Music Of The Night THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA

  • Even if The Phantom of the Opera were the greatest show on earth, probably nothing in the way of actual experience could measure up to the hoopla that preceded last week's U.S. debut of the monster-meets-girl musical. No previous offering in Broadway history has rivaled the $18 million advance sale for Phantom, a commitment made by hundreds of thousands of people to pay up to $50 a ticket, generally before having had a chance to hear any of the songs, read any reviews or acquire the vaguest familiarity with the imported-from- London stars.

    Some of the show's lures are known commodities: Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber (Cats, Jesus Christ Superstar) and Director Harold Prince (Cabaret, Follies) have mounted some of the flashiest spectaculars of recent years, including their prior collaboration, Evita. Practically everyone, it seems, has seen a movie version of Phantom, although few have read Gaston Leroux's turgid 1910 thriller about the hideously misshapen genius who constitutes himself the shadow ruler of the Paris Opera House and, upon becoming infatuated with a chorine, maneuvers her career from afar. The beauty-and-the- beast theme and subterranean wonderland setting echo the myths of Persephone, Pygmalion and Faust and also contemporarily embrace Freudian metaphors of sexual awakening. The Broadway launch has been boosted by publicity about Phantom in London, where, since its debut in October 1986, virtually the only way to get in on short notice has been to belong to the royal family: the Princess of Wales, a particular fan, has attended four times.

    These rational factors go only part way in explaining the extraordinary anticipation that Phantom has aroused. The show apparently taps into yearnings for a transporting sensory and mystical experience: in a word, for magic. On that primal level, despite considerable and at times embarrassing shortcomings, Phantom powerfully delivers. The story may be muddled, the characters sketchy, some performances shallow and the music often slushily derivative. So what. For those who seek an equivalent to a ride through the Haunted Mansion at Walt Disney World -- seemingly a vast proportion of today's Broadway audience -- Phantom is a brilliantly manipulated journey, scary yet ultimately unthreatening. A prime example is the show's most celebrated effect, the gasp-evoking plummet from the ceiling almost to the floor of a 1,500-lb. chandelier. Many spectators arrive knowing it will drop, and the staging gives plenty of clues to the rest. Equally, however, audiences can trust that the "danger" will be averted at the last possible minute, so the dread is purely titillating, without a hint of life's real pains and perils.

    The Phantom, described as a scholar, seems more a necromancer, dematerializing, teleporting, even dodging bullets. He defies the laws of gravity and physics: his kingdom in the bowels of the Paris Opera House is reached by rowing across a subterranean lake through which candelabra rise and descend, mysteriously unquenched. The lagoon seems to be at or above the level of his hideaway, yet his chambers remain unflooded. Allow oneself a moment's skepticism and the story turns to piffle. But audiences give themselves over to the fantasy concocted by Prince and Designer Maria Bjornson, letting logic evanesce as long as the sights and sounds are glorious. Which they are: bolts of lightning, carpets of fog and flashes of fire compete with the Phantom's midair descent in a chariot of gilded cherubs and his final disappearance while sitting on a solid-looking throne.

    These effects are meant to be balanced by a love story, or rather two competing ones: the conventional passion between a handsome young vicomte and a chorus girl, and the dark, obsessive bond between that same young woman and the Phantom, who seeks to win her devotion by making her a star. The maiden is thus expected to choose between outward beauty and the beauty of the soul and, in protofeminist fashion, between status as a rich man's wife and acclaim as an artist in her own right. As befits a fantasy, she gets both by virtue of a brief display of compassion.

    The three principal roles are again played by the actors who originated them in London, and therein lies the show's chief weakness. As the Phantom -- musically, a tenor good guy rather than a baritone baddie -- Michael Crawford gives the most compelling performance currently to be found on any Broadway stage. The character is an extortionist, kidnaper, incendiary and murderer. Yet as Lloyd Webber conceived him and Crawford plays him, he is also a romantic capable of true selflessness and is all too easily forgiven. As his rival, Steve Barton is blandly tuneful and smugly self-assured, which is all the role demands. The narrative tension is meant to emanate mainly from the virginal Christine, the part Lloyd Webber wrote for his wife Sarah Brightman. Vocally she has the needed equipment: her soprano is clear and sounds youthfully innocent along a wide range. But as an actress she has learned almost nothing from years in the role. Her vocabulary of gesture is limited to a flutter of hands and a gape of astonishment, accented by huge black circles of makeup around her eyes that cause her to resemble a raccoon. Brightman's Maypole figure, long nose and prominent overbite do not aid in explaining why both men adore her. But these deficiencies might be overcome if she displayed the least hint of star quality, or even stage presence, instead of acting like Minnie Mouse on Quaaludes.

    Lloyd Webber gives his wife every help, beginning with her vocal introduction. Although Phantom is garlanded with opera pastiche, it subliminally nudges opera aside in favor of pop by offering the winsome ballad Think of Me first in the overripe, rococo style of a diva (Judy Kaye), then in Brightman's appealingly unadorned rendition. The device hints that the Phantom and his chosen instrument will become the means for remaking musical entertainment. If that claim is to be taken as Lloyd Webber's judgment of his own role in the theater, however, it seems premature. His knack for crafting hit tunes is offset by their interchangeability among characters and situations, plus a tin ear for lyrics and lyricists. Moreover, nothing in Phantom compares with Memory in Cats. The melody that comes closest, The Music of the Night, contains a repeated phrase that seems to quote Come to Me, Bend to Me from Brigadoon, a show that had true magic, fantasy and romance and that embodied a tradition of Broadway quality Lloyd Webber has not come close to matching.