DAYTON--Seeing and hearing is still believing when it comes to The Phantom of the Opera, which opened here for the first time Wednesday night at the Schuster Center for the Performing Arts.

The masterpiece of popular appeal, visual splendor, staging and passionate voices has lost nothing in the more than 15 years since it opened on Broadway.

There were gasps when the chandelier fell, tears when the Phantom begged Christine to love him, at least one scream following a gunshot and an overall sense that the almost 2,300 people in the Mead Theatre were glued to the proceedings.

Once those who see the first few performances start talking, there's little doubt that the remainder of this run will sell out quickly.

Even though composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and the featured performers generally get top billing, legendary director Harold Prince and the designers of a musical like no other are also responsible for its incredible staying power. Their work truly stands up.

There's so much to see on an operatic scale and very few dull moments. The pacing is an achievement on a scale of getting an elephant to sprint and run the hurdles. Without momentum, this is a story that would collapse like a house of cards if we had too many chances to stop and think about it.

The Schuster Center also deserves a round of applause. Mixing natural and amplified sound is more than tricky, but every word and lyric was crystal clear in the back row of the loge. Based on other experiences with this massive musical on the road, that isn't always true. But when the top ticket price is $70, it should be.

Brad Little, whose vocal, physical and expressive range in the title role was marvelous on the first night, heads the first-rate touring company of 36 performers.

His portrayal includes pompous snobbery, almost juvenile mischief, deep rage and a sad, shattered vulnerability when Christine unmasks him for the first time and ultimately deserts him.

An ability to touch the heartstrings is far more crucial than an ability to appear from out of nowhere or hurl fire at a rival. But it's very cool when the Phantom descends in one of the golden angels that adorn the glowing proscenium to sing All I Ask of You.

Her emotional eloquence and clarity of character as Christine weren't on that level, but Rebecca Pitcher sang her role beautifully. Her duets with the Phantom, who seeks to claim her, and Raoul, the nobleman and opera patron who loves her, were sure and satisfying. Her heartfelt solo in the graveyard to the memory of her father, Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again, was transfixing.

Tim Martin Gleason's Raoul was no match for the power and depth of the Phantom, but then, looks can go a long way in deciding a love triangle.

Not unlike another chorus girl (Peggy Sawyer) in a different musical (42nd Street) set in a different century, Christine rises to opera stardom in 1880s Paris after the Phantom plucks her from the corps de ballet and trains her--somehow anonymously--to sing. He's convinced that only she "can make my song take flight," an alarming development for the reigning and very substantial diva Carlotta (Kim Stengel).

But take flight it does, which is a very positive development for those of us with tickets for this production. The long wait has been rewarded.
 

Terry Morris is Dayton Daily News theater critic. Contact him at 225-2377.
 

DAYTON | Ronald Reagan was President of the United States when The Phantom of the Opera opened on Broadway, but its first visit here is far from old news.

Ticket sales for the four-week run at the Schuster Performing Arts Center, which begins Wednesday night, are approaching the 60,000 mark and set a new local record with every purchase.

The musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber, with lyrics by Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe, tends to have that impact when it visits a city for the first time.

But the 1988 Tony Award winner for best musical, which is still running strong on Broadway, also tends to attract repeat business.

While not impossible considering the way some people feel about it, it’s doubtful that any theatergoer has seen Phantom as many times as Brad Little and Rebecca Pitcher have performed the leading roles.

Little has played the Phantom about 1,500 times, beginning with his debut in late 1996 at the Aronoff Center for the Arts in Cincinnati. After an extended break from the tour, he returned to the cast six months ago, and says, “I absolutely love it.”

Pitcher, who plays the leading lady Christine DaaŽ in the show’s only remaining U.S. tour, has done so for four years.

“It helps a great deal that I like the show, the character and the story,” she said. “The audience is always different. Regardless of how hard you try to make it so, it’s never the same show twice.”

The relationship between the Phantom and Christine, part of a complex triangle that also includes the young nobleman and opera patron Raoul, is the core of the stage spectacle adapted from Gaston Leroux’s 1911 novel.

The title character, a disfigured, masked loner who dwells in the catacombs beneath the Paris Opera, becomes obsessed with Christine the moment he hears her singing.

As Pitcher describes the young soprano, “she’s just a little ballet chorus girl at the time.”

He immediately and secretly begins grooming her to replace reigning prima donna Carlotta Giudicelli, whose voice he intends to silence one way or another. With notes he signs “O.G.” (Opera Ghost), pranks and illusions, he bullies the opera’s leaders to accept his casting choices, then backs up his threats by trimming — permanently — some of those on the company payroll. He also downsizes the audience in one fell swoop of a plummeting chandelier.

Without so much as seeing his face, Christine entrusts herself to him — for a while.

“She doesn’t know what her feelings are for him. He’s a father figure to her. He’s strangely attractive. She thinks he may be the ‘Angel of Music’ her father told her he would send to her before he died. Once she realizes he’s killing people, she knows that going with him is not the best decision,” Pitcher said.

“Not everyone agrees with that. I’ve had so many audience members ask me how I could ever leave the Phantom.”

Harold Prince, who staged the original, chalked up such responses to an erotic undercurrent between the Phantom and Christine.

The Phantom’s magnetism comes through in the best-known song from the show, Music of the Night. Others in a score that stays with the audience after the final curtain include Think of Me and All I Ask of You, for Christine and Raoul; I Gave You My Music, for the Phantom; Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again, for Christine; and the pulsating, if corny, title song.

Little, who said it’s possible “to overdo” character “and it will still work,” prefers to “make him as human as possible rather than a crazed being with no basis in reality.”

He insists that his character “isn’t a bad guy. His desires and the reasons he kills all stem from his love for Christine and his passion for music. I never forget that his whole understanding of life is based on opera. He’s a tortured creature who has spent his life under the opera house. All he sees is opera. And in opera, they kill for love.”

As the lines that often gather outside the stage door (and the photo on his CD, Brad Little Unmasked) indicate, Little doesn’t resemble the Phantom when out of costume. But he can relate to being different.

The son of a theater professor whose brother and sister majored in theater in college, he decided against higher education.

“I’m dyslexic. That route didn’t work for me,” he said.

After singing in the choir of his high school in upstate New York, he studied music privately.

“I auditioned for Phantom in New York and got a role in the chorus on Broadway. Later, I got promoted to play Raoul. After two years of that, they asked me to play the lead on the road. I’ve been very lucky, and luck is as important as talent,” he said.

Much like Christine, who was plucked from the obscurity of the chorus, Berea, Ohio, native Pitcher was working at an Eddie Bauer store in a mall “when I decided one day I just couldn’t stand it anymore. I had to do something.”

Her voice teacher told her there was an audition for Phantom in New York coming up, she went, and she got the part.

But it wasn’t really a miracle.

She has two degrees in vocal music. Both of her parents are music teachers. Her brother, also a performer, has played the role of Phantom in Germany.

“We’ve never done the show together, which is probably for the best. We’d laugh too much during the love scenes,” she said.

The tour will arrive in Dayton from Greenville, S.C., where its debut run there closes tonight. From here, it will move on to San Francisco.

Besides New York and London, other companies of Phantom are currently performing in Stuttgart, Budapest and Madrid.
 

Contact Terry Morris at 225-2377 or tmorris@DaytonDailyNews.com

DAYTON | Some people were born to act, while others were born to sing. It could easily be said the Benjamin and Marian Schuster Performing Arts Center was born for The Phantom of the Opera.

"When the Schuster Center was in its design stages, Phantom's road crew gave advice on how to make it easier for them and this show," said Pat Keough, the technical director for the Victoria Theatre Association, which manages the show here.

The Phantom of the Opera is one of the largest traveling stage productions in America. It takes more than 20 semi-trucks to deliver everything needed for the show.

Thursday, the advance load of equipment came to the Schuster Center in five fully loaded semis. The 45-person crew at the Schuster unloaded them in 30 minutes.

"It looks like mass confusion, but each person is an important part of a machine," Schuster spokeswoman Laura Januzzi said. "I've just been told not to get in their way."

Two semis were backed into semi loading docks on the Ludlow Street side of the new theater. A fork lift moved larger equipment in a third dock. Huge boxes were rolled off and moved throughout the theater.

"Phantom uses its own sound system," Keough said. "We had to take down ours, and they install their own surround-sound system."

Keogh's crew has been working since Sunday to prepare the Schuster for one of the largest productions ever to tour, Phantom's road crew has 25 members, while a normal Broadway production has about 10.

Keough and his crew put in 560 hours getting ready for Thursday's arrival, and another 560 hours on Thursday alone.

"We started at 8 a.m., and we're scheduled for 12 hours today. I'm hoping things go well and we're out of here in 10, though," he said. "By the time everything is done, we'll have put in a couple thousand man hours here."

The feeling around the theater is vibrant and alive as electricians and carpenters get to work.

"Dayton's never had something of this size," Januzzi said. "It's great for downtown because these people will be working and living here while the show is in town."

The show, which opens June 18 and runs into mid-July, has already sold more than 52,000 of the 74,000 tickets available.

If members of the Phantom road crew find something in a facility they don't like, the production will pay to have it changed. When the production came to the Schuster, its crew bought new lighting that Keough's crew installed.

"They wanted more lights, so they paid for more lights. They have a large budget, and something as minute as stage lighting isn't even a factor to them," Keough said. "When Phantom leaves here, Schuster will be a better place than it was before they got here."
 
 

[From the Dayton Daily News: 06.13.2003]