You'll see a lot of curtains. You'll see a lot of candles. You'll see a lot of fog.

Andrew Lloyd Webber's blockbuster, now 17 years old, has turned into a sure thing, and there are no surprises in the national touring production, which has rolled into Carr Performing Arts Centre a third time for a 3½-week run.

A skeptic might call this production generic -- indistinguishable, more or less, from the Broadway version or the versions in London, Stuttgart, Budapest or Madrid.

Phantom fans will call it exactly what they want to see.

The national tour is exactly that -- all soaring melodies and grand effects, all high seriousness and splendor. The cast members are accomplished and reliable. And if you squint at the rococo gilt of the show's extravagant proscenium arch or at the huge chandelier on high, you might think you're in some glorious old theater such as the Paris Opera House instead of the bland 1970s confines of Carr.

The Paris Opera, of course, is where you're meant to be in Lloyd Webber's 1986 musical, which allowed the now-knighted pop composer to indulge his taste for Pucciniesque melodies as much as he liked. Phantom's stretches of mock-opera are drawn out and bombastic, and the show's lyrics (by Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe) are as clumsy as those in every other Lloyd Webber show since he parted ways with Tim Rice. (Rice is no Cole Porter, but his successors make him look brilliant in comparison.)

Still, there's something about Phantom that moves people. Maybe it's the minor-key melodies, which stay with you long after you leave the theater whether you want them to or not. Maybe it's the elaborate production values: the scores of floating candles, the layers of draperies, the flares and the flames and the grand chandelier, which is always more impressive in its protracted rising at the beginning of the show than when it falls -- also very slowly -- at the first act's close.

And maybe it's the love triangle, in which the gifted young soprano is torn between the handsome nobleman who adores her and the disfigured madman who lives in the bowels of the opera house and has taught her to sing.

The current tour makes as much of all that as Phantom always does, and the casting is as strong as usual, from David Cryer and D.C. Anderson as the opera company's hapless owners to Patti Davidson-Gorbea as the formidable ballet mistress, Kate Wray as her wide-eyed ballerina daughter and Kim Stengel and Jimmy Smagula as the company's self-satisfied stars. (Those people ought to be good: Most of them have been playing their roles for many years.)

The boyish Tim Martin Gleason is just as dashing as he needs to be as Raoul, the aristocratic love interest, and Rebecca Pitcher brings out all the conflict in the soprano Christine. Brad Little, who also played the Phantom when the tour was here in 1998, has the requisite big, pretty voice, and his title character is both pitiable and moving at the end of the show. (Elizabeth Southard plays Christine at some performances; Little leaves the tour Sunday and will be replaced by Gary Mauer.)

In fact, the only surprise in Phantom, for the Phantom skeptic, is that the ending really does move you: All the oversize trappings, the pomp and circumstance, have been cut away, and you're left with three people in love, one of whom is bound to lose.

If you're a fan, you'll be buying your ticket for the next time around. If you're not, well, rest assured: There are worse things in the world than a sentimental ending, a lot of smoke and mirrors and a really great chandelier.

Elizabeth Maupin can be reached at emaupin@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5426.

Most musical theater has fans. But The Phantom of the Opera has fans you won't believe.

And when Phantom makes its third trip to Orlando with a monthlong engagement that begins next week, those fans will be out in force.

By the middle of December, Jane Pardue already had bought 37 tickets to take herself, family and friends to see Phantom. Pardue herself has seen the show "way more" than 200 times.

She's far from alone. Plenty of people in the audience at Carr Performing Arts Centre will be seeing Phantom for the fifth or 10th or 15th time. And even the folks who run Broadway in Orlando, which is bringing the show to town -- folks who proclaim themselves jaded by musicals -- are nearly beside themselves with anticipation.

"I cannot wait," says Ron Legler, executive director of Florida Theatrical Association, which presents the Broadway in Orlando touring series. "I'm so psyched. I've hooked so many people onto Phantom."

It's hard to find a musical-theater fan without an opinion on Phantom, the Andrew Lloyd Webber blockbuster that has been raising the heat in and around the theater since it opened in London in 1986 and on Broadway a year and a half after that.

Theater critics gave the show -- about a scarred composer and the young soprano he loves -- mixed reviews, and its continuing 15-year-run in New York has led locals there to dismiss it as a tourist show. But audience members have bought into Phantom's tragic love triangle, and they've bought into it again and again and again.

When the gargantuan show made it to Orlando the first time, in 1995, Carr Performing Arts Centre had to be remodeled for the occasion -- the roof of the stage house raised to 85 feet, the lighting grid lifted, steel trusses added to support the show's ornate proscenium arch and the backstage area.

That spring, Phantom played for more than six weeks in Orlando. When it came back, in 1998, it played for 31/2 weeks more.

No other touring show has been able to play such extended runs here. And the third time around, business is hopping. On the first day tickets went on sale, the Broadway in Orlando box office sold $220,000 worth of tickets -- $100,000 worth in the first hour and a half.

For Pardue, Phantom has become a way of life. She first saw it seven years ago, and she has been following the North American touring company nearly ever since. She has become friendly with some of the cast members, and she has traveled to more than 40 other cities to watch them perform.

"I'll go to the show every night to support them," she says. "Every night, I'm just as impressed."

Pardue, who is in her 50s, has been a musical-theater fan since she was a girl in New York. Her father took her to Broadway to see My Fair Lady when she was small, and after that she spent every nickel she could on theater tickets.

Les Miserables may be her favorite musical, she says, but Phantom is right up there.

"If you understand the story, that's key," she says. "It's such an emotional story. At the end, your heart breaks for the phantom because you kind of wish he'd get the girl. It draws you in every time."

It was the story, too, that attracted Legler, who saw Phantom for the first time in Toronto in 1988 when he was in college in Pennsylvania. Everyone at his school was required to see a live performance, so he and his fraternity brothers went on a bus to Toronto for the show.

It was the first play he had seen.

"We were all dreading it. But when I saw it, something clicked inside my head: 'Oh, this is what I've been missing!' It was magical. It was like a dream."

Legler was majoring in business administration and political science, but he began taking as many theater courses as he could. Eventually, he took a job doing group sales for Pace Theatrical, the predecessor to Clear Channel Entertainment, which promotes the touring series in Orlando and dozens of other cities across the country. Part of his job was selling groups on Phantom.

"I love it so much that selling it was easy for me," he says.

His colleague, Ryan Sheehy, who is Florida Theatrical Association's director of public relations, saw the show the first time on her 16th birthday when her parents took her to New York. She'll be turning 26 when Phantom is in Orlando, and that's where she'll be.

For Sheehy, the attraction was Lloyd Webber's music. She asked her parents for singing lessons as soon as she got home.

"That's when my passion for the arts began," she says.

And those two aren't the only Phantom fans in their office: Alina Williams, the ticketing manager, has seen it 11 times -- in Orlando, Tampa, New York, Los Angeles and London.

The tour's return will make it an even dozen, at least, but who's counting? Not Legler, who thinks he has seen it 37 times although he's not quite sure. Legler can tell you about the show's effects on other touring theater, and he can reel off the figures on the show's economic impact: 65,000 people will turn up at Carr during the run, and they'll spend $10 million downtown.

But it's Phantom itself he really loves.

"The show gives me the chills," he says. "It really does."

Elizabeth Maupin can be reached at emaupin@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5426.

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