The address is 1025 South 1st Street, a low-slung stretch of the Las Vegas Arts District where the neon of Fremont Street is a few blocks north and the Strip is a world away. Inside that building is Vegas Theatre Company, a small house that has spent the last several Octobers turning itself into one of the more unlikely horror destinations in the valley. On October 24, it hosts Jana Wimer's CRINGE, a new Halloween show billed as hilarious, spooky and delightfully uncomfortable, aimed at kids and grown-ups at once. Tickets run $15 to $25, and the show sits in a 3 to 4 p.m. slot on a Saturday afternoon.
That a children's show and a horror pedigree share an address is not a contradiction so much as a family tree. Wimer is a Las Vegas performer and the co-creator, with Los Angeles impresario Zombie Joe, of Urban Death, the long-running live horror production that first opened in 2005 at Zombie Joe's Underground Theatre in North Hollywood. Urban Death is built from rapid-fire, wordless vignettes performed in near-total darkness, with sound design doing much of the work and the audience's imagination filling in the rest. It has since traveled to New York, Cape Town and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and the New York Times, reviewing it, called it "Grand Guignol is alive and well... sheer, vital stagecraft."
Zombie Joe's itself dates to 1992, when its founder, then a theater and psychology student at UC Irvine, dropped out after the school rejected his play The Masterpiece and leased a garage in Northridge with a high school friend. The company's early work drew on Antonin Artaud's Theater of Cruelty, unnerving audiences through light, imagery and sound rather than plot. That lineage, imported to Southern Nevada, is what Wimer has been building on.
Her Las Vegas credits are substantial. She directed ABANDON, a wordless descent into the life and writings of the Marquis de Sade during his years in an asylum, co-written with Robert Bullwinkel and Abel Horwitz, with an original score by Joseph Bishara of The Conjuring and Insidious and sound design by Emmy winner Katie Halliday of Stranger Things. ABANDON won a Best of Vegas award for shock theatre and was named among the top three haunts in Vegas by Haunts.com. Last October, Wimer directed Urban Death Vegas, a local premiere that drew on the original Urban Death canon while adding new pieces about what is genuinely terrifying about life in Las Vegas, staged by Las Vegas Horror Show and Vegas Theatre Company.
CRINGE is a different register. Where ABANDON was rated R, warned of violence, grisly images, nudity and strong sexual themes, and barred anyone under 17 without a guardian, the new show is pitched squarely at families, with the squirm built on embarrassment rather than gore. The title is the joke: cringe comedy, the kind that makes an audience laugh and wince in the same breath, is a natural fit for a puppeteer, since a puppet can get away with social mortification a human performer cannot. The listing describes kids and grown-ups laughing, squirming and dying to see what happens next, which is roughly the contract of any good Halloween entertainment for children, and a reminder that the holiday's theatrical tradition has always run from the genuinely frightening to the gleefully gross.
The venue suits it. Vegas Theatre Company occupies a storefront space in the Arts District, the walkable pocket of galleries, bars and small stages south of downtown that has become the city's home for work too small or too strange for the Strip. Its address, 1025 South 1st Street, is a short walk from the Arts Factory and the cluster of murals and studios around Art Square, and the theater's own programming mixes mainstage productions with monthlies, pop-ups and rentals, which is how a one-off Halloween show lands on a Saturday afternoon between other bookings.
For anyone who has followed Wimer's work, the interesting question is what a puppet show by the person behind Urban Death looks like when the darkness is dialed down and the audience includes children. The tools are the same ones she has used all along: timing, discomfort, the willingness to let a silence sit a beat too long. The difference is the target. Instead of the Marquis de Sade in an asylum, it is the universal childhood horror of watching someone do the wrong thing at the wrong moment and being unable to look away.
The show runs 3 to 4 p.m. on October 24, 2026, at Vegas Theatre Company, 1025 South 1st Street. Tickets are $15 to $25. It is a single afternoon slot in a small room, the kind of booking that does not get a second chance if it sells out, and the kind of odd, handmade Halloween production that the Arts District does better than almost anywhere else in the city.