A Phantom that moves you through the building as seriously as it moves you through the score.
Masquerade is the rare immersive show that remembers it is supposed to be a musical. You move through five floors of a transformed West 57th Street building, and the night still holds together as a story. You are roaming, but you are never lost.
I say this as someone who has done the immersive homework. I have wandered the hotel of Sleep No More and trudged the battlefield of Punchdrunk’s The Burnt City in London. I admired both and liked neither. They are museums of performance art, beautiful vignettes whose order is mostly your problem. Masquerade takes the same raw material and gives it a spine.
The evening starts before you arrive. The production asks you to come masked, dressed in black, white, and silver, and suggests Paris Opera fabulousness. My friend and I took that as permission. By the time you reach the coat check, you already feel like part
of the show.
Directed by Diane Paulus, Masquerade keeps Andrew Lloyd Webber’s score but trims and reshuffles it so it can move with you through the building. You still get the rooftop, the graveyard, the managers’ office, the opera within the opera, and the boat ride across the underground lake. What is new is how you visit them. Masked butlers guide your cohort from room to room and appear exactly when you need them. There are no hidden corridors for the bravest, and no bad sightlines for the polite. Everyone gets the good stuff.
An anonymous warehouse in Midtown has been turned into something genuinely artful. Arnel Sancianco’s scenic design is brilliantly crafted, and the only thing that surpasses it is the authenticity of the props, which you get to examine an inch from your face. Even the books behind glass in the library are French, because of course, we are in the Palais Garnier. That closeness extends to the cast and their gloriously over-the-top costumes. Nicola Formichetti’s designs are opera-house excessive, and they look even more magnificent when you can trace the beadwork with your eyes.
Off Broadway in New York draws from some of the best performers in the world, and this cast does not disappoint. Riley Noland’s Christine and Francesca Mehrotra’s Meg sing with clean, ringing sopranos that hold up under the intimacy. Clay Singer’s Phantom is haunted and oddly tender until the score asks him to fill the room, which he does. All of them work inches from their audience and still calibrate for the scale of the room, big enough to ride the music, specific enough to hold up at arm’s length.
A note on the music. Apart from Ben Russell’s gloriously entertaining fiddle, the score is recorded and piped through the building. The spectacle here is visual, not sonic. The voices are solid, and you have no trouble hearing anyone.
The machinery underneath is part of the wonder. Masquerade runs six cohorts through the building at once, and you almost never see another group. A Columbia-trained music and math double major named Simon Broucke built the traffic model that keeps forty-two actors and six audiences looping through the same scenes without colliding.
Paulus has dressed that machinery up as a story with glimpses of the Phantom’s past at a carnival sideshow, which recur across the night. Aurora North’s nail-hammering Blockhead and Renée Renata Bergan’s fire-eating Carny anchor those moments with real bite, while doing the practical work of pausing the crowd before moving them to the next room.
If there is a cost, it is that precision. The show insists you are free, but the math is always there, gently herding you toward the next cue. Viewers who came for the feral freedom of Sleep No More may find that too managed, and viewers who came for a deep reinterpretation of Lloyd Webber will not find that either. Masquerade is an amusement ride with a first-rate soundtrack and performers Disney could only dream of. That is the show, and on those terms it delivers beautifully.
Wear comfortable shoes. Over the course of the evening you will visit the roof as well as the basement, with most of the floors in between, two hours of standing, climbing, and being very close to strangers. For anyone willing to show up in black, white, and silver and let the opera house do its work, this is one of the most transporting theatrical experiences in New York today.
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Masquerade
Based on The Phantom of the Opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber, with lyrics by Charles Hart and additional lyrics by Richard Stilgoe. Directed by Diane Paulus. Produced by Randy Weiner. Presented by arrangement with L/W Entertainment.
218 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019.
Run: through September 13, 2026.
Runtime: approximately 2 hours and 10 minutes, no intermission. You will be on your feet the entire time.
Tickets and information: masqueradenyc.com.
A black, white, or silver mask is required for entry. Complimentary masks are available at the door. Formal eveningwear in black, white, or silver is encouraged. Ages 13 and up.
