Finding Their Way in ‘Masquerade’

This past summer, three Harvard students helped transport Manhattan audiences to Parisian rooftops, to opera house dressing rooms, and to a subterranean labyrinth.

Tanner Quirk ’29, Alicia Chu ’28, and recent graduate Saman de Silva ’26, spent more than two months working on “Masquerade,” an immersive adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “The Phantom of the Opera” directed by Harvard theater luminary Diane Paulus. The Off-Broadway show is performed for 360 people a night, in six separate performances that unfold simultaneously throughout a single building.

“It’s so important to show this next generation of artists entering the field that they can be innovative; they can think broadly,” said Paulus, a professor of the practice in Theater, Dance, and Media and the Terrie and Bradley Bloom Artistic Director of Harvard’s American Repertory Theater. “So often you feel there’s only one way of presenting work or having a career in theater. There couldn’t be anything more outside the box than ‘Masquerade.’”

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