"Queen of the Night" Opens at the New Diamond Horseshoe Club IN its heyday, Billy Rose's Diamond Horseshoe was quite the thing - "the most zestful, gorgeous and lovable pleasure palace in town," a critic for The New York Times wrote shortly after it opened in December 1938. Buried deep in the basement of what is now the Paramount Hotel on West 46th Street in Manhattan, the theater transported audiences back to New York in the Gay Nineties, the era of Diamond Jim Brady and Lillian Russell, in a revue stacked with old vaudeville troupers and glamorous showgirls. Mason Ames holding up Valerie Benoit-Charbonneau in "The Queen of the Night" at the Diamond Horseshoe supper club within the Paramount Hotel. Katherine Crockett is the lead in "The Queen of the Night." Now it is back in business. The developer Aby Rosen, who bought the Paramount two years ago, has awakened the old theater from the half-century coma that it slipped into after closing in 1951, spending more than $20 million in renovations and financing Randy Weiner's latest adventure in immersive theater, "Queen of the Night." The show opens for a six-week run on New Year's Eve. Devotees of Mr. Weiner should know, in a general way, what to expect: a disruptive, interactive theatrical experience that shrinks the distance between audience and actor and takes rude liberties with conventions. They got it, most recently, in "Sleep No More," a deconstructed, noirish, mostly wordless "Macbeth" presented in three abandoned warehouses on West 27th Street beginning in 2011. Mr. Weiner helped bring the play over from London, along with the members of Punchdrunk, the British theater company that created it. Before that, in the production that put Mr. Weiner on the map, they got it in "The Donkey Show," a reimagining of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" by Mr. Weiner and his wife, the theater director Diane Paulus, as a disco-era karaoke for actors. And they have gotten it in spades at the Box, a combination dinner theater, cabaret and nightclub that Mr. Weiner opened on the Lower East Side with Simon Hammerstein and Richard Kimmel to present an eye-opening lineup of "fetish burlesque" performers and other determined transgressors. With the Diamond Horseshoe as his playground, and the deep pockets of Mr. Rosen to back him, Mr. Weiner has upped the ante this time around. "Queen of the Night," very loosely based on Mozart's "Magic Flute," combines and amplifies the elements of his previous productions and throws in a few more for good measure. There's a bit of opera, a lot of rock "n" roll, plenty of circus and magic, and hefty servings of food and drink, interwoven with a series of sacred and profane rituals that the audience experiences, as it were, on the move. "I wanted to get together all the people I've met, and putting them together seemed in the spirit of making an opera," Mr. Weiner said during a break from a run-through of the production. The evening is presented as a "dark debutante ball" given by the Marchesa, a potently ambiguous figure, played by the Martha Graham dancer Katherine Crockett, who blends aspects of Mozart's queen, the 1920s muse and dandy Luisa Casati, and the performance artist Marina Abramovic. The focal point of the ball is the ritual deflowering of Pamina, the queen's daughter. The ceremony requires a propulsive rock score and much cracking of a bullwhip. After this dark and stormy night of the soul, the evening progresses, suggestively and mysteriously, and with many distractions and diversions, toward a romantic conclusion. Judging by two early run-throughs, audiences must be prepared. In "Sleep No More," ticket holders wear masks. They wander anonymously from floor to floor as voyeurs, with the action taking place around them. In "Queen of the Night," there are no masks, and the role of the spectator is turned inside out. The evening is an open invitation to intimacy - fleeting but, in theory, transformative. Guests are encouraged to mingle and wander, and many tables are communal. The queen's butlers can and do approach. They establish intense eye contact. They embrace newcomers. They whisper mysteriously into surprised ears. They lead the willing off into secret chambers and point out the wonders within.