Catching Up With the ‘Phantom’: A Night of Opera

One of the pitfalls of the critic’s life, I discovered early, was having to review a premiere or an opening night.

The film critics have it easier. They attend screenings and the review is usually tucked safely away before the searchlights rake the Hollywood skies and the limos roll up.

For the drama critic, loping off to a theatrical opening night, the tumults and the shoutings, the elegance and the noisy enthusiasms are, if nothing else, distracting. The level of hypocritical acclaim can be very high and has to be weighed since it cannot ignored.

Drama critics increasingly prefer late previews, both for deadline reasons and to avoid the glitter and the inquisitive, accusing stares of the first night. (“Terrific, isn’t it, Chuck?” stated with something like menace.)

For reasons not wholly unrelated to the above, I didn’t see “The Phantom of the Opera” until last week. I went, as I had gone to “My Fair Lady” years ago, in the uneasy conviction that it could not possibly be as spectacular as all the huzzahs, rapt murmurs and advance sales made it out to be.

But Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews and the Loewe-Lerner score proved to be even more wondrous than I could have hoped. And “Phantom” as a piece of theatrical showmanship is in a class by itself.

I think that that’s the key. Andrew Lloyd Webber, director Harold Prince and their accomplices have created a theatrical class of their own, an extravagant popular musical theater that is both an extension of but not quite like anything we’ve seen before.

It is opera for those who hate opera and wouldn’t be caught dead at “Rigoletto.” Spectacle is all. “Phantom” is less a book show than a blueprint show. The impact of the presentation derives in considerable part from the feeling that we’re seeing--live--the kind of gee-whiz effects only the movies are supposed to do.

That damned chandelier does sit above your head with a Damocletian foreboding and then does indeed fall, even if with a relieving grace. Those myriad tapers do rise from the porous stage; the Phantom climbs around the proscenium and bodies disappear on cue. It is majestic razzle-dazzle.

Not a fragment of melody nor a piece of lyric stays with me. Yet there were gasps of excitement and thunderous applause when Michael Crawford and Dale Kristien reached the rousing climax of their duet, “Music of the Night,” in Act I. Lloyd Webber obviously has access to the emotional responses of a wide audience, even if his skill has more to do with his handling of dynamics than with the creation of fresh and invigorating song.

“What it’s all about, then?” a friend asked at intermission. Well, it’s about spectacle, and yet, in “Phantom” Webber has found some particularly congenial material--a love story operatic in every sense, with a central figure who is hateful, pitiable and fascinating, a beast with nastier claws than most, and a beauty who has more substance and a harder choice to make than the fairy-tale norm.

It is not exactly a universal human dilemma to be fretted about on the way home. The innocent man hounded by a malevolent cop, and the plight of the dispossessed, as in “Les Miserables,” catches universality better, although the story’s emotional force was dissipated by the continuous legerdemain of the production, splendidly distracting, and by the banality of the music.

Intention, form and content are about as well met in “The Phantom of the Opera” as they can be. It is a crowd pleaser, and our subsequent-night audience leaped to its feet, cheering, even as at a premiere.