Midway through “Masquerade,” the Phantom of the Opera himself suddenly grabbed hold of me, his touch light and electric, and pushed me aside. The masked musician and magician had crept up behind us to make his way through the thick fog and thin crowd to reach soprano Christine Daaé, his protégé and obsession. Several dozen theatergoers, all also wearing masks, were making our way through the Phantom’s subterranean lair beneath the Paris Opera House. This was long after we first entered the opera house, when the ballet mistress Madame Giry taught us a few dance moves; it was shortly after we had been handed candles to hold while a gondola carrying the Phantom and Christine glided right past us in the mist; and it was long before we had to scurry away from the chandelier so that it wouldn’t crash on top of us.
“Masquerade,” in short, is sensuous and you-are-there in a way that “The Phantom of the Opera,” the earlier version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical, was not. The approach that director Diane Paulus et al take in this intricate, intimate, interactive new production could well appeal to audiences who have never seen Phantom, or even those who saw it and didn’t care for it.
But of course, it’s reasonable to assume that the main audience for the show will be theatergoers who already know the musical well, given the many fans the show drew over its 35-year run in Broadway’s Majestic Theater. That popularity is the very reason why “Masquerade” could conceivably serve as a model for an exciting, sustainable new wave of immersive theater in New York.
Much of the reaction to “Masquerade” has centered around the granular changes in the plot and the music from the original production. Scenes and songs have been put in a different order; two songs have been added (‘“Come and Marvel at the Freak” and “Learn to Be Lonely,” which was in the 2004 movie adaptation but not in the original stage musical); there is a new scene (a carnival freak show, which features a fire-eater and a woman who hammers a nail into her nose, as well as Erik the facially deformed musical genius — and future Phantom — as an abused freak in a cage whose head is covered in a burlap sack when he’s brought out of his cage and forced to play the piano.) A live lone violinist now performs a newly composed overture; the rest of the instrumental music is prerecorded.
But the main difference, which makes all the difference, is its transformation into immersive theater.
Immersive theater officially began in the city with “Sleep No More” in 2011, peaked around 2019, and has been less visible since the pandemic. It has always been fuzzily defined (here’s my now-decade-old attempt), but “Masquerade” embodies the genre’s core elements. It is, above all, site-specific: Its scenes and songs take place in playing areas meticulously designed to look like everything from a dressing room and a boudoir to carnival grounds and a graveyard — placed throughout a six-story building on West 57th Street; The audience is gently but quickly guided to each space, up and down the staircases (and escalators), even up to the roof; there is often little distance between spectator and actor.
And, like the best immersive theater, “Masquerade” doubles as an art installation: In the carnival room, there is a gate designed by Bob Dylan (yes, the musician)
and theatergoers pass by works of art and artifacts that are created with care (though, since our journey is guided by assistants who rush us along, we have little time to examine.)
Emilio Sosa’s costumes and Nicola Formichetti’s masks are their own sort of wearable art installation.
Like many ambitious works of immersive theater (such as last year’s “Life and Trust“), “Masquerade” is a massive and costly undertaking — reportedly $25 million, an army of designers, a huge cast, the military precision with which it unfolds each night for six different groups of 60 theatergoers apiece. The groups enter 15 minutes apart, each assigned its own Phantom and Christine, but the other cast members repeat their roles multiple times a night.
I had the 8 p.m. slot: My Phantom was Clay Singer, Christine was portrayed by Riley Noland; they were both superb. And seeing their passion and their agony close up somehow made it easier for me to embrace the Gothic romance of it all with far less eye-rolling. The musical has always asked us to have sympathy for a stalker and serial murderer; the immersive version felt more persuasive .
A show like “The Phantom of the Opera,” which (although it closed in 2023) is still the longest-running Broadway musical in history and remains among the most profitable, could justify the staggering effort involved in making it site specific and immersive, because its producers have deep pockets and there is a ready-made audience likely willing to pay top dollar. But “Phantom” is not the only such popular, profitable Broadway musical that’s no longer running on Broadway. I suddenly wondered: Would such an immersive, site-specific approach work for other such shows? Rent, set in a tenement? Les Miserables, behind the barricades? Grease, set in an old high school; all schools already have a gymnasium; the yard (or the roof) could be turned into the drive-in movie theater, the old cafeteria could the soda shop. Fiddler on the Roof; we’d tour through the shtetl – Tevye’s home, Motel’s tailor shop, the barn, the inn – and wind up in a space designed to look like Kyiv and Siberia.
Masquerade
218 West 57th Street through February 1
Running time: About 2 hours and ten minutes
Tickets: $222 – $322
Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Lyrics by Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe. Book by Stilgoe and Lloyd Webber. Created and produced by Lloyd Webber. Conceived and produced by Randy Weiner
Created and directed by Diane Paulus.
Shai Baitel – Creative Director, Fine Art
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui – Choreographer
Kathy Fabian – Props Designer
James Fluhr – Production Designer
Jessie Flynn – Art Director
Nicola Formichetti – Director of Masks
Skylar Fox – Magic and Visual Effects Designer
Chris Habana – Mask Fabricator
J. J. Janas – Hair, Wig and Makeup Designer
Brett Jarvis – Sound Designer
Kate Lumpkin – Casting
Lee McCutcheon – Music Producer
Scott Pask – Developmental Scenic Designer
Gypsy Snider – Acrobatic Designer
Emilio Sosa – Costume Designer
Ben Stanton – Lighting Designer
David Andrew Wilson – Music Supervisor for Andrew Lloyd Webber
William Waldrop – Music Supervisor / Music Director
Cast:
ANDRE
Raymond J. Lee
BARKER
Chris Ryan
BOY IN THE CAGE
Kody Jauron
Maxfield Haynes
Kevin Zambrano
BUQUET
Jacob Lacopo
Andrew Wojtal
CARLOTTA
Satomi Hofmann
Betsy Morgan
CHRISTINE
Haile Ferrier
Eryn LeCroy
Francesca Mehrotra
Riley Noland
Kaley Ann Voorhees
Anna Zavelson
FIRMIN
Jeremy Stolle
GIRY
Satomi Hofmann
Maree Johnson
Tia Karaplis
Betsy Morgan
PHANTOM
Jeff Kready
Telly Leung
Hugh Panaro
Kyle Scatliffe
Clay Singer
Nik Walker
PIANGI
Phumzile Sojola
RAOUL
Paul Adam Schaefer
Nicholas Edwards
Francisco Javier Gonzalez
CARNAVAL DES OMBRES
Joseph Kerr
Rawb Lane
Laura Lee Anderson
Anna Monoxide
ENSEMBLE
Alaska
Baby Byrne
Gabriella Enriquez
Nkrumah Gatling
Cooper Grodin
Bryan Hernandez-Luch
Nathan Keen
Claire Leyden
Georgia Mendes
Sami Merdinian
Charles Osborne
Jack Sullivan
Olivia Tarchick
Nikita Yermak
