Deep in the second act of The Phantom of the Opera, deeper yet in the bowels of the Paris Opera, the Phantom leans over the helpless Christine and hisses, "You try my patience."

A chill goes up the collective spine of the Gammage audience. It is a reminder that the Phantom is not the usual romantic hero but a disturbed, dangerously violent man.

Brad Little, essaying the title role, brings a menace to the part unmatched by any of his predecessors, including the role's originator, Michael Crawford.

Getting to the second act, Little can try the audience's patience with his melodramatic gesturing and the disconcerting tendency of his speaking voice to squeak when he's excited.

These are momentary flaws, though, not enough to disappoint, especially when weighed against his singing and that shivery ending.

In contrast, Rebecca Pitcher's Christine is a woman of unalloyed delights.

Her voice, quite capable of soaring over Gammage's lamentable acoustical design, also has a rich underregister that lends an unexpectedly sonorous beauty to Andrew Lloyd Webber's melodies.

Completing the musical's romantic triangle, Jim Weitzer combines a strong voice with a charmingly youthful impetuousness that is perfectly suited to the part of Raoul.

It marks the third time The Phantom of the Opera has appeared at Gammage. This production ranks with the first in quality and far exceeds the second.
 
 

In London, a couple in their late 20s, who first saw Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical on their honeymoon, have been back more than 60 times.

Stephanie Barusch isn't in that league, but she's working on it.

The Phoenix youngster celebrated her 10th birthday Dec. 21. Her favorite present from her stepfather was front-row tickets for the tour of Phantom that opens at Tempe's Gammage Auditorium this week.

She saw the show in New York during her annual holiday stay with her father, a Manhattan broker "who hates the theater but loves me, so he goes anyway."

That will make six times she's seen Phantom.

What is there about this masked guy that appeals so much to a girl whose other crushes include Brian Littrell of the Backstreet Boys and James Van Der Beek of Dawson's Creek?

"The stuff," she says. "You know, the chandelier that falls down, the elephant, and . . . the stuff. Every time I see it, I get this funny feeling, like I'm going to cry because I'm having such a good time."

Although he may be no Brian or Jim, the Phantom's not so bad.

"I feel sorry for him," Stephanie says. "He doesn't get the girl, and that's sad. My brother hates the gooey parts, but I tell him it's OK. They don't kiss all the time, like they do on Dawson's Creek."

Margo Evans, a jazz and theater buff who traded Boston clubs for a patio in Scottsdale, understands the appeal of the Phantom. Or at least the actor who played him the first time she saw the show. That was in New York, where Michael Crawford re-created his London original.

"Once you saw Michael Crawford, you had to come back and see him again," she says, breaking into laughter. "The man is gorgeous!"

For Deborah Meehling, a psychologist with the Washington School District, and her daughter, Lauren, 14, it's the music that keeps them hooked.

"It's really, really beautiful," Lauren says. "I've just about worn out my CD."

Her mother likes the songs even more when they're performed onstage.

"To see them brought to life that way, and to see how my family enjoys and is moved by the experience . . . you can never have enough things like that in your life," she says.

Meehling is aware that some people feel the music is overblown and schmaltzy.

"You know what? I don't associate with people like that," she says.

Stephanie is more blunt.

"My dad bought me some Mozart stuff for Christmas last year because he thought I was playing my Phantom CD too much.

"It was pukey."

Connie McCarthy, a retired Phoenix educator, can't help her repeat trips. She's addicted to the story.

"I saw one of the movie versions a long time ago and I was hooked," she says. "It never bores me. Every time I go, I find something different to enjoy."

Talk to any Phanatic, as Phantom fans are called, and sooner or later, the conversation turns to that crashing chandelier. What is it about that lighting fixture?

Karen Williams, Stephanie's mom, recalls the first time her daughter saw the show. They were sitting in the front row of New York's Majestic Theatre.

"Steph was just so entranced, but, for some reason, she looked up just as the chandelier started to fall.

"She let out this horrible yell. I thought, 'Oh, Lord, I never should have brought her to this. I've traumatized her.' "

As for Stephanie?

"She was clapping her hands and crying, 'Do it again! Do it again!' "
 
 

PHANTOM FIGURES:

Hours the show runs:2.5
Costumes used:230
Mannequins in crowd scene:11
Performers:36
Orchestra members:16
Pyrotechnics effects:14
Scene shifts during show:22
Scenery and electrical system operators:37
Crew members:60
Fog and smoke machines used during performance:10
Pounds of dry ice used for each show:550
Candles used during performance:213
Chandelier height (in feet):14
Number of beads on chandelier:35,000
Elephants:1

My Fair Phantom?

It's amazing how close Gammage Auditorium came to welcoming that musical to its stage.

When Andrew Lloyd Webber decided to make a musical out of Gaston Leroux's 1911 novel, The Phantom of the Opera, he was convinced that Alan Jay Lerner was the only man to write the book and compose the lyrics.

The author of My Fair Lady, Camelot and Brigadoon was interested, but it wasn't to be. Lerner died before he could begin work on the project.

A disappointed Lloyd Webber turned to Richard Stilgoe, who had collaborated with the English composer on his earlier successes, Cats and Starlight Express. It is their Phantom that opens in Tempe on Wednesday.

Perhaps the loss of Lerner actually helped Phantom. Cats and Starlight Express were more scenery and special effects than story, and as it turned out, Phantom became the definitive spectacle of its era when it premiered in London in 1986. Maybe of any era. There have been numerous attempts to copy the show's lush design, but none has managed to top it.

Between them, Stilgoe and Lloyd Webber came up with a framework for some of the most famous set pieces in the history of musicals, including a crashing chandelier, a boat ride through a subterranean lake filled with floating candles and glimpses of operas that are more elaborate than anything ever seen at Covent Garden or the Metropolitan Opera House.

Ironically, Lloyd Webber never intended any of it. He was drawn to Leroux's tale of a disfigured composer's obsession with a young soprano because of the complexity of the characters' relationships and because he thought the role of the girl would provide a career breakthrough for his wife at the time, Sarah Brightman. (It did. She and Michael Crawford (as the Phantom) became international stars.)

Granted, the surrounding story elements were Gothic, so much so that Lloyd Webber toyed with the idea of making Phantom into a spoof of the horror genre. At Brightman's urging, he reread Leroux's original novel and realized that its strength lay in its romanticism. He decided to treat the story seriously.

Alas, he could not win against himself. He was fatally addicted to melodic fireworks and, when Harold Prince signed on as director, any chance of Phantom remaining a simple love story was lost in the mammoth scenery shifts and soaring orchestral interludes.

It was Prince, along with his designers, who turned Phantom into a sumptuous visual feast. Like Lerner, the director almost didn't do the show. He had a string of failures in the 1980s and was looking for something different.

Lloyd Webber had offered him Cats, but Prince turned it down because he didn't want to do another of "those overproduced English spectacles." He agreed to do Phantom because he was attracted to the story's "essential humanity."

The show, it seemed, had its own agenda. In a 1996 interview, Prince said the Phantom production "constantly reinvented itself in terms of scale -- and, in spite of our efforts to keep it simple, each rebirth was more spectacular than the last."

The result may have been overproduced, but The Phantom of the Opera struck a chord with the public. It is still running in London and in New York, where it opened in 1988. There is no end in sight for the tours, including the one that stops at Gammage.

With worldwide ticket sales in excess of $2.8 billion, Phantom has made Lloyd Webber a very rich man. What makes him happier is that, to some degree, he has been vindicated. The crowds come to see the sights, but they leave the theater caught up in the glow of the love story.

In an interview in 1998, on the occasion of the musical's 10th anniversary on Broadway, Lloyd Webber said, "Love is a terrifying thing. It demands everything, it promises nothing. But to not take the risk?

"Some people think of the ending of The Phantom of the Opera as unhappy. I am not one of them. He risked all, and lost, but the Phantom loved! It is the most important thing one can do in life."

Which is bigger? The elephant in the first act of The Phantom of the Opera or the chandelier that comes crashing down a few scenes later?
"Oh, God," Gary Zabinsky shudders.

Esoteric trivia is the last thing on the production stage manager's mind, but he knows this much: The elephant is no Dumbo.

The chandelier, on the other hand, has delusions of gander.

Like an ungainly bird, it rises to the Gammage ceiling at the beginning of the show, only to come plunging down amid the screams of actors (fake) and the first 15 rows of theatergoers (very real).

During intermission, while the patrons are standing in line for one of the bathrooms, it goes up again.

By rights, the thing should be dented. Its pendants should be slivers. Instead, it looks as if it has been brought in from the Paris Opera House seconds before curtain.

"That doesn't just happen," Zabinsky says. "There are hours of preparation every day. Once a week, we schedule an eight-hour maintenance session. All the crews are in, painting, repairing and fixing, recognizing trouble spots and figuring how to get around them."

Given that Phantom travels with a union crew, that can't come cheaply.

"Cameron Mackintosh (the producer) insists that every performance should look as good as it did on opening night in London or New York," Zabinsky says. "And he is the only producer I know who spends the kind of money it takes for us to keep it that way."

It has been seven years since this tour hit the road with its 22 semitrailers jammed with costumes, props and scenery. During that time, the chandelier has been (mostly) on its best behavior.

"We are constantly checking it for problems," Zabinsky says. "Every move it makes is monitored by our automation computers. If the numbers for the rate of fall aren't reading the way they should or if there's an odd noise, the crew is on it. I mean right on it!"

The computers not only monitor the chandelier's speed but also its stopping points and the automatic braking system that comes into play if anything happens.

"If all of that were manually operated, the chances of something going wrong would increase dramatically," Zabinsky says.

The chandelier's ups and downs are just one of the musical's complex scenic requirements.

"The opening of the draperies, the descent into the Phantom's lair, the candle sequence (as the Phantom's boat glides across a subterranean lake) . . . they could all be done by hand, but it would be a nerve-racking job for the crew," Zabinsky says.

"One mistake in timing and someone could get seriously run over."

None of this takes into account the "travelator," Zabinsky's term for the show's most elaborate piece of scenery. It is a pair of towers that rise and descend (elevate) while moving back and forth (travel).

Making things even more complicated, there is a bridge that spans the gap between the towers, sometimes connecting with them, sometimes not.

"Given the amount of traffic on that thing -- actors climbing up one of the towers or running across the bridge -- the potential for trouble is enormous," Zabinsky says.

There have been only a few mishaps, none of them life-threatening. Usually a problem means the towers simply stop and loom.

"It makes it very difficult for the performers," Zabinsky admits. "It's sort of like parking a Buick in your living room and then pretending it's not there."