Word: phantomed
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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...
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...
...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...
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...
...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...