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.
While the gold standard for popular immersive theater is the Macbeth adaptation Sleep No More, which ended its 14-year run earlier this year, Masquerade is a more straightforward treatment of rather less venerated source material. The Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, which set a Broadway record with its 36-year run, is itself a kitschy adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s 1910 gothic-horror novel about a disfigured man who lives beneath the Palais Garnier in Paris, studying the arts and meddling in the theater’s productions. (Basically, it’s the story of a particularly bossy critic.) The musical softens some of the more horrific elements, and is known for an insidiously catchy Webber score. Based on the middling reception of the 2004 movie adaptation, it may also be something of a you-have-to-be-there work, a show that depends on live pageantry and, yes, spectacle to fully put across its melodrama.
