You could easily walk right by the four-story stone building on West 57th Street without taking any notice. The sign over the door reads Lee’s Art Shop, though that art-supply store closed a decade ago.
The only reason you might slow down there these days is to weave through the line of people out front, dressed for a formal affair with masks over their eyes.
Lee’s Art Shop is now home to “Masquerade,” the immersive retelling of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Phantom of the Opera,” and masks are a must. “Phantom” superfans have become “Masquerade” superfans. They’re flocking to it again and again. One woman has reportedly seen it 55 times.
Over the course of two hours, an audience of 60 follows the musical in motion: Up and down escalators, up stairwells and around corners to experience in a new way the love story of an opera ghost and his soprano obsession.
It’s “Phantom” on its feet, directed by Tony-winner Diane Paulus and produced by Randy Weiner, and the effect can be a bit dizzying, a sort of musical haunted house where you’re never sure where you’re headed next. (Comfortable shoes are a must; sitting is minimal.)
Every night, six ‘Masquerade’ pulses
But there’s more masking going on here than just those masks worn by the audience and the show’s most famous character. The night is full of curtains and fog and lighting effects, all of which are designed to mask what is happening just a few steps away.
Because this isn’t just one masquerade.
Each weeknight but Monday, there are six performances (the production calls them “pulses”) of the musical, back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back.
Every 15 minutes — at 7, 7:15, 7:30, 7:45, 8, and 8:15 — the story starts again with another 60 theatergoers and another “pulse.” On Saturdays and Sundays, there are matinee and evening “Masquerade” marathons: 12 performances, a dozen pulses.
There are six different Christines, six different Phantoms.
Wait … SIX performances at once?
That means that as soon as Phantom 1 takes Christine 1 down to his lakeside lair under the Paris Opera to sing “Music of the Night” and the audience of 60 moves on to the next scene, Phantom 2 takes Christine 2 down to his lakeside lair under the Paris Opera for another audience of 60. Then Phantoms 3, 4, 5 and 6 and Christines 3, 4, 5 and 6.
The cast sings to recorded musical tracks that are piped throughout the building, but the audience never hears a repeated note, thanks to the precise placement of speakers and the choreography of masked attendants.
Known as “butlers,” they usher the crowd swiftly from one scene to the next. After all, the clock is ticking and the next group is on its way.
“It was so intricately mapped,” said Joséphine Stark, private events manager at “Masquerade.” “There’s a million secret entrances, secret hallways. Every staircase, every escalator was mapped so that no one ever knows that there’s other people in the building until the end of the show when everyone meets at the bar.”
That means no ad-libbing or lingering over a solo.
“The music will play whether you’re ready for it or not, so you’d better be ready,” said Stark, who summed it up succinctly: “It is a crazy machine.”
Just consider the nightly cast. Beyond the six Phantoms and six Christines, there are three Raouls (Raoul 1-4, Raoul 2-5, and Raoul 3-6, named for the pulses in which they appear); three Madame Girys; and three Young Phantoms each performing two pulses per night.
Characters like Carlotta and Piangi do all six shows every night, sprinting around the building.
‘Masquerade’ dressers have their own choreography
The choreography also includes getting dressers and stage crew throughout the space. Substitute dresser Keely Seboria said there are tiny dressing closets tucked throughout the building, behind curtains no one notices.
“It can be a little bit crazy especially for people who are training or new,” Seboria said. “The hardest part for a lot of them is number one, understanding how the show works because it’s very complicated, this is not your typical show obviously. When you’re training it’s really hard to like just wrap your head around how does the show actually function?”
The five dressers follow “tracks” — intricate choreography that amounts of a list of where to be and when, in a Google doc ranging from two to six pages.
How one ‘Masquerade’ dresser spends her night
“The first track I learned, I start upstairs in one of the hallways and I spend the first half of the show just doing changes for the Raoul actors, and then just doing the managers,” Seboria said. “Then I leave that area, I clean up all my stuff because that area gets used later in the show. So I have to make sure everything is gone, back in a corner that nobody sees.
“I shove everything back there, I leave that area. I go to another quick change booth. I do two more changes really, really fast for the last Raoul. And then Piangi. Piangi goes to the next half of his show. I go all the way around the building, downstairs to the dressing rooms, I drop off some stuff, I pick up some stuff. I go through the cellar, I pick some more stuff, I come back up here, I pick up some more stuff and then I go all the way back upstairs to a different booth on the same floor, where I do my second half of the show, which is just the Christine changes.”
One Phantom change is done in less than 45 seconds.
Each actor has one set of their own clothes in everything. Some clothes, like button-down and regular shirts, come in duplicates and triplicates.
Some actors appear in every pulse, which ends up being a 3 1/2-hour performance, Stark said.
“And it’s not like a regular show where you’re just walking off stage left, and back on stage right,” she said. “They’re running up and down the stairs, all over.”
Dressing room scenes are the most frantic
The wildest part of the night, logistically, comes when each pulse of 60 is split in thirds, each occupying a different dressing room.
There are separate scenes with Raoul (the love interest) and Christine, with opera managers André and Firmin, and with the comic Carlotta and Piangi.
Stark explained just how crazy those scenes are.
“Because those scenes take place three times per show, those actors do those scenes 18 times per night. … Raoul and Christine will do their scene in dressing room one, then they’ll do it in dressing room two while the managers go to room one. And they’re just crossing in and out and they do it 18 times per night, which is pretty crazy.”
Chatting in the ‘backstage’ hall
But just because it’s crazy, doesn’t mean there aren’t fleeting moments of connection among the cast, which sound like the backstage view of a door-slamming farce.
“Just standing in that hallway, seeing those actors walk out, walk in, cross paths,” Stark said. “They come out of a room and are just like, ‘Oh hey, I haven’t seen you in a while, how’s it going?’ And then they run back into the room and they’re like (dramatically) ‘Gentlemen!’ It’s just so seamless and so quick.”
Sebora laughed.
“Sometimes they have conversations in between rooms where they’re like, ‘So how was your weekend?’ Open door, go into the room, come back out. ‘Oh, that’s great, I had a great one,’ open door, go back in, come back out, ‘Oh my God, and we saw my mom.’”
In the dressing room, Carlotta might sit in your lap, the Phantom might make you part of his devious plan, and you might be handed a letter. With apologies to Lin-Manuel Miranda, you are in the room where it happens.
Safety first when it comes to crashing chandelier
People with even a small knowledge of “Phantom” know a key moment is when the chandelier comes crashing to the stage. With an immersive show like this, safety and the butlers and cast ensure that the audience is outside a designated circle.
If a patron wanders into that circle when the chandelier is falling, sensors will halt the fall at a safe distance.
The action shifts all over the building’s seven levels, from the opera stage to the underground lair to a seedy carnival pit and even to a rooftop planted with Phantom roses. There’s something going on from basement to roof.
“Some members of the cast or team have described it as if you took the cross section of a dollhouse there would be something happening in every room,” Stark said. “I do think it’s like that, like there’s moving pieces everywhere that you’re not aware of and it’s always in constant motion but perfectly synchronized.”
Bob Dylan’s connection ‘Masquerade’ connection
All of the masking and shadows and haze obscure yet another odd association with “Masquerade.” When patrons leave the seedy carnival area, they pass through iron gates that were fashioned by none other than Bob Dylan.
Yes, that Bob Dylan.
Turns out Dylan is a fan of the original book and the silent film and reference the Phantom in his 1965 song, “Desolation Row.”
“And the Phantom’s shouting to skinny girls
‘Get Outa Here If You Don’t Know
Casanova is just being punished for going
To Desolation Row.’”
One of Dylan’s hobbies is welding scrap metal from his home state of Minnesota in his L.A. studio.
“He included in both gates a little rose as a ‘Phantom’ Easter egg,” Stark said.
Crystal Diaz contributed to this article. She is a senior at Bronx Haven High School.
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