Review: ‘Masquerade’ Tries to Revive ‘Phantom of the Opera’ But Embalms It Instead

<img decoding="async" class="size-full-width wp-image-1588848" src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/MAIN.Jeff-Kready-and-Anna-Zavelson-in-MASQUERADE-Photo-by-Oscar-Ouk.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="An actor dressed as the Phantom in a half-mask holds the hand of an actress as Christine while surrounded by masked audience members in a smoky immersive theater scene." width="970" height="647" data-caption='Jeff Kready and Anna Zavelson. <span class=”media-credit”>Photo by Oscar Ouk</span>’>

Do you love mandatory gussying up for the theater, to see and (giggle) be seen? Do you shiver with delight, your features hidden under a frilly, lacy mask? Does it thrill you to stumble down staircases and stagger through dimly lit hallways while Andrew Lloyd Webber’s pre-recorded music pours like clotted cream through speakers? Yeah, me neither. And yet, there I was at Masquerade, the site-specific, immersive remix of The Phantom of the Opera, wondering if veteran director Diane Paulus could turn aversion into affection. Will my heart ever melt over this hideously deformed musical?

Unlike the friend who chaperoned me, a “Phan,” I didn’t catch Lloyd Webber’s melodramatic operetta as a teen, and therefore its bombastic, pop-Puccini score never imprinted on my oatmeal brain. (I’m the Phantom! I’m Christine, too!) Truth is, I didn’t appreciate musicals until I was in college and someone lent me a CD of Sondheim’s Assassins. Phantom is the gateway for those who can’t handle Sweeney Todd’s bleak, witty sadism. In reviews of the revival of Sunset Boulevard and the misbegotten Bad Cinderella, I’ve gone on record as finding Lloyd Webber’s overwrought, repetitious scores insufferable. Despite the fact that Phantom ran for a record 35 years on Broadway, I’m not alone in my distaste for its camp-gothic excesses.

But here was a golden opportunity for conversion. Paulus’s first “immersive” breakthrough (before the term was everywhere) was in the late 1990s, when she staged an experiential version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream using none of Shakespeare’s language but a slew of disco hits and mirror balls. The Donkey Show started life in a former piano store on Ludlow Street and eventually moved Off Broadway to run for years. I remember it as a sweaty blur of glitter-caked, roller-skating actors in short-shorts, pasties and huge Afros. Paulus is an old pro at taking theatrical IP and infusing wild, contemporary life into it.

If only she’d done so here. When the creative team of director Daniel Fish’s audacious Oklahoma! re-orchestrated the score for a small, bluegrass ensemble, we heard Rodgers and Hammerstein’s iconic tunes with fresh ears. Or when co-directors Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch framed Cats as a queer ballroom extravaganza, the music assumed a transgressive social function that turned kitty kitsch into catharsis. At Masquerade, the music is not revivified; it’s embalmed. Singers perform to pre-recorded tracks, and the canned score sounds similar to a full-orchestra cast album. Which gives each number a karaoke hollowness that the talented vocalists struggle to enliven. Imagine if instead the music were live, translated into rock, EDM or some fusion of Baroque and techno? A roving string quartet? Virtuosic a cappella? Anything.

Forget ears. How about eyeballs? No argument, Masquerade is a head-spinning fusion of 360-degree design and crowd control, jointly conceived by Lloyd Webber, Paulus and Randy Weiner (the latter an impresario behind Sleep No More). The logistics are staggering: audiences (instructed to dress semi-formal and bring masks) are admitted into a shadowy converted space on West 57th Street: six audiences enter at six staggered times, and each group sees its own Christine and Phantom pairing. When I attended, the glowing, ardent Anna Zavelson played Christine opposite Jeff Kready’s dignified yet tormented Phantom. Over two uninterrupted hours, we follow characters throughout and beneath the Palais Garnier opera house as soprano ingénue Christine is, well, groomed by the Phantom—composer, inventor, hoarder of candles—a mad, cursed artiste determined to make her a star in his works. He pines for the young singer, yet his face is deformed and he’s traumatized by a childhood as a circus freak. There’s a wealthy young man named Raoul who loves Christine, and the poor girl is torn between the two. Even by the standards of goofy opera plots, this one is thin, and the comic relief is leaden.

An army of designers and tech crew have created dozens of areas across six floors we traverse and occasionally get to sit in. Fine art creative director Shai Baitel, props designer Kathy Fabian, visual F/X designer Skylar Fox—these are just a few names behind the visual splendor. Choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui is the resourceful dance-maker who keeps the performers moving fluidly in tight spaces around clusters of spectators. Engaging though the visual elements are, I wish (as with the music orchestrations) the costume and mask design had deviated from the original template. We watch the same dandified Phantom who has pounded his organ since the Reagan administration.

There’s so much moving about (up and down escalators, no less) and drastic trimming of dialogue that unless you’re familiar with the story of the original Phantom, it can get confusing—or you simply give up caring. We descend to the Phantom’s lair in the bowels of the opera house and make our way up to the actual roof, while visiting other spaces that function as the flies above the stage, dressing rooms and other locales. Some sections transcend gimmickry and almost approach poetry: Christine, having fainted, rests on a bed in the Phantom’s Phan Cave, and sinister hands emerge from the mattress and pillow, longing to caress her. The Phantom has a big woe-is-me number on the roof when he thinks Christine is leaving him (“All I Ask of You”): overripe but impressive. And the iconic “Music of the Night” seduction ballad acquires extra creepiness with a roomful of people ogling the scene, bathed in the glow of electric candles. (Given the prevalence of masks, I considered an allusion to Kubrick’s final film, but since we’re talking Lloyd Webber: Ears Wide Shut.)

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.

Masquerade | 2 hrs 15 mins., no intermission | 218 West 57th Street | 212-505-5666 | Click Here For Tickets

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