NEW YORK – Steps away from Carnegie Hall and Brooklyn Diner, there's an unsuspecting art supplies shop with newspaper-plastered windows.
But walk inside the Midtown storefront, and you'll be whisked into the 19th-century Paris Opera House, where a masked genius haunts the halls and an iconic chandelier crashes to the floor.
Welcome to "Masquerade," a fully immersive production of "The Phantom of the Opera" that opened off-Broadway last fall. It's a wildly ambitious and richly emotional new staging ofAndrew Lloyd Webber's 1988 Broadway musical, performed concurrently every night by six different casts, who guide audiences from the Phantom's eerie underground lair to the star-filled rooftops of Manhattan.
"Nothing has ever been attempted like this in musical theater before," Webber tells USA TODAY. "Everything is so minutely timed down to the very last millisecond – it's an extraordinary technical feat."
For his part, "I enjoyed it madly. It was great fun to be on an adventure."
Why the immersive new 'Phantom of the Opera' is 'quite confronting'
"Masquerade" follows the familiar beats you know and love from "Phantom," which traces the doomed romance between the disfigured Opera Ghost and young soprano Christine Daaé, the target of his dangerous obsession and tragic longing.
But the production also goes to great lengths to better understand the Phantom, with a nightmarish carnival sequence where we first meet him as a young man in a cage. The unsettling scene challenges the audience's empathy, as cast members implore theatergoers to rattle his cage and feed him.
"It's a bit of a Rorschach test, like, 'How do we react in those situations?'" director Diane Paulus says. "At every performance, there are people who just sit by the cage and hold the Phantom's hand." And if you hang around long enough, the Phantom might even pass you a note, offering "deeper insight into his backstory and how he was left by his mother."
The sideshow "is quite confronting and disturbing because of the nature of the violence and the assault on our senses," says Maree Johnson, who has portrayed ballet mistress Madame Giry both on and off Broadway. "It's a mob mentality, and sometimes you see that with the audience."
How 'Learn to Be Lonely' found a new home in 'Masquerade'
After the Phantom escapes the carnival, Giry takes the facially deformed outcast under her wing, giving him shelter in the opera house and fostering his musical prowess. She also sings him "Learn to Be Lonely," a new song to the musical that first appeared in Joel Schumacher's2004 big-screen adaptation starring Gerard Butler and Emmy Rossum.
The ballad was originally titled "No One Would Listen" and sung by the Phantom in his lair. But when the sequence got cut from the movie, Webber repurposed the melody for the end-credits number "Learn to the Lonely," which wasperformed by Minnie Driverand nominated for an Academy Award for best original song.
"When I was going through everything for 'Masquerade' with Diane, we felt that we only touched on the Phantom's backstory in the movie and that it would be really good to have something for Madame Giry," Webber explains. "We felt that 'Learn to Be Lonely' was really very apt for her, and it works rather touchingly in 'Masquerade.' It's also the last (instrumental) music you hear of the evening as you leave the space."
Advertisement
The song might seem rather depressing taken at face value, with lyrics about learning to "laugh in your loneliness" and "be your own companion."
"It's a very harsh way of talking to someone," Johnson says. "But in the context of the show, it comes from a very nurturing place. Giry historically is such a tough character: She's had to learn to be lonely in this world, which has given her an iciness and distance. By doing this flashback, we get to see her vulnerability."
For Webber, "the song is really about saying, 'The world will always reject you and they won't see you for who you are,'" he says. "There really wasn't a place for this song before because the original stage show is so incredibly tightly constructed. But it's sort of found a use now, even if it's not where we originally intended it."
Andrew Lloyd Webber would love 'Evita' on Broadway with Rachel Zegler
"Masquerade" opened off-Broadway just two years after "Phantom" closed in April 2023 at the Majestic Theatre. Although sales had slowed for the Broadway production after the COVID lockdown, the beloved musical played to sold-out crowds in its final months, and it still holds the record for the longest-running show in Broadway history, having played nearly 14,000 performances over 35 years.
"That should never have closed, it was ridiculous," Webber says. "It just had its best-ever year in London last year. It was a stupid decision to close it up, and it'll be very interesting to see if the Majestic ever has anything in there that … oh, never mind, never mind (laughs)."
Similar to the lateStephen Sondheim, Webber, 77, has been increasingly open to having his work reinterpreted in recent years. Just last summer, "Wicked" starCynthia Erivoplayed the Messiah in "Jesus Christ Superstar" at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, and the Pussycat Dolls' Nicole Scherzinger won a Tony Award for a stripped-down Broadway revival of "Sunset Blvd." And this spring, a queer ballroom take on "Cats" – dubbed "Cats: The Jellicle Ball" ‒ will open at Broadway's Broadhurst Theatre.
"It's very good to have new directors and new thoughts," Webber says. "If a piece is any good, it can stand the test of time with many, many productions. It's interesting to let them go; you can't have everything precisely as it was done before. But what's common to all of them is that the music hasn't been changed. Musically, 'Jesus Christ Superstar' was exactly as it was at the Hollywood Bowl in the 1970s."
Just this month, Jamie Lloyd's radical reworking of "Evita" in London earned five Olivier Awards nominations, including best musical revival and best actress (Rachel Zegler). Theater fans have been clamoring for a Broadway transfer ever since the production's West End run last summer, where Zegler performed "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" nightly from an outside balcony.
"I'm afraid with 'Evita,' there are still some hoops to be gone through, but I'd love it to go. It's an extraordinary production," Webber says of a potential New York outing. "The one thing that absolutely cannot happen is what we did in London with her on the balcony. We can't do that in New York. I mean, something awful could happen. We have gun laws in Britain."
Regardless of what lies ahead for "Evita," the legendary British composer remains more prolific than ever, with London revivals of "Cats" and "Jesus Christ Superstar" coming this summer.
Plus, "I'm currently writing two musicals at once at the moment, and they couldn't be more different," Webber teases. "It's very exciting this year, but hopefully next year, I'll have two new ones. We'll see, we'll see."
"Masquerade" is now running through Sept. 6 at 218 W. 57thStreet.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:'Masquerade' reinvents Andrew Lloyd Webber's 'Phantom' in NYC
