Return of the King: Elvis evolution
- Live team
- Oct 1
- 8 min read
A time-travelling, tech-fuelled immersive experience has landed in London
Words Verity Butler
Step through the doors of a retro-style TV studio at NBC. It’s 1968, and a pair of head-set-clad producers are panicking. Elvis Presley has locked himself inside his dressing room and is refusing to come out. You picture him nervously pacing back and forth inside as he prepares for what will soon become his career-defining TV special.
As you and others (the live television audience) wait with growing anticipation, you have no idea that you’re about to travel through decades of rock ’n’ roll history. Welcome to Elvis Evolution: a brand-new sensory spectacle that’s just arrived in London.
Developed by Layered Reality, the studio behind Jeff Wayne’s The War of the Worlds: The Immersive Experience, and directed by Jack Pirie, Elvis Evolution is an ambitious experience that looks to surge ahead of other players in the busy immersive pool.
Offering a fusion of live theatre, AV systems, sensory storytelling and rich visuals, it’s a glimpse into the future of experiential entertainment. “The beauty of immersive, to me,” says Pirie, “is that it’s a merging of mediums into one show or storytelling format. I end up drawing a lot on my background in film and theatre and combining it all into something new and hopefully different for audiences.”
And different it is. If one thing is for certain, Elvis Evolution is not just another tribute show.
A little less conversation, a little more AV please!
The show – all 40,000 sq ft of it – is housed in Immerse LDN at London’s Excel. Across its runtime, audiences are transported through four environments that include interactive themed bars, multisensory train carriages, as well as panoramic AV spaces that recreate key moments of Elvis’ life.
From the jump, Pirie’s creative goal was clear: “How do you deliver the feeling of being within a story in a way that you previously couldn’t?”
To bring that vision to fruition, Layered Reality turned to some of the most sophisticated AV tools on the market.
“We’re using a D&B Soundscape system,” Pirie explains, “which is a state-of-the-art audio system that can mimic the acoustics of different spaces.”
The team collaborated with Southby Productions, who brought in multi-award-winning sound designer Gareth Fry. Together with the show’s music director, Kojo Samuel, the team elevated Soundscape to a starring role in several pivotal scenes, including one that places the audience inside a gospel church where young Elvis first encountered spiritual music.
“We wanted to replicate the feeling of hearing a choir or congregation singing in church. With Soundscape, we can place the audience in that environment sonically, not just visually. It’s about sound that surrounds you, lifting you to a new place just like it did for him.” The show’s focus around sensory detail extends to the smells, movement and haptics woven into performance. In a sequence set on a labourer’s train through Mississippi, audience members can feel the rumble beneath their feet, the rush of air and even the scent of sun-drenched earth after rain.
“We’re thinking about everything from scent dispersal – bourbon in Beale Street blues bars – to haptics and fans for recreating physical sensations,” says Pirie. “What did the blues smell like in fifties Memphis? What did it feel like to be on a train rolling through the countryside? That’s what we’re trying to evoke.”
Lighting, projection and blended worlds
Creating immersive environments means balancing light and shadow, physical sets, live performers, digital illusions and virtual landscapes. That complex task fell to a lighting team led by David Howe, working with design studio 808 Create and equipment supplied by White Light.
“There’s been a huge amount of work in the design phase,” says Simon Reveley, CEO of Layered Reality. “We had to take all of these complex ideas into the room to figure out how the hell we would try to blend amazing lighting with all of this projection and LED.”
That’s no small feat when your toolkit includes high-definition LED walls, 360° projection and multilayer gauze effects, in different combinations depending on the scene. “At the start of the show,” says Pirie, “we drop you into the forties in Tupelo, Mississippi during a summer storm. Gauzes and projection help to create those expansive, rural landscapes.”
Elsewhere, the team play around with illusion and presence.
“We love that blurry line,” Pirie says. “There’s something magical about being able to step into a room where you can’t tell whether you’re watching something happen right in front of you or being transported somewhere else through the projections.”
One of the most central visual moments is the finale: an explosive, multilayered dream sequence which shows Elvis in different stages of his life, infinitely mirrored in LED tunnels and echoed in light. The overall effect was like memory folding in on itself, which is highly reflective of what was a tragically chaotic final chapter of Elvis’ life.
“We had a brilliant video team, headed up by Harrison Cook at Pixel Lux Design,” adds Reveley. “Pixel Lux was integral in specifying all the hardware required, and worked closely with us in the testing phase to make sure we had the right blend of technology. That included multiple large format LED screens from Absen, which were then augmented by additional screens around the room.”
The use of LEDs in theatrical scenarios has become an increasingly popular choice among production teams, with advances in the technology opening up new doors when it comes to seamless storytelling. In an immersive setting, the creative opportunities offered by the tech are increased tenfold.
“Elvis Evolution is driven by live actors, and the technology weaves into that,” Reveley says. “When you think about the way tools like LED or projection are deployed in theatre, it’s usually done within the proscenium arch. With an immersive environment such as Elvis Evolution, we try to make use of that 360° space as much as possible. It’s about choosing the right technology for the job, then also layering in different effects – physical, visceral and sensory. It’s the blending of all those different components that really makes it a Layered Reality experience.”
Attention to detail
The show features four key rooms: NBC Studios, a train carriage, the Blue Hawaii bar and finally the stage seen in the iconic 1968 Comeback Special. When it comes to a completely immersive 360° experience of this scale, set designers find themselves leaning heavily on smaller detailing to complement the larger-scale technology present.
From Presley’s dressing table with its family photos and a trinket tray stacked high with chunky gold rings, to sixties television sets displaying CCTV of NBC producers desperately trying to coax Elvis out of his room, these finer details were certainly in abundance.
“Stage One delivered all of the set work for us,” describes Reveley. “And they also worked on the bars and F&B areas, which are just as important for completing the experience. As an immersive company, we want people to step through the door and immediately enter the world we’ve created for them.”
Reveley emphasises the years of previous collaboration between Stage One and Layered Reality, and why they were the obvious choice for this job.
“I’ve worked with them for the last 30 years of my career, on a number of different projects, and the minute they started to see solutions to the challenges we had with this project, we knew we had to get them on board.
“They’ve got an incredible pedigree – they can fabricate just about anything you might think of. Most importantly, they’re specialists on the automation side of things. When it comes to moving set work around – they’re your guys.”
Why immersive?
Layered Reality is no stranger to large-scale immersive experiences. Its earlier production The War of the Worlds broke fresh ground by intertwining VR, live actors and interactive storytelling into a seamless narrative.
“For a long time,” Pirie notes, “different mediums had to be boxed in for their own audience: film, games, theatre, museums. But now, as the tech has evolved, the boundaries are falling away.
“Why can’t I have the emotional punch of theatre, the spectacle of cinema and the interactivity of games, all in one?”
That philosophy is similarly central to Layered Reality’s ethos.
“We tend to be driven by the creative desire first,” Reveley says, “and then we find the best technologies to deliver that. But, working at the scale we are with Elvis, there’s going to be a wow factor, which comes from combining talent and technologies across disciplines.”
Asking Pirie what his go-to AV tool is for delivering any kind of immersive performance, for him the answer is easy.
“Honestly? I’ve always been a sound person,” he admits. “There’s a sequence in The War of the Worlds where we turn the lights off and just have a pitch-black audio experience. It does something to the imagination that no visual ever can.
“Sound is often underappreciated, but it’s so crucial. Especially in immersive environments. That’s why tools like D&B’s Soundscape are so exciting. It’s not just about noise; it’s about emotional tone.”
A personal insight
Elvis Evolution remains, at its heart, a story-driven experience. The narrative follows Presley’s journey not just as a bullet-point history, but as a personal rediscovery, all viewed through the eyes of his childhood best friend Sam Bell.
“Sam was 12 when he met Elvis in Tupelo,” Pirie explains, “and they were incredibly close. Sam sadly passed away a few years ago, but before that he talked often about what those years meant to him – and to Elvis. We’ve used his voice as our narrative lens.”
It’s been a successful decision for the installation, grounding the experience in the perspective of a child. It evolves as Bell grows into an adult whose life takes a very different direction to Presley’s. This allows audiences to see a more intimate side to the King of Rock and Roll.
“There’s something about childhood that helps you understand someone at their core,” Pirie says. “We wanted to show not the myth, but the boy who was becoming the man.”
Pirie shares that this is why the story kicks off at Elvis’ ’68 Comeback Special; it was a moment when Presley himself was trying to reconnect with his roots.
“He was struggling, having an identity crisis. The night before the special, he had a wave of stage fright. Couldn’t go on. We took that moment as our jumping-off point. The audience steps into that crisis along with him – and then they go back in time.
“It’s all about rediscovery. He’s finding himself again, and we’re exploring his story with new eyes.”
Not just for the Elvis fans
One of the most refreshing aspects of Elvis Evolution is its broad appeal. In other words, you don’t have to be a die-hard Elvis aficionado to enjoy it.
“You don’t need to know anything about Elvis going in,” Pirie insists. “You’ll still get a great story, a moving journey and hopefully a joyous night to share with the people around you. Yes, there’s live music – lots of it – but this isn’t a concert. It’s a time-travelling journey through emotion, culture and memory.”
Ultimately, Elvis Evolution is about more than just the man himself.
“If you had to encapsulate this show in one central theme,” Pirie concludes, “it’s that it’s built around the joy of music. It harnesses the power of music to bring people together.”
The impressive show marks a new, multisensory milestone in immersive experiences and live performance, and Jack Pirie, Layered Reality and all of the other teams involved have delivered a technology-fuelled masterclass in AV-powered storytelling.
Long live the King.
Elvis Evolution is (at time of writing) scheduled to run at Immerse LDN, Excel London until the end of September 2025. For more info and tickets, head to elvisevolution.com
