NEW YORK — The Phantom caressed my shoulder, caught my eye and vanished into the fog, his disembodied hand beckoning me to follow. Because this wasn’t a sex dream, dozens of masked theatergoers swarmed behind me down a narrow passageway into his artfully sinister lair.

The Opera Ghost — or OG, as he’s known to denizens of the Paris Opera House, the setting of Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel “The Phantom of the Opera” — is bent on continuing his decades-long reign in New York, only this time you can feel his breath on your face, depending how much of it you leave uncovered.

“The Phantom of the Opera” stage musical closed at the Majestic Theatre in 2023 after nearly 14,000 performances over the course of 35 years, making it the longest running show in Broadway history. But the masked menace had

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