Masquerade Off-Broadway Reviews

Still, on its very many levels and for most of the assembled audience, “Masquerade” works. At the close of the final scene people all around me sobbed. Was this relief at our escalator rescue? More likely it was compassion for the Phantom’s tragedy. My eyes stayed dry. I don’t know about you, but I am tired of being made to care why bad men do bad things. The Phantom already has all the best tunes. Does he really need our sympathy, too? Either way, the music of the night plays on.

Oh God, we don’t need the backstory! I don’t need to know that he was a sad little boy whose mom abandoned him to creepy carnies. (As much as I like creepy carnies.) I think this is where the sentimentality of our own era runs up against the gothic, which is actually so much more hard core. We’re desperate to provide psychological explanations for our Phantoms, our Heathcliffs and Cathys. “Hurt people hurt people.” Yeah, okay. Just tell me a good ghost story.

In the end, though, it may not matter much which cast you see. Putting the audience closer to the actors does not make a show like Phantom more moving; it only takes some of the grandeur away. And Masquerade’s peripatetic structure inevitably keeps wrenching you out of theatrical illusion: One moment you are in the Phantom’s underground lair, and then you are on an escalator; now you are watching a murder in the opera-house wings, and then you are looking at the office buildings behind Christine and Raoul’s duet. But if you have any affection for Phantom at all, it’s a blast. The main attraction of Masquerade is not its stars, its story or its music of the night; it’s the pleasure of re-exploring a property you already know and seeing it from a new angles. Get dressed up, hide your face and give yourself over to the phantasy.

Anyone put off by the theme-parkification of theater – spectacle! Gimmickry! Intellectual property! – would probably do well to just ignore Masquerade, a new immersive-experience off-Broadway version of The Phantom of the Opera. It has an unavoidable resemblance to next-gen ride experiences like Disney’s Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance or Universal’s Monsters Unchained (the latter of which even features a cameo from the Phantom himself, albeit in a different incarnation) that make patrons feel as if they’re being ushered through a famous fictional world. But a lot of skill goes into high-end theme park attractions, and like those, Masquerade is a lot of fun if you’re in the right mood.

What results is not unlike an expensive, exclusive party in a carnival funhouse. While the original “Phantom” was derided by its detractors as a cheesy theme park attraction, “Masquerade” truly is a glorified one.

Depending on your preexisting view of this material and how upclose and personal you like to get with your fellow “Phantom” fans, “Masquerade” likely will feel either spectacularly intimate or horrifically so. One is led in small groups with timed entries through various rooms where shards of the story come together in a show where the multicast logistics must be a total nightmare.

A few smart, artful additions raise “Masquerade” to something far greater than a jolly tourist attraction. Paulus, when she’s firing on all cylinders, knows how to fuse the commercial with the profound.

Ultimately, it’s the intimacy of the environment that makes Masquerade such a special experience. You’re just a few feet away from the performers as they sing Andrew Lloyd Webber’s gorgeous score, and it’s safe to say you haven’t lived until you’ve had a performer of the caliber of Hugh Panaro singing “Music of the Night” to you directly, just inches from your face. It’s enough to make anyone a Phan.

Oh, and that overture? We first hear a version of it in a parlor room, where we’re greeted with flutes of bubbly and a violinist (it’s an Easter egg; Christine’s late father is one in the musical) serenely playing a Phantom medley. I’ll admit, serene wasn’t what I expected upon stepping into such a larger-than-life event. But I should have known — the violin is just the pre-show muzak. When the fully orchestrated overture later exploded alongside a flash of light and a shower of confetti like broken glass, Masquerade instantly had me under its spell. I’d call it the point of no return, except I definitely hope to return.

“Follow me!” “This way!” “Hurry!” I doubt Andrew Lloyd Webber and his collaborators imagined there’d be so much shuffling and calls-to-action when they first conceived of a musical adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s Le Fantôme de L’Opéra. But the catacombs of what was once the home of the American Society of Civil Engineers require nimble navigation for cast, crew, and attendees of Masquerade, a mostly mesmerizing immersive reimagining of The Phantom of the Opera.

But the score, at its passionate and melodramatic heights, is Andrew Lloyd Webber’s best, and only two years later, that music has a new ingenious and most alive production, the immersive Masquerade, filling out all the floors, from rooftop to basement lair, of a creepy building just west of Carnegie Hall. Walking a tightrope between dramatic musical work and theme-park attraction, Masquerade is a mightily inventive twist on Webber’s classic stage musical.

Capitalized at $25 million and extended into next February, Masquerade tries to be a lot: a karaoke Phantom by hard-working troupers; a theme-park ride inside the world; a two-hour chunk of fan service with extra back story; an IRL mingle for Phans to play dress-up and quaff champagne in the bar afterward. What it wasn’t, for me, is fun or emotionally resonant. If you think Phantom of the Opera is legit art, that’s your problem. I’ll assume you’re not reading this, that you’re busy charging $500 on a pair of tickets. I hope the actors are well compensated, because they don’t get a bow—shameful. We all know the modern musical has to evolve to survive in the face of technology and economic precarity, but this cash-grab stunt tries to look backward and forward at once: hard to do with a silly mask on your mug.