(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.
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.
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.
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.
Spoiler: Elvis does indeed perform.
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.
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.)
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.
The highlight of the “train ride” is prerecorded video footage of actors playing the young Elvis and Sam Bell. It is nicely shot and well-acted with a lovely dreamy quality to it. For a moment, I did forget I was in the London Docklands and not deep in the American South. Then there was a quick transition to British actors on stage doing Southern accents, and I remembered where I was again.
Surprisingly, for a show about Elvis, the real thing is barely in the first act. Most of the shots of him here are the actor playing the younger version in video footage, or a backlit shot of an older actor with a pompadour hairstyle loitering outside Sun Records.
After the first act explains how Elvis became the biggest star in the world, the audience is taken to a Hawaiian-themed bar for an intermission and to “await” the Elvis performance. Leis are handed out, and guests can sip on blue Hawaiian drinks with rum and pineapple juice and take their photo with a half-dressed Elvis cutout on a surfboard.
Finally, it’s time for the King’s big comeback concert. We walk through his dressing area, where his “scent” is piped through the walls. The Old Spice notes were an excellent re-creation of my high school hallways after gym class.
We are then shepherded into the concert hall, where actors playing NBC staffers point out the applause sign. This is where the much-discussed AI elements come in. The show used the burgeoning technology to create footage of Elvis in his dressing room as he deals with stage fright, which is then projected onto a screen (so no holographic element). AI Elvis stares blankly into the middle distance as he remembers his love of music and his Mississippi roots. He doesn’t speak here—no words are put in Elvis’ mouth—so it at least avoids the uncanny valley quality of the Peter Cushing likeness as Grand Moff Tarkin in Rogue One some 22 years after the actor’s death.
The King emerges to perform, and we are treated to a three-piece band playing along to AI-enhanced footage of that 1968 concert. The main effect of this AI is to make Elvis look too polished and a little too pretty, as if he’s a 2025 TikTokker speaking with a filter over his face. His skin has no texture, and his eyes are too bright.
The concert ends with footage of the real-life Sam Bell talking about his childhood friend, and a montage demonstrates the deep hold Elvis still has on us all today, with artists like Elton John explaining why Presley was such a big deal.
Our last stop, an after-show dance party with musicians strumming along to Elvis songs, is good fun. It’s the last bit of proof that Evolution thoroughly understands the eternal appeal of Elvis and the audience’s seemingly bottomless appetite for 1960s Americana. But the show ultimately sheds no light on either the man or the myth, and no technological boundaries are pushed. If you missed your chance to see Elvis before his untimely passing, you’re out of luck. The King is still dead.
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