As the masked Phantom wordlessly led an audience member out of the room, a woman broke the silence to ask in a slightly panicked voice, “Where’s he taken my daughter?”
Harmless, temporary abductions included, Masquerade (through Nov. 30) is a meticulously organized piece of theater. Within an atmospherically dark and bizarro immersive environment in a midtown building, there are six performances every night of this adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera.
Every evening, six different audiences (known as “pulses” by theater staff) are moving through the same, evocatively designed space meant to replicate the musical’s chief setting of the Opera Populaire. Somehow they never intrude upon each other. The soundproofing means that they should never hear each other’s performances either.
The ticket confirmation comes with the instruction to wear white, black, or silver, as glamorously as possible. Bring a mask (think glitzy, not surgical; they’ll give you one if you don’t have one). Up and down stairs and along gloomy corridors and into brightly and dimly lit rooms you shall wander, so wear comfortable shoes. The performances of the musical are spaced 15 minutes apart, with six different lead actors playing both the Phantom and his true love Christine.
After the recent success of Jamie Lloyd’s Tony-winning Sunset Blvd. in London and New York, the balcony-singing, headline-grabbing Evita in London (coming to New York!), and with Bad Cinderella a never-to-be-mentioned again aberration, Lloyd Webber—whose Really Useful Company has officially sanctioned Masquerade—is clearly at ease with his traditional musicals being radically reimagined.
No one designer or director is listed for Masquerade, but rather a collective of names. They have produced a striking, clever show, in which more things are impressive, rather than—as can be the bane of so much immersive theater—exhausting and tiresome.
Yes, the natural audience for Masquerade will be the same fleet-of-foot who loved the akin exercises of Sleep No More, Life and Trust, and The Great Gatsby. But in my group were also dedicated Phantom fans. There was some quiet and not-quiet humming and singing along, and tears of the kind that signaled a very personal connection to the musical.
Unlike other immersive shows, Masquerade features minimal audience interaction and participation. At the start—glasses of champagne optional—you learn a simple dance under the stone-faced tutelage of narrator Giry (Maree Johnson). After this, you may be prevailed upon to throw a flower, hold a piece of paper, answer a question, or just be spoken at.
But there are no tasks to be performed. You don’t have to run around, or chase after different sets of actors. There aren’t multiple stories and set-ups to make sense of. There are even clever and additive tweaks to the story; for example, to explain the Phantom’s past he is given a younger self.
Masquerade looks and sounds consistently glorious, as if we really are in an opera house and circus of strange folks, objects, easily-offended divas, luxe costumes, secret rooms, faded glories, and hidden intrigues. Lloyd Webber’s cream-and-two-sugars melodies were sung beautifully (in our show) by Kaley Ann Voorhees as Christine, Nik Walker as the baleful, lovelorn Phantom, and Nkrumah Gatling as poor Raoul, who truly suffers for being the third wheel.
As their twisted and tragic love triangle unfolds, we first see the giant—and I mean giant—chandelier that Phantom fans know well. Then we go backwards in time to the traveling circus from where the Phantom came; we gaze upon fire-eating, a woman putting nails through her cheek, and a young man in a cage. Later, we alight upon a boudoir where Christine reclines until… (no, I shan’t spoil it), and all the chaos that unfolds in the rafters of the Opera and in the Phantom’s subterranean lair when the vengeful masked-one determines that Christine shall be his.
Despite the company’s intense efforts, anything not about Christine, the Phantom and Raoul frankly becomes a little grating. The real treat, alongside the astonishing design and special effects (people appear and disappear before your eyes!) is the exquisite singing—and being so close to the singing—such as gazing agog when Walker manfully booms “The Music of the Night.”
Masquerade also works because of the company’s absolute commitment to the musical’s overwrought melodrama, and us being so close to that melodrama. You are quite literally swept up in it all, leading to the show’s most fabulously staged moment on the roof—Manhattan buildings looming all around and occasional sirens wailing skywards from the streets below—with Christine and Raoul belting their famous duet, “All I Ask of You,” as the furious Phantom looks on from a ladder.
Although the story continues from that moment, it is so unbeatable that the narrative threads tied up back inside feel a little patience-testing. Still, the ending is powerfully staged, with a final, moving piece of audience participation torpedoed in our group by one attendee’s exclamation of “S–!”
The true mark of success? A few days later, as with Sunset Blvd., I am still humming Lloyd Webber’s standards. As earworms, they are as determined to stick around as the Phantom himself.
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