“Adventure Pizza” is a choose-your-own-adventure live rock show in which the audience has control of the story as the lead character, all framed in a world of puppetry and video animations.
Inspired by a love of interactive games, live performance, pizza, and the transformative magic of puppets, “Adventure Pizza” follows a branching map. This map and story is constructed around Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, wherein audience choice dictates what song is next, where the story goes and ultimately, who your character is.
Still an evolving work-in-progress, to date ‘Adventure Pizza’ has had selections shared as a live Twitch stream and with a live audience at La Mama’s puppet slam.
photo by Richard Termine
In 2023 we were thrilled to premiere the first live staging of ‘Adventure Pizza’ at La Mama’s Puppet Slam.
Borrowing from the Twitch premiere, we adapted several scenes for a live audience, inventing the Choice-O-Meter and using audience input to guide us through different paths.
Originally envisioned as a live show, “Adventure Pizza” was first adapted as a Twitch stream during a residency with the Object Movement Festival in 2020, which had pivoted to an online format due to quarantine.
In “Adventure Pizza,” you come home from a long day wanting only one thing: a large pizza. Alas, every delivery person on Earth has mysteriously disappeared. You must choose to go and get the pizza yourself, battling ninjas, animated discarded pizza crusts called “Crusties” and most terrifying of all, your own internal demons.
Adventure Pizza was initially realized as a collaboration between myself and Dan Brennan for Monsterface Industries and the director Leigh Walter.
For the Twitch Stream, we staged several early scenes. It is the dream to some day return to the show and bring it to the live stage.