The Call Is Coming From Inside the Opera House: ‘Masquerade’

When audience members arrive at Masquerade, the immersive quasi revival of Phantom of the Opera, they need to know the password. They use it to enter a large building that was once the home of Lee’s Art Shop and has now been turned, under director Diane Paulus, into a multifloor, multiroom performance space. (They also need to wear a mask over their eyes, but don’t worry if you’re not the type to have costumes lying around: Cute little show-appropriate ones are provided at the door.) As in many such productions in the long wake of Sleep No More, they’re ushered from room to room and scene to scene and sometimes pulled aside by cast members for individual interactions. There’s no orchestra, just one violinist, and most of the music is prerecorded — though the voices are, of course, very live and very big. Vulture asked our two drama critics, Jackson McHenry and Sara Holdren, to go (separately) and review the show (together) with a few side chats of their own.

Jackson McHenry: Hi, Sara. I’ve just gotten back from visiting the Phantom’s new mind palace in Midtown. You’re supposed to wear black, white, or silver — and compared to some Phans in full cocktail attire, I felt underdressed. Anyway, what was your Masquerade experience? Did you get pulled aside for any special interactions?

Sara Holdren: I did! But first, I have to admit that I last saw Phantom on Broadway when I was 11, and that experience didn’t turn me into a Phan girl. (I was solidly Team Les Mis.) So this time, I took a much more Phantom-literate friend with me, which was helpful. She knew the lore; for instance, she filled me in on the creepy traveling-carnival sequence that’s been added here (after being cooked up for the movie in order to give our anti-hero a backstory). That was where I got pulled aside: Poor little baby Phantom — at that point a street urchin with his head in a burlap-sack mask, being displayed by a freak show because of his “horrible” face — motioned me over to his cage. He held my hand for a long time and gave me a sad little string bracelet while staring deeply into my eyes. I’m definitely a mark for this kind of thing. There’s not a person on the street raising money for Greenpeace who doesn’t make a beeline straight for me.

J.M.: Last summer I saw Life & Trust, another heir to Sleep No More, and it also had a whole haunted-carnival sequence. Are haunted carnivals inevitable in immersive theater in the same way that disparate species in nature keep evolving to look like crabs? I guess it’s the genre’s adjacency to the classic maze with a lot of trick mirrors. Here, though, the extended and rather dreary sequence did underline how trope-y the mechanics are. The Phantom’s horrible face is never that off-putting — if he’s grotesque in-universe, he’s also meant to be an object of the audience’s fantasy outside of it — and to further excuse the damage his schemes do later on, the Phantom’s tormentors are implausibly, sneeringly, cartoonishly evil. I got picked for a much more sinister interaction: During this show’s version of the “Prima Donna” sequence, in which the actors involved in backstage shenanigans at the Opéra Populaire scurry between groups of audience members in several rooms, the temperamental star Carlotta handed me her perfume and then the Phantom reached out from behind a clothes rack and swapped it for another bottle. When Carlotta spritzed herself with it later on, she lost her voice. So I helped poison the poor soprano — which is too bad because I often sympathize with Carlotta. She’s a diva, but she’s put in her time. Then here comes Christine, that perfect ingenue, to usurp her.

S.H.: It’s true! Justice for Carlotta. Who were your Christine and Phantom? We should say, the show has some pretty astounding logistics. There are six pairs of actors playing the two leads (along with several different Raouls and Madame Girys, the latter being our spooky, imperious tour guide through the whole shebang). Somehow, they’re letting multiple audiences in per night — 60 people to a group — and starting up the entire experience every half-hour or so. All sorts of sections must be playing simultaneously in different spaces. Trying to imagine the flow chart for it all kind of cooks my brain.

J.M.: I have to say I’m enjoying Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new era of letting people make wild revisions to his catalogue.

S.H.: I’m with you. Even if it’s partly mercenary, I appreciate Sir Andrew’s willingness to let people experiment with these behemoths. I frankly don’t feel much need at this point to see a Cats that isn’t a drag ball or a Phantom that doesn’t have some kind of Rocky Horror element to it. Embrace the camp! Serve wine with the cheese! I know this whole thing had a $25 million budget, but there were moments — going up and down escalators or jogging down flickering corridors or into the Phantom’s lair of creepy little automaton inventions (very Blade Runner) — when I felt a Spirit Halloween vibe, and I didn’t hate it. The budget line for drippy-looking electric candles alone must be through the roof.

But wait! I got distracted — the Phantom and Christine! I had Jeff Kready (who was nearly a dead ringer for Iain Glen: blond and tortured) and Anna Zavelson. To your point about Christine being the Platonic ingenue — 100 percent. Zavelson’s like a living Disney princess.

Yes, of course, there is a chandelier.
Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman

J.M.: I had Kyle Scatliffe as the Phantom, intense and growly, and then Eryn LeCroy as Christine. LeCroy stood out to me because she gave her Christine more internal melancholy, and she has the jawline and ringlets that made me think someone needs to adapt a Brontë novel for her. Put her out on the windswept moors! (By the way, the night of my performance, there was a threat of rain, so a scene that usually takes place on a rooftop happened inside.) So much of Phantom is owed to dark and stormy bodice rippers, and those tactile and DIY qualities of Masquerade that you pointed out enhance that energy. When the Hal Prince version of the show closed on Broadway, I remember that Helen Shaw wrote about the way Maria Björnson’s original set was dominated by fabrics in an erotic way. Doing the musical as an immersive piece brings that fetish-y quality out. You’re right up there next to all these textures, like the phantom’s cape, or Christine’s long wedding veil, or even the ropes that Raoul gets tied up in. The score is also sensual on that level — it’s too bad there isn’t a full orchestra, aside from the violinist who provides the overture. And I imagine it would add far too much logistical headache (and budget) to have live musicians. But you can hear well enough what makes the score stand out in the prerecorded bits. Lloyd Webber is ever fond of repeating his melodies, and the emotional effect comes from placing them in different registers and layering timbres on top of one another. Putting classical soprano next to electric guitar next to organ and so on; it’s like putting tender flesh up against leather and wrapping it in velvet.

S.H.: I love that point about the eroticism of texture. It’s true there’s a real attention to detail here. All the books in the Phantom’s study are French and period-appropriate — Zola, Baudelaire, etc. If you’re a true Phan, Masquerade might really be your ultimate dream: Just come live inside your favorite show for a while. It struck me as the stars were tearing through “Music of the Night” in the catacombs (grotto, gondola, chandelier — they all still manage to find a way in!) that even the audience dress code is part of an overall aesthetic vision. You look across the space, full of theatrical haze and candlelight, and you’re not met with a bunch of people in jeans and T-shirts. Instead you see an intentional color palette and a sea of masks. We’re not just attending a costume ball — we’re part of the set.

Still, no matter what comes of new interpretations of his work, Lloyd Webber isn’t a composer I’ll ever stump for. I agree with Andrea Long Chu, who wrote so incisively about the rather insidious way he elevates music above meaning and “music loving over music itself.” But that’s part of why it appeals to me when these things dive more fully and ingenuously into the camp I think they were always really meant to be.

J.M.: I imagine it would violate several New York building codes, but I was a little disappointed that the gondola didn’t arrive in its own massive pool. I will hold out for the Phantom log flume, the carnivalesque end point for this sort of project. And yes, I’m also of two minds about how effectively the gambit works: On the one hand, it injects the whole thing with this lively creepy-crawly-campy energy; on the other, it hits the fundamental stumbling blocks of Phantom with its shins pretty hard, like that whole tragic backstory. Or the moralizing at the end of the show, when the audience, in sympathy with the Phantom, is asked to unmask. There’s only so much you can “elevate” about a work that fundamentally wants to revel in some schlocky mud. We’re all demons inside? Sure, I guess. Can I interest you in a Taittinger-sponsored cocktail?

Sara Holdren: 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.

Masquerade is at a seeeecret location through November 30.