On the last night of September, in the industrial stretch of Santa Fe where Rufina Circle dead-ends into a former bowling alley, the leaves will not be the only thing turning. Meow Wolf's Bedtime Stories: Falling for Fall, billed as a neo-burlesque variety show, promises an evening of what the venue calls "mischief and delight" — a seasonal salute to cool weather, cozy nights, and the particular steamy pleasures of staying in. It is, by any measure, an unusual night out: a burlesque revue staged inside a 20,000-square-foot immersive art installation, where the audience sits among the same enchanted forests, glowing caves, and interdimensional corridors that daytime visitors crawl through.
The show has a longer history than its seasonal title suggests. Bedtime Stories was created by Alexandra Renzo, Meow Wolf's performance director, and first staged in 2018 at the collective's flagship Santa Fe location, the House of Eternal Return. According to Meow Wolf's director of events, Kristin Hutton, the founding impulse was inclusiveness. "The goal was to create a truly inclusive event that encompassed a bit of all the wild talent that New Mexico — and now Colorado — has to offer," Hutton said. The show, she added, "highlights the history of queer neo-burlesque using a variety show as its medium," mixing drag, live music, poetry, and other acts into what she described as "a well-rounded, raucous, welcoming night in celebration of amazing talent."
That formula has proved durable. Meow Wolf has continued to produce a Santa Fe edition of Bedtime Stories roughly four to six times a year, and the shows "regularly sell out," Hutton said. The concept eventually traveled: in August 2023, Meow Wolf's Denver location staged its own debut edition, Bedtime Stories: We Heart Colorado, hosted by Denver burlesque figure Coco Bardot and timed to Colorado Day. But Santa Fe remains the show's home, and the fall edition is the latest in a rotating series of themed installments — past iterations have carried titles like Rhinestone Prom and Lust & Bloom, each keyed to a season or a mood.
The setting is inseparable from the experience. The House of Eternal Return opened in 2016 inside the gutted shell of an abandoned bowling alley purchased by Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin expressly so that Meow Wolf — then a collective of roughly 150 artists and fabricators — could realize a large-scale vision. The result is part haunted house, part choose-your-own-adventure, part jungle gym: a full-size two-story Victorian home at its center, the fictional residence of the Selig family, who vanished after "something happened" that warped time and space. Visitors are turned loose to reconstruct the non-linear story from the family's clothes, furnishings, books, and papers, wandering through some 70 interconnected spaces — tree houses, a tiny Old West ranch powered by hamsters, luminescent caves, mastodon-skeleton xylophones, laser harps. The collective's own organizers have cited arcades, theme parks, Burning Man, grocery stores, nature, and the forts they built as children as inspirations, along with Nickelodeon, MTV, Jim Henson, and Twin Peaks.
Performing burlesque in such a space is a different proposition than performing in a conventional theater. There is no proscenium to hide behind, no neutral black box to disappear into. The show is described as seated, with limited seating available on a first-come, first-served basis — no reserved rows, no assigned seats, just an invitation to arrive and find a place in the heart of the installation. Audiences are advised to bring cash for tips, a reminder that this is a live, intimate form in which the performers are paid in part directly by the people watching them.
That tipping culture is woven into neo-burlesque itself, a form that revives the variety-show structure of classic burlesque while pushing past its mid-century conventions. Meow Wolf's version leans explicitly queer and deliberately eclectic, treating the variety format as a container for acts that might not otherwise share a bill. It is, in Hutton's framing, a celebration of local talent as much as a night of entertainment — a showcase for the dancers, drag artists, musicians, and poets working in and around Santa Fe.
The autumn theme gives the evening its throughline. Falling for Fall is built around the turning of the leaves, the arrival of cool weather, and the appeal of long nights indoors — a set of images the show's own description treats with a knowing wink, promising cozy and "sometimes steamy" nights at home. It is a seasonal show in the most literal sense: a production that changes with the calendar, cast anew each time, and staged in a building that is itself about transformation, disappearance, and the strange things that happen when time stops behaving.
For anyone who has only seen the House of Eternal Return in its daytime, family-friendly mode, the Bedtime Stories series offers a different relationship to the space — after hours, seated, with a drink and a pocket full of singles, watching performers work a room that was never designed to sit still. For anyone who has never been, it is an unusual introduction: an art installation that doubles as a cabaret, in a converted bowling alley, on a fall night in Santa Fe. Seating is limited, and the show's history suggests it fills. The advice, as with most things at Meow Wolf, is to show up and see what happens.