Dinosaurs, Disco, and da Vinci: Inside Virgin Voyages’ Out of Time

Cruise entertainment has long relied on the musical revue: fast-paced songs, big choreography, and familiar hits designed to appeal to everyone in the room. It’s a format that works, but it can also start to feel predictable.

When Virgin Voyages set out to create entertainment for Brilliant Lady, they wanted to take that familiar structure and completely flip it on its head. The brief was simple but ambitious: build a revue that felt unmistakably Virgin. Fast. Bold. Unexpected. And unlike anything guests had seen at sea before.

The result was Out of Time, a chaotic, time-traveling spectacle that transforms the traditional revue into a wild ride through history, pop culture, and pure theatrical absurdity.

At the center of the story is the eccentric Dr. Victoria Vortex, a scientist obsessed with bending the rules of time itself. With the help of her questionable assistant Dr. Tempus, and their wisecracking robotic companion, T.I.M.M., she unveils her latest invention: the Timecrowave.

Naturally, things go wrong.

When the machine malfunctions, the audience is thrown into a whirlwind journey through wildly different eras and environments. One moment, they are surrounded by prehistoric dinosaurs; the next, they are transported into a roaring 1920s speakeasy, a disco-fueled dance floor, or even an alien rave somewhere far beyond Earth.

The show moves at breakneck speed, blending wall-to-wall pop music, comedy, choreography, and visual spectacle into a musical adventure where anything can happen, including a karaoke showdown with Leonardo da Vinci.

Like many Virgin Voyages productions, Out of Time was built specifically for the capabilities of The Red Room, a flexible performance venue aboard Brilliant Lady. The space is equipped with nine moving LED walls and five stage lifts, creating a powerful technical foundation. But rather than using these elements simply as scenic tools, the creative team treated them as storytelling devices.

Each shift in time transforms the room itself. LED walls slide and rotate to reveal entirely new environments, while stage lifts raise performers, scenery, and creatures from unexpected places. The effect allows the venue to behave like the time machine itself, constantly reshaping the world around the audience.

The result is a show where the stage is never static. The environment moves, evolves, and surprises the audience as the story jumps from one era to another.

Behind the show’s playful tone lies an enormous amount of technical coordination. Every movement of the LED walls and stage lifts had to be mapped in advance, with choreography, video content, lighting cues, and music all timed precisely to the shifting stage environment. Because rehearsal time inside the venue is limited, our team arrived with the production already extensively planned and tested.

The complexity extended beyond the technology. The show’s visual world required large-scale scenic elements, including a twelve-foot dinosaur head and a towering nine-foot raptor costume, pushing the boundaries of fabrication, shipping, and installation at sea.

Meanwhile, the costume department designed and built more than 100 original costumes to support the production’s rapid-fire changes in time period, style, and character.

The result is a show that feels spontaneous and chaotic while operating with remarkable technical precision behind the scenes.

Out of Time demonstrates how the familiar can be reinvented. By combining advanced stage technology, immersive scenic design, and playful storytelling, the production transforms the traditional cruise revue into something far more dynamic–a show that is fast, funny, visually explosive, and unmistakably Virgin. And perhaps most importantly, it leaves audiences with the same reaction night after night: “I’ve never seen that on a cruise ship before.”

No Ceilings creates experiences audiences have never seen before — wherever they happen to be.