Masquerade review: an immersive Phantom of the Opera in New York

Someone puts a mask in your hands before you have heard a single note. That is the whole show, really, in one gesture. You stop being someone arriving at a theatre and become someone crossing into another world.

There is no curtain here. No seat waiting in the dark. A Kenny Scharf mural greets you at the door, and from there you are moved through six floors of a converted building on 57th Street, up escalators and staircases, all the way to a rooftop and down into a basement lair, while the story happens around you rather than in front of you.

Anyone hoping for the Broadway production they remember should recalibrate now. This version follows the Phantom's side of the story rather than Christine's, and that choice is where the show is both at its best and most exposed. Told from his perspective, the piece pushes hard into his childhood, his isolation, the making of the mask, even adding a carnival sequence that never existed in the original show, all sideshow and stunt work rather than romance. Some of that pays off. Some of it explains a character who worked better half explained. The Phantom's pull was always that you couldn't fully account for him. Give him a full backstory and you risk turning a myth into a case file.

Austin Colby has nowhere to hide in a room this size. Every hesitation shows. He has the voice the role demands, but it's the quiet moments, the ones you'd never catch from row J, where he lets something lonelier through the mask, and he's good enough that he almost makes the extra backstory worth it.

Stephanie Reuning-Scherer's Christine holds her own ground. She never plays the girl caught between two men, she plays someone thinking, and that keeps the whole evening centred on her rather than on him.

Nicole Ferguson gets real laughs as Carlotta. Lee H. Alexander's Raoul is steadier and warmer than the role sometimes gets played. Tia Karaplis as Giry has a stillness that anchors a few scenes almost by herself.

The show is also entirely guided, and run on rotating teams, so a scene built for a small dressing room gets played over and over to different groups in a shuffled order just to keep everyone moving. You feel the machinery of that a little, even as you admire it.

When the chandelier comes back, lit up with what must be thirty thousand crystals, it lands differently than it does from a balcony seat. You are standing right under it.

Director: Diane Paulus

Music: Andrew Lloyd Webber

Book: Richard Stilgoe and Andrew Lloyd Webber

Lyrics: Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe

Cast: Austin Colby, Stephanie Reuning-Scherer, Lee H. Alexander, Nicole Ferguson, Tia Karaplis, Claire Leyden, Michael Kuhn, Matthew Curiano, Saman de Silva, Chris Ryan, Cooper Stanton, Kevin Zambrano, Nikita Yermak

Production: Created by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Diane Paulus, conceived and produced by Randy Weiner

Running Time: 2 hours 10 minutes

Rating: ★★★★½