Apollo 13: Mission Control is an interactive theatre show about NASA's failed Apollo 13 mission.
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Premiere and touring history
The show premiered in October 2008 at BATS Theatre in Wellington, New Zealand and has toured Hamilton, Nelson and Auckland in New Zealand. It returned to Wellington for a season at the New Zealand International Arts Festival in 2010 and then embarked on an Australian tour beginning at the Sydney Opera House. Subsequent tours to Australia have included The Powerhouse Theater in Brisbane and The State Theater Centre in Perth. In December 2012 the show made its USA premiere in Tacoma, Washington at the Exhibition Hall in the Tacoma Dome, it then toured to the Spokane Convention Convention Center and the Milton Rhodes Center for the Arts in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
The experience
The show tells the story from the point of view of Mission Control. Audience members are seated behind working computer consoles and are allowed to flick the switches, use the working telephones, interact with the actors and hear the three astronauts through headphones. The astronauts perform their part of the show in a command module in another room in the theater. Each night they are joined by an audience member as the "guest astronaut" and their performances are displayed on two large screens at the front of the stage and on smaller TV monitors at the consoles. An actor playing Walter Cronkite broadcasts live news updates throughout the show, interviewing audience members and Astronaut James Lovell's wife Marilyn.