(My inevitable got-a-free-ticket first time seeing Phantom only 35 years after it opened.)
This kind of thing always happens to me.
I go around shooting off my mouth about this or that – especially if I’m being kind of negative about something, and that thing falls in my lap. My girlfriend says I manifest things with my words. Some call it the Law of Attraction, Oprah called it The Secret. Apparently I can do it for anything but a book deal. (Ooh, maybe that just counted!)
Here on Tawk, I have more than once expressed my distaste for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s colossus, Phantom of the Opera. Having been a theater kid, I had listened to the score over and over back in the day, amid the hysteria of my peers, hoping it would grow on me, searching for something akin toe the tragic themes of Les Mis or the murderous darkness of Sweeny Todd.
Nope.
So, naturally, I was offered free tickets to the 35th anniversary performance of the Broadway production. This was a big one. It would be the last such anniversary, as the show finally closes for good in April. We’ve been over all this. This was not just another performance of Phantom; this was a reunion. Most people there had been in or worked on the show over the years. I went into this ready to be won over, wanting to walk out saying, “Now I get what all the fuss has been about.”
Nope.
Okay, here we go.
I went to Disney World for the first time as an adult. I grew up hearing about it from the other kids and listened to tales of magical things – the rides, the adventures! Years later, I sat there in a boat in a few inches of water, looking at some singing puppets and I thought, THIS is It’s a Small World? That was Pirates of the Caribbean? Space Mountain is just a roller coaster in the dark?! I had that same feeling while watching this legendary production, Phantom of the Opera, unfold before me.
Having seen production pictures for years, one expects something massive and overwhelming. Like opera.
The stage itself is small by Broadway standards, the house cramped and intimate. The humble preset made me immediately think, “That’s it?”
This is just a first impression, not a criticism. The audience was there for it and the air was electric. The lights went down, and the crowd roared, like a rock concert when you can see the band walking on stage in the dark before they bring the lights back up.
The atmosphere was camp. People came in costume.
The chandelier was lifted over our heads for it to fall later and we all screamed in ecstasy; to not do so seemed rude.
By today’s standards, the production values came off campy and rickety. Set pieces seemed tiny especially for a show with this “you-have-to-see-it-to-believe-it” legend hanging around it. As the show played out, this became the thing that fascinated me. Thirty-five years ago, Broadway had seen nothing like this. Look he’s up in the ceiling! That along with its drum machine score, paper thin plot and sketchy main character, are reasons that if Phantom opened today, it would close tomorrow. It was a museum piece, unchanged in all these years. I immediately realized that the people around me were remembering the first time they experienced it, and that perhaps was the point after all. It was a piece of their past, and for that reason it remains precious to them. I get that feeling when a Star Wars film starts up and the opening chords begin, and the words scroll up the screen into the infinity of space. That was the moment my creative imagination came alive, and the reason I will excuse all that horrible dialogue and silly space puppets every time, because it makes me feel like a kid again.
And so it went at Phantom. We all knew all the words and knew what came next. Like those midnight screenings of Rocky Horror Picture Show in college.
Emilie Koatchou’s Christine was as light and fragile as a soufflé and her rendition of Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again stopped the show. We applauded for so long, she broke character and smiled and nodded. In a strange and lovely moment, we, the audience, knew we had given her something she might just always remember.
Ben Crawford’s Phantom though… He was much more of a brute than I thought the character was. I had imagined a sexy, leering, vampire guy who sings. But Crawford’s phantom came off as an abusive boyfriend-turned-kidnapper. Angry, erratic and kind of a dick. “Sing for me!” – or you go back in the box!
I am truly grateful to have seen Phantom of the Opera on Broadway before it closed, for all the context it gives and its historical significance and for giving me the right to truly opine on its shortcomings, though never with the authority of the man in front of me, who stood after it was over and declared… “That damn chandelier falls slower every time I see this thing.”
