You don’t buy a ticket to Masquerade. You receive a password. And right now, a lot of people want one. The $25 million immersive re-imagining of The Phantom of the Opera recently announced an extension through the summer, is scouting venues in China, and has become one of the most talked-about live entertainment experiences in New York. It’s part theatrical event, part nightlife ritual, part all-in pilgrimage for the devoted fan base known, with characteristic flair, as the Phans.

Diane Paulus and Randy Weiner, the director-producer couple behind the show, are pushing limits on what theater can be. Forget sitting in a darkened hall waiting for the curtain to rise. At the former Lee’s Art Supply building on West 57th Street in Midtown Manhattan, the Phantom of the Opera doesn’t perform for you. He finds you. He gazes at you. He might even sing with you.

“From the revels of the masked ball, into dressing rooms a breath away from the cast, and even down through mirrors into the deepest corners of the Phantom’s lair,” that’s how the show bills itself, and it isn’t overselling. The show, which opened last July, has already become a phenomenon.

“When you have a show like Phantom that has such a cultural footprint,” says Paulus, who also directed Waitress and Jagged Little Pill on Broadway, “you have an opportunity to provide a new perspective, a new experience of something that is beloved.” We spoke this week via Zoom. “And then there are people who’ve never seen Phantom. I know it feels like anathema. But I’ve met many of them.”

For the four or five people who haven’t seen it: The Phantom of the Opera, with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, lyrics by Charles Hart, and additional lyrics and book by Richard Stilgoe and Lloyd Webber, ran on Broadway for a staggering 35 years and nearly 14,000 performances before closing in 2023. Its transition to Masquerade was less a nostalgia grab than a cosmic leap straight into the story. Groups of just 60 guests, dressed in black, white, or silver and masked, are guided through more than 30 scenes across six floors of the building and, weather permitting, the roof. Six separate casts perform simultaneously, staggering start times every 15 minutes. The chandelier has 30,000 crystals and, as with everything else in the show, you can practically get close enough to change the bulbs.

It’s all an experiment in collective experience. “I describe the production as akin to an Apollo mission,” says Weiner, who co-produced the iconic immersive production Sleep No More and the theater-nightclub concept The Box. “But in this case, we’re building the spaceship as we’re trying fly it.” After nearly a year in operation, the spaceship is soaring.

Immersive Theater: A Gateway to ‘Peak Human Experience’

Why now? And why immersive? Both Paulus and Weiner see this moment as a cultural inflection point, as AI, social media, and digital saturation are making live, embodied human experience an ever-increasing value.

It’s also valuable for producers. You Me Bum Bum Train is a critically acclaimed immersive theater experience in London, created by Kate Bond and Morgan Lloyd in 2004. It takes one "passenger" at a time through a series of rapid-fire, intensely staged scenarios, such as conducting an orchestra or conducting a bank robbery, using hundreds of volunteers and detailed sets.

In Los Angeles, The Willows runs 25 audience members through a two-hour spooky dinner party inside the vintage Beckett Mansion. Neil Patrick Harris is inviting guests to an immersive weekend on Florida’s Little Palm Island for an elaborate (and not inexpensive, at $10,0000) murder mystery.

“This quest for peak human experiences is a real thing,” says Paulus. Something like Masquerade is driving on that cylinder. “We designed our show to ask questions like, ‘How can we push human presence to the forefront? How is the audience going to literally feel, hear, touch and see and taste this experience?” Masquerade has a full service bar available at the end of the performance, and guests are encouraged to linger and interact with performers and other theatergoers. “We are taking you deeper than you would go as a passive audience member.”

The philosophy is baked into every aspect of Masquerade. Photos and video are prohibited (camera lenses are covered with stickers at the door). The audience-to-performer ratio is radically intimate compared to a traditional musical, and you stand close enough to the performers to see them sweat. The Phantom might tap your shoulder. The character Christine might hand you a note.

Those intimacies matter now more than ever, the producers say. “We don’t realize how little we make eye contact in a world where everyone’s online all the time,” says Paulus. “But there’s something chemical that happens when someone looks at you. It shifts you. It shifts what you think is possible.”

Repeat Visitors, Global Fans

Some Masquerade guests have returned 20 or 30 times in the show’s first year. It’s that loyalty, along with the built-in global fanbase of the original Phantom, that’s driving international expansion plans.

Weiner confirms that a team has already traveled to China to scout potential venues. The model that worked in New York, taking over underutilized real estate and transforming it into a fully realized world, translates, he believes, to cities where large commercial spaces sit empty and audiences hunger for the kind of experience that can’t be streamed.

“Real estate is lying fallow because people don’t go to stores anymore,” Weiner says with a laugh. “That’s the opportunity.”

On the Rails, Not in a Chair

Masquerade occupies an interesting middle ground in the immersive theater spectrum. It isn’t fully “open world” like Sleep No More, based primarily on William Shakespeare's Macbeth, where audience members wander freely and interact with performers for hours. Paulus, who cares deeply about narrative architecture, made a deliberate choice: guests move through Masquerade in sequence, preserving the emotional through-line of what she calls “an essential love triangle.” But within that structure, the experience remains fluid, where you sit, where you look and who looks back at you.

“The audience experience is very fluid within a highly organized dramaturgical structure,” she explains.

The results can be sublime. At one performance, Christine encountered an audience member weeping in the outdoor graveyard scene. The woman’s father had died the year before. Christine pointed to a nearby statue. “That’s my father,” she said, staying in character but fully present in the moment. They then held each other.

“Actors know these performances move people,” says Paulus. “In the middle of the show, you can have a genuine moment that can make a very deep emotional impression.”

A New Form for a New Era

Performances run evenings Tuesday through Sunday, with Saturday and Sunday matinees. For those who can’t secure advance tickets, a Black Tie Standby Line offers a limited number of $170 same-day tickets, though the dress code is enforced even for standby hopefuls.

Dressing up, Paulus notes, is an important part of the experience. “It elevates what it means to go to the theater,” she says. “You’re celebrating the moment by asking, What am I going to wear? Who am I going with? How am I living it afterward in the late bar?”

Weiner, who grew up in New York producing guerrilla street theater and once opened fire hydrants on the Lower East Side to create waterfalls for outdoor performances, still sounds slightly amazed by the arc of it all. “If you’d told me then that I would one day be doing this multi-million dollar extravaganza with Andrew Lloyd Webber, in partnership with Brookfield Properties, using the finest Broadway actors, I would never have believed that.”

But here he is. And if the couple’s ambitions hold, the Phantom’s reach is just beginning. New IP conversations are underway. A new immersive project, involving an “incredible” music catalog (Paulus hints), is set to be announced within months.

“There are other ways in which we’re going to experience theater viscerally and immersively,” she says, “that could come from all kinds of sources.” She won’t say more. But then again, the Phantom has always been a keeper of secrets.

Masquerade, an immersive theater production of The Phantom of the Opera, runs Tuesday–Sunday evenings with Saturday and Sunday matinees at the former Lee’s Art Supply building, 220 West 57th Street, New York City. Tickets from $170 (standby) and $221.50 (advance). Masquerade is presented by arrangement with LW Entertainment. Proper attire (black, white, or silver with a mask) is required.

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