Theater review: Masquerade

★★★

“Mesdames and messieurs, the Phantom is back,” said Alexis Soloski in The New York Times. Sure, the title character of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera is a sexual predator and murderer. But “few men stay canceled for long,” and this one collected so many admirers during Phantom’s 35-year Broadway run that “phans” seem delighted that he’s just been resurrected for an immersive, Sleep No More–style version of their favorite show. Inside a 19th-century commercial building just south of Central Park, audience members follow the Phantom and the object of his obsession, the chorus girl Christine, from the basement to the roof (weather permitting) as the pair’s twisted love story plays out. “It’s all very sexy, provided you are comfortable excusing the bad behavior of powerful men.”

“The complexity of the enterprise is staggering,” said Adam Feldman in Time Out. Six nights a week, the show is performed six times, with groups of 60 entering in 15-minute intervals. Every group gets its own Phantom and Christine, while some supporting actors perform their bits for each brigade, and ticket buyers themselves are expected to arrive in black, white, or silver cocktail attire and to don masks. To me, the two-hour show’s peripatetic nature “keeps wrenching you out of theatrical illusion: One moment you are in the Phantom’s underground lair, and then you are on an escalator.” Still, “if you have any affection for Phantom at all, it’s a blast.”

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Even though the singers’ backing music is prerecorded, said Tim Teeman in The Daily Beast, Masquerade “looks and sounds consistently glorious.” While the subplots woven into the central love-triangle drama become “a little grating,” it’s a treat to take in the “astonishing” design and special effects, and especially to be so close to so much “exquisite” singing and to feel the cast’s “absolute commitment to the musical’s overwrought melodrama.” Two years after Phantom’s last Broadway curtain, “Masquerade has transformed what was formerly regarded as a corny tourist attraction into one of the hottest tickets in New York,” said Naveen Kumar in The Washington Post. “It’s an uncanny trick.”