Tarantino's cinematic universe as live cabaret show? Welcome to L.A.'s new CineVita

Los Angeles Times

04-03-2025

An elaborate mirrored tent sits on an unassuming patch of land just across Rivers Lake from SoFi Stadium. With its Art Deco facade and bright red carpet, the venue billed as the world's largest Belgian spiegeltent looks stunningly out of place in the urban landscape of sprawling asphalt parking lots and low-slung beige buildings.
Called CineVita, the 15,000 square-foot double-decker tent is the new home of the theatrical production company For the Record, which for the past 15 years has staged live musical revues of beloved film soundtracks. Its opening act at CineVita is a celebration of Quentin Tarantino favorites titled 'Tarantino: Pulp Rock.'
The tent may conjure fantasies of seeing a performance 100 years ago — with 3,000 hand-beveled mirrors, hand-cut stained glass windows and ornate carved wood ornamentation — but the show's content is decidedly modern. Guests at the VIP booths ringing the venue will find a pack of candy cigarettes on their table, and there's a Royale with cheese on the menu, a wink to the burger famously referenced by John Travolta during his reverie about Europe in 'Pulp Fiction.'
'We were immersive before immersive was a thing,' For the Record co-founder Shane Scheel says on a recent afternoon in the tent. 'This hybrid of music, movies and theater — all in one — and a night out.'
For the Record was immersive out of necessity in its infancy, when it operated out of tiny Vermont Kitchen & Bar in Los Feliz. Scheel conceived its productions as a kind of cabaret dinner theater — a place for his talented friends to belt out show tunes of a cinematic variety when such opportunities were glancingly few in L.A. Because the space was so small, performers were forced to stand on tables, spin on bar stools and weave through the crowd. Its very first show was called 'Tarantino in Concert,' and the director himself attended with Rosario Dawson and loved it.
Today's incarnation of the Tarantino show is 'Pulp Rock,' and features an impressive cast of singers, musicians and actors re-creating key scenes — and songs — from Tarantino's revered canon, including 'Kill Bill,' 'Inglourious Basterds' and 'Reservoir Dogs.' Actor Tara Lee, cast while the show was in London, says that For the Record creates an incredibly supportive environment for performers, a rarity in the cutthroat world of show business. In the show, Lee embodies Uma Thurman in scenes from both 'Pulp Fiction' and 'Kill Bill.' (Yes, you'll see the twist and a notorious overdose.)
Working in the spiegeltent, which has a circular stage in its center and is ringed by wooden tables and plush VIP banquettes, is unlike performing in any other venue, Lee says. There is also a circus-like atmosphere with additional tents for food services and bathrooms.
'It feels like this show is what it was literally made for,' Lee says of the tent. 'It's taken something and elevated it 1,000 times over. It's not just coming to a show, it's coming to an experience — down to the fact that the food is themed and the servers are in uniform.'
Since For the Record's humble inception, its shows have grown exponentially. The group moved from Los Feliz to the larger DBA nightclub in West Hollywood, where Demi Moore's daughter, Rumer Willis, joined the cast. Willis had come to see the show at a previous venue and fell in love with it, asking how she could become a part of the act, Scheel says. Moore is now an investor in CineVita, which has raised $6 million to date. Each investor is a producer and also owns a piece of the tent — a rare deal in Hollywood, notes Scheel.
Later, For the Record scored a residency at the Wallis in Beverly Hills, which was a welcome opportunity but didn't present the same interactive options that defined a true For the Record experience. This is why, during the pandemic pause of 2020, Scheel and his co-creator, Anderson Davis, prioritized visualizing an idealized future for their company. What they really wanted to do, they decided, was tour.
'We've created lightning in a bottle. How do you move the bottle?' Davis says. 'It turns out you have to build something where the entire bottle can move with you.'
An ornate Belgian spiegeltent might not seem to fit the bill at first blush, but these lavish tents are indeed built for the road, says Peter Goossens, president of West Coast Spiegeltents, whose company built the tent, known as the Queen of Flanders. His company creates its tents in collaboration with the Rik Klessens family, fourth-generation spiegeltent builders based in Belgium.
'Spiegeltent' is Flemish for 'mirror tent,' and the structures first came to prominence in Belgium around 1900 when they were used as traveling dance halls at town fairs. Remarkably few of these old-world venues remain in circulation — there are only a handful in America — although they are much revered in Europe, where it is much more common to stumble across one.
Scheel and Davis flew to Belgium with Goossens to meet with the Klessens family. There they were over-served a potent monk-brewed beer, Goossens jokes, and introduced to a world of possibilities for their vision of a traveling show.
'Our screening process when we get people to Belgium is to give them a tripel beer or two, and by the end of dinner we pretty much know everything about them,' Goossens says with a smile.
The tent that Scheel and Davis decided to commission after their trip took two years to build, Goossens says. Members of the Klessen family hand-sewed the drapes and carved the wood by hand.
Now that it's completely built, however, Goossens says it should take only about two weeks to take down and about three to put back up using a crew of 12 from both Belgium and America.
CineVita will remain in L.A. through the end of the year — 'John Hughes and the Brats' is next on the calendar. In early 2026, the show — and the Queen of Flanders — will hit the road, stopping first in Austin, Texas, and then on to Washington, D.C. Multiple shows will be staged in each city, making the venue a bit like a movie theater with rotating offerings.
'You walk in and say, 'This is a piece of art',' Scheel says. 'Half the reason to come out is to see this venue and how it provides such a beautiful place for our shows to really come alive.'