Let's face it: There's no fighting a phenomenon, and in the case of "The Phantom of the Opera," currently playing the Saenger Theatre, there's really no need to put up your critical dukes and try.

One can acknowledge that Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical has maybe three good, endlessly recycled melodies, that its pyrotechnics and falling chandelier don't carry the impact they once did and that even admirers would trim the show by at least one scene (the one in the cemetery) if given the chance. And though Webber is spoofing opera conventions on several levels, he and his collaborators are guilty of mediocre operetta and recitative, especially in the second act. If lyrics are lost, and they are, particularly in the two backstage ensembles, it's no great deprivation.

But you know what? Almost none of this matters to the theater-going public, because those three melodies are swooningly romantic, as are the genius strokes of gorgeous, gothic design that align the Phantom with candlelight, silhouette, shadow and fog. And then there's his baroque hide-out beneath the Paris Opera House, the sloping walkways that get us there -- lifted from the Lon Chaney silent film version -- the swagged, fringed curtains, ornate costumes, and the massive, gilded false proscenium.

It also helps that this is, perhaps, the most cohesive company to play "The Phantom" in its three local appearances, and that the piece and Harold Prince's original staging hold up well, with adroit comic touches to temper the melodramatics.

We're goners from the moment those descending organ chords are struck, still dazzled by the boat ride across the subterranean lake illuminated by a cathedral's cache of candles and enveloped by the Phantom's voice, emanating from different sections of the theater. It's a high-gloss, Saturday-matinee serial of superior showmanship, "The Perils of Christine."

She is the singer who has been coached by the mysterious, masked "Opera Ghost," her "angel of music," who wants her to replace the demanding diva Carlotta and eventually to sing his own opera. In thrall to this shrouded specter of a tutor, she makes the mistake of unmasking him, discovering he's no Matt Damon, just as true love shows up from her past in the person of Raoul.

New owners take over the opera house as the Phantom's amatory and artistic demands reach their zenith.

The musical highlights are the throbbing rush of the "Phantom" theme; "Music of the Night," a lullaby that escalates to swooping performance heights; and the lovers' melodically ravishing "That's All I Ask of You."

Veteran "Phantom" Brad Little, who sang the role here in 1997, has a remarkable voice that ranges from tenor to baritone territory, and he can growl out a line or musical phrase with a harrowing harshness. His movement is often stylized, suggesting Chaney-esque pantomime at times. He makes a fine "Phantom."

His Christine, Rebecca Pitcher, has a supple, substantial soprano and a spontaneity that draws us to her. Tim Martin Gleason is a boyish Raoul with a strong tenor and the look of a matinee idol-to-be.

The miracle man of the production is David Cryer, the superb character actor-singer who has been playing Monsieur Firmin, one of the new owners, for 11 years. It's not just that he's very good in the part (he ought to be by now!), but that he's so fresh, funny and unforced, as if he just stepped into the role. His comic partner is D.C. Anderson as Andre, a frisky contrast to the more grounded, mature Cryer.

Madame Giry, the severe, secretive ballet mistress, is meant to be dour and draconian, but Patti Davidson-Gorbea has an undisguisable beauty in the role, emerging as enigmatically glamorous, a la Gale Sondergaard.

Kim Stengel makes a great, gaudy figure of fun as the haughty Carlotta, perfectly paired with Jimmy Smagula's ample comic tenor Piangi, who has trouble mounting his elephant in the "Hannibal" opera excerpt. As Madame Giry's lively dancer daughter Meg, Kate Wray hovers enchantingly on the periphery of the plot, claiming the final, haunting image. (The show's ballerinas are often grouped as prettily as Degas dancers.)

"The Phantom of the Opera" is the kind of show it's become fashionable to dismiss. But the fact remains that it still works, both as musical theater and spectacle, often splendidly so.

What: Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical drama of the Gaston Leroux thriller; music by Webber, lyrics by Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe, book by Stilgoe and Webber.

Where: Saenger Theatre, 143 N. Rampart St., corner Canal.

When: Performances tonight at 8; Saturday at 2 and 8; Sun at 2; and Mon, Tues, Thurs and Dec. 26 at 8; Dec. 27 at 2 and 8; Dec. 28 at 2 and 7:30; Dec. 29, 30 and Jan. 1 and 2 at 8; Jan. 3 at 2 and 8; and Jan. 4 at 2 and 7:30.

Tickets: $18 to $62.25. Call 522-5555 or 569-1520 for groups of 20 or more.

The title alone has an ornate, gothic glamour to it.

But the story has much more: a power, a hold on the collective imagination, that began long before composer Andrew Lloyd Webber heard "The Music of the Night" in his head.

That's what keeps Gaston Leroux's "The Phantom of the Opera," first published in 1910, such a potent, perennial theme for countless movies, a TV miniseries and, of course, a blockbuster musical, scheduled to be released as a movie musical this time next year. There's already been a '70s rock movie musical "Phantom" and a '40s film version that leaned heavily on opera. In fact, there are several different "Phantom of the Opera" musicals out there today, although the most familiar is the Andrew Lloyd Webber steamroller-spectacle, opening tonight at the Saenger Theatre for the third time, with schedulers confident that its mystique will sustain a month's run.

"The Phantom" will celebrate 11 years on the road during its engagement here, and it has been running in London since 1986 and New York since 1988, where the shows have become seemingly permanent tourist attractions.

"Who knows why that is?" said Brad Little, who has played the role of Erik the Phantom "off and on since 1994," including a stint on Broadway and the show's last visit to New Orleans. "My theory is that it has a little bit of everything -- romance, horror, action, suspense. There's even some comedy to it. I think it has it all, especially as a musical."

"Like the heroine, we're seduced by the grotesque," said Don Brady, professor of drama at Loyola University. "We actually root for the monster; we'd like to see him get a little!"

"Well, it's a very good story, first of all," said novelist-biographer Gavin Lambert, who wrote "The Dangerous Edge," about the origins of the literary thriller. "Novels such as 'The Phantom of the Opera' and 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame,' with these deformed fellows, caught on enormously in their day and people kept reading them and re-imagining them. There's also the sexual menace, which is always very titillating for audiences, isn't it?"

"It takes you out of the ordinary," says author Jeanine Basinger ("Silent Stars," "A Woman's View"), the head of film studies at Wesleyan University, "and yet it links you to things you can understand -- obsessive love, the feeling you're not good enough for somebody else. And it tells it in this epic setting of the Paris Opera House. It crosses so many genres, but no matter how they vary it, no matter what changes are made -- it always works. Think about it: This is a story that works both as a great silent film and spectacular musical theater."

"It's melodrama, for God's sake!" says actor-director Luis Q. Barroso, who played the title role in "The Phantom of the Old French Opera House" locally. "I love melodrama and so do most people, whether they admit it or not."

The mystery writer Raymond Chandler described melodrama as "an exaggeration of violence and fear beyond what one normally experiences in life." To which Lambert adds in his book, "A dark cloud is always moving nearer. External mystery of plot -- flight and pursuit, riddle and warning -- creates a deeper mystery than the threat itself."

Many people point to "Beauty and the Beast" as a "Phantom" progenitor.

"But it's not," said actor David Cryer, the only actor who has stayed with "The Phantom" since its first national tour began, in 1992. "People like to think of it as 'a fairy tale for adults,' but things do not work out in the end for the two main characters, the Phantom and Christine, as they do for Beauty and her Beast. There's a real darkness there.

"Hal Prince, the show's director, thinks the story has a deep importance to the psyche of women. He thinks all women have this fantasy of having a mentor, and the Phantom serves as one for the soprano, Christine. The problem is that he also wants her to be his love."

"His love for Christine is obsessive, controlling," Little said. "Really kind of an S&M thing, because he says, 'You are going to do exactly what I tell you to do.' And she ultimately shows him a love and compassion he never thought possible.

"It's interesting the reactions you get from women who love the Phantom," Little said. "This is a character in reality they would loathe and run screaming from. You know what it is? A rescue fantasy! They think, 'I'm the one who could take care of you,' 'I'm the one who could change you.' I've heard some extraordinary things from fans, people who see the show again and again."

Michael Howard, the artistic director of Tulane Summer Lyric Theatre -- who directed the second best-known musical version of the story, the Maury Yeston-Arthur Kopit "The Phantom" -- says Webber naturally gravitates to characters that loom large and require the kind of music and trappings he gives them and that his public has come to crave.

"Look at the subjects he chooses -- 'Evita,' 'The Phantom of the Opera,' Norma Desmond in 'Sunset Boulevard' -- larger-than-life characters who transcend the need to talk, who have to break into this sweeping music, who demand the kind of spectacle that we rarely see on the stage anymore," Howard said.

"And yet at the heart of 'The Phantom' is that terrible secret that everyone has -- that we want people to love not the exterior, but what's inside of us. I think even beautiful people must feel that. And each of us likes to feel that we would be capable of doing that.

"Kids today say 'like, awesome' -- a feeble effect of vocabulary -- and I made one of them get a dictionary and look it up to see what 'awesome' and 'awe' really mean. And the dictionary says something like 'a mixed feeling of reverence, fear and wonder, caused by something majestic . . . the power of inspiring intense fear or fearful reverence.' The story, the music and the stage craft of Webber pieces such as 'Evita' and 'Phantom' do that."

But there are some who are immune to those shows' charms, just as there are people who find what Paul Newman called Webber's "singin' cats" eminently resistible.

"My sister, the actress Lois Kibbee, just didn't get 'Phantom,' " Brady said. "Couldn't stand it. She was one of those people who thought all of Webber's shows had basically one tune, endlessly repeated. And I'd say, 'Yes, but it's usually a beautiful one.'

"I know I'm not the only one to say his music reminds me of Puccini, but it does, it's very Puccini.

"And what a damn good plot. The monster with a heart of gold who has everyone terrorized, the soprano who's intrigued and maybe just a little bit calculating too, the self-important prima donna, the chandelier crashing from the ceiling, the opera managers in a tizzy and -- this is what makes it -- always something psychologically dark lurking just around the corner. It's like New Orleans."

And here, of course, we've always had a weakness for a guy in a mask.
 

Theater writer David Cuthbert can be reached at dcuthbert@timespicayune.com or at (504) 826-3468

1910: French journalist Gaston Leroux publishes "Fantome L'Opera," about Erik, the "Opera Ghost" who haunts the Paris Opera House, living in its catacombs. He falls in love with soprano Christine and is writing a masterwork for her. "Phantom" is serialized and popularized in newspapers worldwide. One estimate is that the novel inspired 18 films and as many as nine theater stagings and musicals.

1925: "The Phantom of the Opera" is filmed by Universal, starring Lon Chaney in horrific makeup, on an opera-house set that took up an entire soundstage built for it, which still stands on the studio's back-lot. Shadowy, expressionistic camerawork, tinted scenes and the two-color Technicolor masquerade scene add to the atmosphere. Re-issued in a 1930 version with added sound and music. Available on a new, two-disc DVD with many extras.

1943: Universal's opulent Technicolor remake, filmed on the same set, with Claude Rains, a superb "Phantom," unfortunately having to take a back seat to Nelson Eddy and Susanna Foster's vocalizing. First version in which the Phantom's music is stolen, his face scarred by acid.

1962: Hammer Horror film version, starring Herbert Lom as an intense "Phantom," with Michael Gough chewing the scenery as the libertine who stole his opera.

1974: Brian DePalma's rock version, "Phantom of the Paradise," with "Faust" and "Dorian Gray" overtones, as Paul Williams, president of Death Records, sells his soul for eternal youth and steals William Finley's music. Imprisoned after a drug bust, Finley busts out, is deformed by a record-pressing machine and haunts Williams' pop music palace. Jessica Harper is the girl.

1982: Playwright Arthur Kopit and composer-lyricist Maury Yeston ("Nine") collaborate on a "Phantom" musical that plays a few dates and falls by the wayside, never reaching New York.

1983: First made-for-TV "Phantom," shot and set in Budapest, with Maximilian Schell, Jane Seymour and Michael York.

1986: Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Phantom of the Opera" opens in London, followed by its 1988 appearance on Broadway, garnering seven Tony Awards and becoming a worldwide phenomenon.

1988: It had to happen: an animated "Phantom." Amazon.com also lists a 1998 cartoon "Phantom." Both are said to stick closer to the Leroux story than most feature films.

1989: The scene shifts to Victorian London and Robert Englund (Freddy Kreuger) is the disfigured, deranged musical genius playing Svengali with a time-tripping woman from the future.

1990: Kopit's script becomes a TV miniseries, starring Charles Dance as the Phantom, Burt Lancaster as his Paris Opera manager father, and Teri Polo as Christine.

1991: "Phantom of the Mall," with Derek Rydall. Inadvertent comedy.

1998: Dario Argento's "Phantom of the Opera," gore-fest in which Julian Sands plays a Phantom raised by -- get this -- telepathic rats in the caverns beneath the opera house.

2004: A December release is planned for the film version of the Webber musical, directed by Joel Schumacher, with Gerard Butler as the Phantom.

The Phantom knows that you're going to flock to see him in his pursuit of the soprano Christine, listen to "The Music of the Night" and gasp at the falling chandelier, even though it's his third visit to town. Spectacle meets operetta, as it so often does in the hands of Andrew Lloyd Webber, and audiences eat it up. Brad Little, who was "The Phantom of the Opera" the last time around, is back, with Rebecca Pitcher as his Christine, and they're making the Saenger home for almost a month.

Opens Wed at 8 p.m., with performances Thursday at 1 p.m. and 8 p.m., with 32 more performances through Jan. 4. (See theater calendar on Page 22.) Tickets range from $18 to $62.25. Call 522-5555 or, for groups of 20 or more, 569-1520.