumbling guy with bolts in his neck. The character who stumbled out of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and into our cultural mythos has taken on many roles over the past two centuries, but he arrives in Beverly Hills this year reanimated anew. From February 12 through March 1, the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts is teaming with Los Angeles’s self-described “junkyard opera” company Four Larks to turn Shelley’s deathless creation of increasingly relevant ethical anxieties into an immersive whirl of live music, expressive dance, stunning design, and unusual narrative.

“We are sort of a big, lumbering thing,” says Four Larks cofounder Mat Sweeney by way of describing the company’s interdisciplinary approach, which yields far more cohesion than he makes it seem. In this reimagining of , a cast of 12 will use instruments, words, found objects,