# Show Review: Masquerade

Earlier this month, I was pretty desperately feeling the need for a vacation. So after a little googling, I booked a flight to New York city, a hotel, and four nights worth of tickets to a new immersive theater show called [Masquerade](https://masqueradenyc.com/).

Background: “Standard” Immersive Theater
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To convey Masquerade, I find it easiest to compare against standard immersive theater.

It’s weird to talk about “standard” immersive theater, because the standard is not that old and has not applied to that many shows at this point. Nonetheless, there is an unambiguous standard format, and the show which made that format standard is Sleep No More. I have not yet seen Sleep No More itself, but here’s my understanding of it.

Sleep No More follows the story of Macbeth. Unlike Shakespearre’s version, the story is not performed on a central stage, but rather spread out across five floors of a building, all of which is decked out as various locations from the story. Scene changes are not done by moving things on “stage”, but rather by walking to another area. The audience is free to wander the floors as they please, but must remain silent and wear a standard mask throughout the entire experience.

At any given time, many small groups of actors are performing scenes in many different places throughout the set. Two or three actors come together somewhere, perform a scene, then go off in their separate directions to perform other scenes. Most of the audience picks one character to follow around for a while, from scene to scene, experiencing the story of that particular character.

If standard theater is like watching a movie, then standard immersive theater is like playing a story-driven open-world video game. There are at least a dozen parallel threads of the story, most of which will not be experienced in one playthrough. The audience has the freedom to explore whatever threads pull them - or, in subsequent runs, whatever threads they missed or didn’t understand. Replayability is very high - this past summer, at a standard-format immersive show called The Death Of Rasputin, I talked to a couple people who were seeing the show for the eleventh time. That is not unusual, as I understand it, for standard immersive theater shows.

Why do people get that into it? For me, standard format immersive theater achieves a much deeper feeling of immersion than basically any other media. I can really just melt into it, and feel like a ghost exploring a new world. Some people don’t like the many parallel threads, because they make it inevitable that you’ll miss big chunks of the story. But for me, that makes it feel much more real - like the real world, there are constantly load-bearing things happening where I’m not looking, constantly new details to discover, constantly things I might have missed. Like the real world, we enter disoriented and confused and not sure what to even pay attention to. We can explore, and it doesn't feel like one will run out of world to explore any time soon. And the confusing disorienting environment also feels... not exactly home-y, but like I'm in my natural element; it resonates with me, like I'm in my core comfort zone (ironically). That, plus being surrounded by the set on all sides, makes it easy to drop into the fictional world. It feels much more real than traditional theater.

Unfortunately, the company running Sleep No More in New York city managed to go very, very bankrupt in early 2025. (Fortunately the show [is running in Shanghai](http://www.sleepnomore.cn/sleepnomore/en.htm).) As you might imagine, that left quite the vacuum of unfulfilled consumer demand. Masquerade was marketed largely as an attempt to fill that vacuum.

By Comparison, Masquerade
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Where Sleep No More told the story of Macbeth, Masquerade follows Phantom of the Opera - including all of the big musical numbers. You know the iconic scene with the Phantom and Christine on the boat through the fog and candles? In Masquerade, you walk through the fog carrying a candle, with the boat in the middle of the audience.

Like Sleep No More, it’s spread out across five floors of a building. Like Sleep No More, scene changes are done mainly by walking from place to place.

Unlike Sleep No More, the audience does not have the freedom to wander. The whole show is railroaded. There are not many parallel threads; you will see the whole show. That, for me, was the biggest disappointment, and lost maybe half the value. Nonetheless, even with that half of the value lost, the show is still excellent.

More generally, Masquerade is clearly aiming for more mainstream appeal than standard-format immersive theater. Despite the obvious potential of Phantom, the show has no particularly steamy sexuality or nudity (unlike e.g. Life and Trust, another big show by the now-bankrupt company which ran Sleep No More). There *is* a carnival-themed segment with a legit sideshow performer, but the body horror doesn’t get too intense - just enough to make the sideshow virgins squirm.

The railroaded format means that people will not enter disoriented or leave confused. The set incorporates seating in about half the scenes, so you’re not on your feet for two hours. There are no choices to make. It is a show which will alienate a lot fewer people. 

But the flip side is that it will disappoint hardcore fans of the standard format.

That said, if you’re not going in anchored too strongly on the standard immersive theater format, the standalone artistic merits of Masquerade are impressive. You can’t do Phantom without a whole lot of singing, and there is indeed a whole lot of singing, all of which was solid (except, of course, for the intentionally bad singers in the story). The sets are great, they nail the ambience repeatedly, and I still don’t understand how they managed the acoustics so well. I definitely felt a lot more emotionally in-the-story than I usually do in a non-immersive theater show.