London’s Immersive New Elvis Show Fails to Bring the King Back to Life

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(Bloomberg) — Elvis may have left the building in 1977, but in 2025 a new immersive show in London called Elvis Evolution aims to bring the rock icon back to life. Yet as I sat on the bleachers of an ersatz 1960s set and watched spruced-up 2D footage of the legend, the only thing that truly impressed me was how devoid this version of Elvis was of the energy and sex appeal that made the King an icon.

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Elvis Evolution takes place at the Immerse LDN, part of the massive Excel Waterfront complex. If you’ve ridden the Tube anytime in the past few weeks, you’ve no doubt seen ads for it. It’s part of a new breed of immersive experiences that are part theater, part amusement-park attraction and part interactive spectacle. Although Evolution uses AI-enhanced video footage, this show—event? play? experience? One struggles to know what to call this thing—is not trying to be the wildly successful ABBA Voyage. There’s no Elvis digital avatar or hologram. Instead it walks its audience through a mix of film-quality sets that culminate in a re-creation of Presley’s 1968 comeback show.

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Our first stop on this tour-de-Elvis was a seafoam green, pink and red diner that managed to be both sterile and kitschy. Guests are told they are in Burbank, California, in the late ’60s and can buy themselves peanut butter and banana milkshakes, hot dogs and Budweisers while they wait to enter the “NBC Studios” for Elvis’ televised comeback concert.

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Actors in period costume play NBC pages and staff, and it’s there that the audience is introduced to Sam Bell, a childhood friend of Elvis’ who is trying to talk his way into the performance and reconnect with his old friend “EP.” This setting introduces the show’s central dilemma—will Elvis perform tonight or won’t he?—and we learn that Presley hasn’t played live in the better part of a decade and (gasp) hasn’t even left his dressing room yet because of nerves.

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Spoiler: Elvis does indeed perform.

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Sam Bell is just as much the main character of this show as Elvis, a strange choice given that I have about as much interest in Elvis’ childhood friends as I do in, say, an algebra classmate of Bob Dylan’s in Minnesota in the late 1950s.

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The audience is ushered from the faux greenroom and follows Sam along a corridor to a “train ride” to Tupelo, Mississippi, where we get to revisit Elvis’ roots. There’s haze and smoke and uncomfortable wooden seats as the show chugs through Presley’s basic biography: He grew up poor in one of the few White families in his neighborhood; he discovered a love for blues and gospel music from his Black neighbors; later he worked as a truck driver in Memphis, Tennessee, before being discovered by Sam Phillips at Sun Records and catapulting into global superstardom thanks to the sheer power of his voice and electric movement of his hips. (And being a White performer of the blues in a deeply racist era, though that point doesn’t get much attention.)

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I’m not a superfan, but I knew all these pop culture beats from the general hold Elvis still has on the public. Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, starring Austin Butler, was a critical and commercial hit in 2022, and I loved the 2023 film Priscilla, Sofia Coppola’s examination of the Elvis phenomenon through the eyes of his (too) young wife. Billboard estimated that Elvis’ music alone still generates more than $12 million a year, proof that there’s plenty of money to be made from dead celebrities, especially icons such as Elvis. I imagine if Colonel Tom Parker was still around, he’d be delighted.