In Behind the Mask, Josh Piterman gives us not only a backstage VIP tour of his musical theatre world, but also some tools to help navigate life, find deeper meaning and explore a growth mindset, and ensure it’s all done with a touch of humour. Photo: Supplied.
Musical theatre is appreciated for its unique blend of storytelling, music and dance, evoking a wide range of emotions and connecting on a personal level with audiences. These art forms combine to create a powerful and engaging experience that can be both entertaining and stimulating.
The atmosphere is typically vibrant, engrossing and emotionally resonant, with a blend of rhythm, revelations, spectacle and a mesmerising storyscape. It plays on themes of narrative, imagination and crafting tales whereby we are transported to another world through elaborate sets, costumes and lighting, while also eliciting a range of feelings through the actors’ performances and the musical score.
Behind the Mask is more than the success experienced by Australian Josh Piterman as a musical theatre performer. He also encourages a shift in perspective about one’s self, making you realise that you are so much more than you think you are.
Piterman knows exactly how it feels to get caught up in the excitement of it all: he is a classical crossover artist who has performed on Australian and international stages. He is known for playing the lead roles of the Phantom in The Phantom of the Opera (a role he reprised in Australia in 2022-2023) and Jean Valjean in Les Miserables in London’s West End.
Piterman is “certainly no stranger to the pressures of elite high performance”. As he relates in the introduction: “The opening night of a musical is wild – the mad rush of adrenaline, the excitement and thrill of the crowd eagerly taking their seats, the infectious nervous energy of the cast.”
Recalling the night he publicly put on the Phantom’s iconic half-mask for the first time on 9 September, 2019, in London, he says it was not a perfect performance.
“God, no,” he writes. “But I felt like I was flying, soaring above the theatre and the peak of the mountain I had spent my whole career trying to reach. At the same time, I felt like I had finally landed. It was one of the most exhilarating and fulfilling nights of my life.
“There is nothing quite like being on stage, completely immersed in a character like the Phantom. It’s utterly transcendental. Still, the feeling is visceral … so rich, so moving, so free, if you let it be. This was the feeling I had pined for as an artist for my whole career. Sure, I’d had glimpses of it, fleeting moments, but the Phantom became like a meditation for me, a place to go into that other world. The non-ordinary world, into the heart. In those moments, it was pure magic.”
Piterman had big dreams ever since he started performing in musicals as a 16-year-old at high school, quickly falling in love with both The Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables. His goal was to play the lead in both those shows. That’s exactly what he did, becoming the first Australian to do so. However, it did take him two decades to achieve after “climbing the undulating paths of the internal and external mountains to get there, but I climbed them …”
We not only get a backstage VIP tour of Piterman’s musical theatre world, but are also given some useful tools to help navigate life, find deeper meaning, explore a growth mindset, and ensure it’s all done with a touch of humour. His book includes many of the lessons, learnings and wisdoms he found while trying to work out who he really is.
“I’m a singer, actor and certified meditation teacher. I’ve played many roles in my life both on and offstage and worn many masks, but I’ve always had a curiosity for what’s happening behind those masks, behind identity and ego. I want to explore the real stories beyond the bright lights of people’s journeys …”
We are able to access the inner sanctum of their lives through Behind the Mask.
“Ultimately, I would like to help you step out from behind the masks you wear, the persona you have created. I want to give you the strategies and the confidence to understand and accept who you really are – because until you ditch the distractions and learn to love yourself as ‘nobody’, you will never truly love yourself as ‘somebody’. You need to understand who you always were before you can realise who you might become.”
Behind the Mask, by Josh Piterman, Echo Publishing, $29.99
