I Saw Masquerade

Last month, I went to New York and saw Masquerade. Masquerade, for those who don’t know, is a “night of mystery and magnificence” based on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera (which logo sits proudly on their website). The change of name suggests that the creators don’t consider it merely a performance of Phantom—fair enough, given the changes. But I would go further. Masquerade isn’t really a show at all; it’s a dark ride.

Dark ride is a term of art in the theme park world. You can use it in more or less precise ways, but, to my mind, the quintessential dark rides are Disney’s Fantasyland rides. These take you through a series of scenes from classic Disney animated features—brought to life through scenery, trompe-l’œil, animatronics, and the eponymous dark. They assume you know the story already; you get to hear the iconic songs, you get to relive the iconic moments. They’re about evoking feelings and creating atmosphere rather than delivering roller-coaster thrills.

And Masquerade would be perfectly at home among them.

Just like Peter Pan’s Flight in Disneyland, Masquerade starts with a very long queue. They make good use of it, confirming your tickets, checking your ID, taking your coats and bags, and giving you your last-chance turnoff to the restroom. They also hand out costume party masks if you need them (everyone is required to wear a mask and to “dress the part”—cocktail attire in black, white, and silver only). As the line winds up the first stair and into the first room, they pipe in anticipatory music. The oldest trick in the Disneyland book.

You finally elbow your way into that first room, decorated to look like an ostentatious parlor. (I hardly need to explain that the sets in Masquerade are wild romanticisms—you’ll have to look elsewhere for your period-accurate Belle Époque Paris). Someone offers you a glass of champagne. People nervously chatter, not sure whether they’re in the performance or still in the queue.

A violin soloist—the only live instrumentalist in Masquerade—pied-pipers everyone into the second room. There, you learn the thin frame narrative: you’re here as guests of the Opera Ghost, the Phantom. You learn a song with little hand motions, like a church kid in vacation Bible school. Then there is an eruption of light, music, and flashing gold confetti. The spectacle begins.

For the next two hours, costumed actors steer you through themed passageways from one dizzying set piece to the next. The Phantom of the Opera was never much of a story—and never less so than here. Even the songs sometimes become ambience. The real star here is the atmosphere. The colored lights, the fog machines, the trap doors. You dance with an actor in a unicorn mask. You thread solemnly through a hall of eerily moving clockwork inventions. Clutching a candle (albeit a battery-powered one), you enter the subterraneal lair of the Phantom—while he and Christine paddle toward you across a sea of fog.

Some dark rides keep you outside of the action; you are safely confined to your ride vehicle, watching the scenes without being a part of them. But Masquerade is one of the dark rides that breaks down that sense of separation. The immaculately-chapeaued carny showman volunteers you for a magic trick. The opera house chandelier lurches from the ceiling toward you. The Phantom rests his hand on your bare shoulder as the senses abandon their defenses.

Perhaps that’s thematically interesting for The Phantom of the Opera. Masquerade puts you very much on the side of the Phantom. He is your host, the actors keep reminding you. You are here to be seduced by him; you are complicit in his seductions. As you glance around at your fellow masked guests, you might ask yourself, are the awful things happening to Christine in some sense your fault?

But Masquerade does not operate on this cerebral level. It speaks in the much more visceral language of broken mirrors and voices in the rafters. It makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Like a drawcord costume mask, it has mystique for the animal heart even if it’s uninteresting to the human brain.

I’ve been to musicals on and off Broadway, and I know that they can be worth seeing for the humor, the music, or even the sheer spectacle. But, in my opinion, the best shows are the ones with rough, real characters you become invested in, the ones where the humor and music and spectacle are all in service of a captivating story. That’s why I could never call Phantom a favorite musical. Its gothic melodrama and shallow exploration of its characters sink it in my estimation.

Masquerade could have been an opportunity to address these shortcomings in its source material. It could have tried to delve into the mind of Christine Daaé or to make Raoul a character and not merely a plot device.

That would have been ambitious, and it would have been an enormous mistake. What Masquerade does is far better. It leans into Phantom’s limitations and uses them to build a different kind of experience, one more sculptural than literary. Something more like Peter Pan’s Flight than War and Peace.

You could read Masquerade as a failed attempt to tell a compelling story. But that’s ungenerous. Better to read it as an attempt to make the world’s first ever two-hour dark ride. Considered in that way, it’s a tremendous success.