Diane Paulus Breaks New Ground With Masquerade, the Immersive Phantom of the Opera Reimagining
Diane Paulus is one of the most imaginative forces working in theater, constantly raising the bar for what can be achieved within the medium. She holds the special ability to breathe new life into familiar material, as was the case when she helmed Broadway revivals of Hair, Porgy and Bess and Pippin. The latter was staged as a full-blown circus, replete with gravity-defying stunts and acrobatics, which earned her the 2013 Tony for Best Direction. Her latest reinvention is Masquerade, a wholly immersive take on The Phantom of the Opera where audience members don masks and are ushered into a multi-level performance space. Paulus spoke to Broadway.com Managing Editor Beth Stevens about the ambitious scope of this one-of-a-kind theatrical event.
“As a director, I sit in a rehearsal room and I'm two feet away from an incredible performer singing their face off at me. I was like, ‘Why can't we give this experience to an audience member?'" explains Paulus. “[Phantom is] such an incredible, legendary musical, but the idea that audiences could have a new experience of it, to actually be inside it, to breathe it and live it and have these Broadway-caliber performers sing this close, that was a theatrical experience, an immersive experience that I wanted to create.”
For Paulus to execute her vision, she needed to acquire a space that was both intimate and sprawling. The location that was chosen is the former Lee’s Art Shop on West 57th Street in Manhattan. On this unconventional choice of venue, Paulus says, “The moment we walked in to the first floor and there were these vaulted ceilings, I thought, ‘This is the catacombs of the Paris Opera.’ Then we went downstairs and there was 10,000 square feet of a basement. I thought, ‘That's the Phantom's lair and his secret workshops.’ Then you go up and up and up and go figure, there's a roof. It just felt like this building has a soul.”
“This was no question the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” confesses Paulus. “But it was also the most thrilling. You are decorating every hallway, every place the audience walks from scene to scene, because that’s part of the show. You are seeing action in a staircase. There's no such thing as, ‘Okay, now you're offstage, that's the wing.’ It's an invisible network; an extremely complex, precise Swiss watch.”
To pull off a show of this nature, the production team developed new technology. “The computer programming [was created] to drive all of the music across six floors simultaneously. There is computer technology that is live mixing all the audio on all the mics,” she explains. “It's this crazy combination of being so technologically complex, but even more primal and human and in the moment than anything you would see in a Broadway theater.”
As intimidating as this undertaking was, Paulus felt invigorated by the challenge. “When we started, I would talk to the cast and crew and say, ‘This is like an Apollo mission.’ We are building the spaceship, we are going to an unknown universe, and I think that's what got everyone excited. They knew we were breaking theatrical ground and making some kind of crazy theater history here, and the audiences that come are part of that history.”
One of Masquerade’s unorthodox qualities is its use of multiple actors to play the same character throughout the course of a performance. “You have six women playing Christine. So that just in and of itself demands a kind of egoless dedication to an endeavor here that is greater than one individual performance,” says Paulus. “The six Phantoms call themselves brothers. They are so generous creatively with each other. They share tips from the performances and they all sit in a communal dressing room side-by-side. It's like a theater family here that I've never seen before. It's a beautiful thing and you feel it in the air when you walk in this building.”
In recent years, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s oeuvre has been radically reconfigured, from Jamie Lloyd’s sleekly modern take on Sunset Boulevard to the Broadway-bound, Ballroom-inspired Cats: The Jellicle Ball. Some might find it surprising that Webber has become something of an arthouse fixture, but Paulus has always seen an experimental verve in the composer. “I think it's a tribute to how out of the box his thinking has been as an artist. If you really look at his work, he was always pushing boundaries. We tend to think of Andrew now as the instant hit maker—he obviously made hits, but he was so theatrical in how he thought.”
In fact, Webber was so receptive to Paulus’ creative vision that he agreed to make additions to his score, “We've done all new arrangements for the music. There's new music that is debuted in this production at the carnival where we learn how the Phantom grew up as a sort of sideshow freak, which is an opportunity for us to gain more empathy for what he went through and to understand the trauma he's lived through,” says Paulus. “Andrew was always saying to me, ‘Tell me what you want. I'll do it.’ He was an incredible collaborator on this.”
Though there is plenty for Phantom diehards to cheer for, Paulus ensures that those unfamiliar with the material will also take something away from the production. “If you've never seen The Phantom of the Opera, this is your opportunity to experience this incredible musical, but more deeply, more intensely and in a more fun way than the traditional Broadway experience. When we go to the theater, we want to feel it, we want that live experience. A show like Masquerade puts that at the forefront.”
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