The announcement that Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel: The Exhibition was coming to the Cherry Creek Shopping Center promised that it would be “unlike anything you’d see in Rome.” Well, it got that right.

For starters, a visit to the real Sistine Chapel in Vatican City is a crowded affair. The exhibition of life-sized replicas of Michelangelo’s frescoes in Denver, however, was practically empty on opening day, except for an older couple who’d traveled from Nebraska to see it. And it was eerily silent except for the stifled sound of the irritatingly perky narrator in the introduction video, who mispronounces the artist’s name throughout. (No, it isn’t pronounced like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle’s name.)

The road-show version of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, which debuted in 2021 in a former Sears store in Chicago, has taken up residence in a space that most recently hosted a tacky immersive experience based on the sitcom Friends. That was just one of many corporate-sponsored shows touting itself as immersive that’s come to Denver this year, at a time when the city is already brimming with everything from experiential shows by local creators to David Byrne’s Theater of the Mind to the Meow Wolf installation, Convergence Station, which opened in September 2021. Since then, Denver has been a center for all things immersive, with Immersive Denver even holding the Denver Immersive Gathering in early November for those in the art industry to see all of the city’s…