As Andrew Lloyd Webber prepares to launch the immersive version of “The Phantom of the Opera” on the last day of this month, for a run that has been extended (for now) through October 19, a question hovers (or haunts): Will Masquerade single-handedly spur a revival of immersive theater in New York — or at least bring more attention to what’s already out there?
It’s been barely six months since “Sleep No More” closed in New York, fourteen years after the debut of this wordless version of “Macbeth” launched the immersive theater trend in the city. In their announcement of its closing, the leaders of Punchdrunk, the producers of the show, concluded: “It’s the end of an era.”
But was it?
Some immersive theater makers and aficionados of the genre thought not. “Immersive’ and/or participatory theater is here to stay,” Erin Mee of This Is Not A Theatre Company told me in a post (Sleep No More is…no more. But is immersive theater no more? NO) “The genre itself is very powerful,” she said, “and remains very popular.” Noah Nelson, the publisher of No Proscenium, a publication (website, podcast, database etc) about immersive theater across the country, said: “I’m all in on the long-term viability of immersive theater.”
Both, however, happened to be involved in immersive shows out of town at the time I talked to them, which in retrospect feels instructive. It may be here to stay, but what happened to it in New York?
That was the question that popped up during a trip I took to Malta for an article that HowlRound has just published, Toward A New Understanding of Immersive Theatre After Three Days in Malta, which details my eye-opening theatrical experiences in the Mediterranean island nation after being invited there to review a show entitled “1881.” The show was an example of immersive theater by anybody’s definition; it was certainly site specific — a site I traveled more than 4,500 miles to get to. But it involved elements that so expanded the genre that (as I admit in the article) it made me wonder whether I was no longer the right demographic, or even the right personality type, to appreciate it.
The article in HowlRound focuses on Malta, but I was struck by a conversation I had with the director of “1881,” Sean Buhagiar, the artistic director of Teatru Malta, who noted the genre’s continuing, palpable presence throughout Europe. He rattled off some of the hot spots — Germany’s Rimini Protokoll , the Netherlands’ NITE , in festivals like the Venice Biennale and Avignon — but started with the companies in the UK, “which has led the charge,” including Les Enfants Terribles. …and Punchdrunk. Punchdrunk is not only still in the immersive theater business; “Sleep No More” is still running in Shanghai.
For a good eight years after Punchdrunk brought “Sleep No More” to New York in 2011, there was a constant stream of theater pieces that at least called themselves immersive — so much so that I came up with a practical definition that identified six elements that existed in the best of the genre.
That stream dried up, along with all other in-person theater, with the pandemic shutdown. It would be hard to argue that it re-emerged in New York with the same level of activity or visibility. Apparently, however, it has done so elsewhere.
The reason for the disparity may be simple. In a smart essay earlier this year entitled What Happened to Immersive Theater on his substack, Michael Bontatibus, the artistic director of the New York and London based immersive company Witness, revealed the culprit: lack of government support. “Homegrown immersive theatre efforts in the US were always going to run up against the brick wall of American capitalism and disinvestment in the arts.”
Still there is more immersive theater in New York than the casual theatergoer might realize. No Proscenium’s latest “Spotlight on New York” lists some dozen current or forthcoming New York shows that call themselves immersive. Masquerade is only the most prominent.
And it won’t even be the first post-pandemic show with high production values. “Life and Trust,” was a mammoth endeavor recasting the Faust legend as a horror story about Wall Street. Set on the eve of the stock market crash in 1929, it occupied six floors of an actual old bank building in the financial district, which the creative team designed the hell out of. Debuting in August of 2024, “Life and Trust” closed abruptly in April, but that eight-month run was four times longer than the producer had initially planned.
I attended a panel discussion at BroadwayCon 2025 in New York’s Marriot Marquis that featured five still-active immersive storytellers who talked about how the genre had gone from “the wild west….to a more refined approach today.” One of the panelists, Micaela Dee, directs the New York troupe of a company called American Immersion Theater, whose productions included “Speakeasy, Die Softly,” a murder mystery and three-course meal at Carmen’s restaurant, in the middle of the theater district at Times Square. Broadway itself has experimented with the immersive genre, not just in its heyday with the transformation in 2016 of the Imperial Theater into a Russian supper club for “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812,” but as late as 2023, with the transformation of the Broadway Theater into a disco for “Here Lies Love.”
On the opposite end of the spectrum are the examples of “immersive storytelling” that admittedly feel closer to experiments in technology than experimental theater. There was the entire “Immersive” program at last month’s Tribeca Festival, eleven individual installations that were collectively entitled “In Search of Us.” Late last year, I saw “The Books of Jacob”, which occurred live on stage at LaMaMa in New York and simultaneously live at theaters in five other countries, but it also existed online, and extensively employed Virtual Reality.
The high-profile marketing campaign of “Masquerade” could revive public interest in what might sound silly to call traditional immersive theater. (But actually not so silly, as I learned in Malta: What we call immersive theater has deep roots in European performance traditions.)
An article in Vogue about Masquerade offers a glimpse into how attentive the creative team has been to each of the elements I identified as defining the best in the genre.
For example, the first and most essential element: “Immersive theater creates a physical environment that differs from a traditional theater…” Director Diane Paulus says: “We have this extraordinary venue we’ve been working on for years…” It’s the former Lee’s Art Shop on West 57th Street.
And then “Masquerade” has the same built-in advantage as the two most successful New York immersive shows (Sleep No More and Third Rail Projects’ Then She Fell, which was based on Alice in Wonderland) — the audience already knows the story (“The most successful immersive theater has a story to tell—and gives respect to storytelling“).
Nicola Formichetti, a former fashion director who has been hired with the perhaps unique title of director of masks, makes clear how much care is being taken in the design. (“Immersive theater doubles as an art installation and hands-on museum“) The nearly fifty different designs for masks are inspired by the early 20th century Paris of the original musical and the modern underground club scene; they incorporate “car parts and broken glasses, Dalí and Duchamp” etc. etc.
Paulus sees what’s “special about this theatrical experience” is that everything is “in closeup.” (“Immersive theater makes individual audience members feel as if they have had a uniquely personal experience, that they are not just part of the crowd.“) “I was in rehearsals, looking at Raoul during the masquerade scene, and he’s literally a foot away, singing to me, with those gold scales swinging back and forth on his mask. There is no way you would ever catch a detail like that on Broadway.”
Will “Masquerade” also “emphasize social interactions“? Will it “stimulate all five senses“? Will it last forever, its stage strewn with “flash of mauve, splash of puce, food and king, ghoul and goose”? Will it spark a rabidly publicized trend once again?
