Crackpots #55: Masquerade (Patreon)

This week's edition of Crackpots comes from Sara Hinkley. Sara is a costume designer and author living in Brooklyn. Her costume design work includes television, film, theatre, dance, and opera, and her historical horror debut novel THE RED SACRAMENT is out 2026 from Titan Books. She is a proud member of United Scenic Artists 829 IATSE.

*****

The Phantom of the Opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber has grossed over 6 billion dollars, 1.3 billion of that from just the Broadway production, which ran at the Majestic Theatre on 44th street for an insane and record-breaking 35 years. Phantom hasn’t been seen by as many people as Les Misérables or made as much money as The Lion King, but it’s close, and arguably casts a longer shadow than either. Its devotees, called Phans, tend to be goth or goth-adjacent women, but not always: President Trump loves Phantom, and its music can be heard at his rallies and playing from inside the White House on Friday afternoons. The Phantom overture is used in The Big Short to establish the doomed excess of the American Securitization Forum conference in Las Vegas in 2007 on the eve of the financial crisis. It also goes triple platinum in my house.

Phantom, directed by the late legend Hal Prince, opened in the East End in 1986 and on Broadway in 1988, at the peak of the megamusical era. I saw it for the first time as a kid in the late 90s, by which point it was well into a run that would continue, interrupted only by COVID, until 2023. I saw it again as a teenager, twice as an adult. Over the years of course the cast changed, new Christines and Phantoms and Raouls matriculating in and out for generations of tourists and weirdos, but most of the orchestra kept their jobs for the entire run, all 35 years of it. These musicians bought houses in New Jersey and put their kids through college playing the music of Phantom. The iconic overture, gothic, overblown, and monumental; the pounding of synth and strings as the Phantom absconds with Christine to his underground lair; the farcical quintet as the managers of the theatre contend with the ghost extorting and bullying them via increasingly deranged letters; the plaintive, lovely turns of ‘The Music of the Night’. The same music, the same show, 8 shows a week, for 35 years.

Does it surprise you these musicians went absolutely insane? There’s a segment of This American Life about it, from the episode “The Walls Close In”. One member of the orchestra would eat his lunch facing the wall so he wouldn’t have to look at his colleagues. Another abruptly left the show and drove all the way to the West Coast. A third used his spare time to build his own orchestra of automata in a warehouse in New Jersey; overexposure to The Phantom of the Opera arguably turned him into the Phantom of the Opera himself. 

The story is simple, a clear, familiar shape adapted from Gaston Leroux’s 1909 novel. A troubled opera house, haunted and under new management. Christine, a sad and beautiful ingenue with untapped talent. The masked Phantom, her mysterious teacher, an apparition lurking in the walls: angel and murderer, seducer and freak. Then there’s Raoul, her nice, rich, normal boyfriend, who doesn’t kidnap her even once. It’s a vivid love triangle, and there are shipping cathedrals everywhere for those with sufficient brainrot and eyes to see; the progenitor of Fifty Shades of Grey is here if you squint, and also Reylo, Snily, Hannigail, and other words mentally normal people won’t recognize.

The plot operates in a loop. We begin decades after the main action, as an auctioneer ominously references ‘the infamous disaster’ of years gone by. The iconic chandelier lies in pieces on the stage, wrapped in canvas. But then the overture blares, and time flies backwards; the chandelier is revealed and restored, lifting slowly over our heads, and we spend the next hour waiting for it to fall on us again. And again, and again, and again.

The music, frankly, whips. It’s written for huge voices, and those voices deliver. What they’re delivering is Puccini pastiche addictively layered with synth and disco from the same unerring ear for hooks and earworms Andrew Lloyd Webber put to use in Cats, Evita, and Jesus Christ Superstar, all of which have had long lives to much applause and eye-rolling, and literal billions of dollars. It should go without saying I listened to the cast recording many, many times on tape as a goth child.

As an adult I’m an author and costume designer for TV, film, and theatre, making my living in the world Phantom introduced me to. Now I recognize it’s most successful for its synthesis of would-be opposites: freak shit and mass entertainment, BDSM imagery and plausibly-deniable 19th century high culture, the bombast and excess and barely concealed horrors of Belle Époque Paris and those of 1980s New York, skulls and filigree, gilded caryatids writhing above the sewer-candelabras of its iconic production design by Maria Björnson as synthesizers pound and the fog machine cranks and a beautiful woman hits a perfect, sometimes prerecorded, E6, and the psychological prisoners down in the orchestra pit saw at their violins for the fifty thousandth time.

When the Broadway production finally closed in 2023 that orchestra was set free—or forcibly retired, however you want to slice it. I remember shock that it had actually closed; it had been on Broadway as long as I’d been alive, and everyone I knew expected it to continue for decades more. I remember gossip that it was closing only to reopen again with a smaller orchestra, that Phantom would always be popular, it just needed to get its costs down and regroup after the pandemic. Someone I knew told me Local 802, the musicians’ union, wouldn’t stand for this, that the same production contractually couldn’t be cut down like that and brought back to Broadway, but I wondered.

This fall, after a long viral treasure-hunt of a marketing campaign in which influencers followed clues to a maskmaker’s shop in Chinatown and a séance in the empty Majestic Theatre, a new Phantom opened: Masquerade NYC, a reimagined and “immersive” production directed by Diane Paulus. The show is rearranged and restaged in the old Lee’s Art Shop building on 57th Street, with six casts; the audience is split into six 60-person “pulses”, and each pulse follows its own Phantom and Christine and Raoul through five floors of a fully realized opera house, securing personal interactions and seeing the action up close.

I saw it in October. No surprise, I loved it; it’s the same great show redrawn as a sort of luxe theme park ride for people who used to be goth. Impeccably designed and executed, scary in parts, thrilling in others, sexy, tragic, extravagant, and sensory—but mostly it was really, really fun to see such a big show sung so well at such close range. Hailey Ferrier as Christine and Ted Leung as the Phantom blew me away, their voices and performances superb and almost blinding at conversational distance. But I couldn’t help but observe the music they were singing to was prerecorded, the 27-person orchestra reduced to just one handsome violinist. It reminded me, too, how much work there used to be in my own industry, and how TV production jobs, along with everything, have shrunk, especially since COVID; how intimacy can be a way of charging more for less.

Still, the immersion didn’t disappoint. The Phantom showed some audience members his sheet music, seated them at his desk with its many candelabras; Christine handed me a love letter he had written her, which I got to take home. One person was taken away by an actor into some kind of elegant cage; I’m not sure what happened in it, but I’m sure it was a good time. A woman on TikTok said at one point she took the edge of the Phantom’s cape right to the face. Another said he touched her on the cheek with his leather glove. At the denouement of the show he stared directly into my eyes for just an instant, his face, inches away, working with emotion. For all this my ticket cost $244, and we were required to wear formal attire in black, white, or silver, with masquerade masks; the line outside looked a little like Eyes Wide Shut.

There were black lace masks for those who needed them, but I live to get a fit off, and so I wore my own: a moretta, an obscure black velvet mask that dates to 18th century Venice. This mask has no ribbon or fastener; you keep it on your face with a button held between your teeth. It’s striking, and another audience member noticed it almost immediately, while we were still milling around and being issued flutes of champagne. She tapped me on the shoulder and complimented the mask, and asked me where I’d gotten it.

Long story as to why, but I bought the moretta to celebrate completing my debut novel, The Red Sacrament, about a theatre troupe of vampires on the eve of the rise and fall of the Paris Commune. It goes without saying this novel was influenced by Phantom, not to mention the works of Anne Rice and Karl Marx, and the way Jenna Maroney says “Actor announcement!” on 30 Rock, and my own experiences, too, of absurdity and exploitation in the theatre industry. I wrote it during the COVID lockdowns, when TV and film production shut down and my job disappeared along with Phantom’s and so many others, and I was going frankly insane cooped up in the house. So I was thrilled at the opportunity to brag about the mask, and the book, and show off what a niche little freak I am. I removed the mask so I could speak to her and told her I’d gotten it on Etsy, a shop located in Venice, that it was called a moretta—

Oh, I know what it is, she said, delighted. I’ve wanted a moretta for ages!

I was a little surprised, but I shouldn’t have been. I’d forgotten I wasn’t at all unique in this room, that we were all the same kind of freak. Everyone around me had paid $244 or more to see The Phantom of the Opera restaged at kissing distance; we probably had all listened over and over to the same original cast recording, which did, after all, sell more than 40 million copies. There were enough of us to keep the original Phantom running for 35 years, enough of us to fill Masquerade’s six pulses every night for as long as it would run, which could be forever. I’d forgotten the literal President of the United States is a Phan, too; that it’s someone’s job at the White House to blast ‘The Music of the Night’ to calm him down, just as it’s someone else’s job to apply gold filigree to the exterior of the White House, and another’s to light candles.

In the 1980s New York and Belle Époque Paris that Phantom synthesizes so well, dark opulence and melodrama were laid thickly over the genuine horrors of the AIDS crisis and the ashes of the Commune, and the public absolutely ate it up. The mass appeal of Phantom is as undeniable now as it was then; we still crave big stories and bigger music, brainrot love triangles and psychosexual thrills and as much gilt and fog and synth as we can get our hands on, even if the budgets are smaller and jobs fewer and farther between. Masquerade is a great time if you’re in New York and can afford it, especially in the winter; bombast and glitter are great for seasonal depression. But if you’re not in New York there’s a new US tour of the original Broadway production: slimmed down, of course, with simplified set elements and a half-size orchestra. This week it’s in Baltimore, and next week Minneapolis, with 11 more cities between now and August. If you want, you can see Phantom again and again and again.