The Many Possibilities of Sarah Brightman

Sarah Brightman--in Hollywood?

What is the original Christine of “Phantom of the Opera,” the wife of its composer, Andrew Lloyd Webber, doing here?

Visiting friends? Visiting “Phantom”? Taking meetings?

None of the above. Or so she insisted, in the penumbra of her swanky West Hollywood hotel suite. It’s not even likely that she’ll get near “The Phantom.”

“I’ve seen it so many times and worked with it for so long. . . ,” she said, her clear, high-pitched British voice trailing.

What Brightman is doing, she reports in the same crystalline tones, is cutting an album for Polygram, keeping a low profile and, while she is at it, doing a bit of promotion for another album, just completed, called “The Songs That Got Away.”

Brightman was on “The Tonight Show” last week, in a black gown that exposed one dainty shoulder, and wearing a “Christine” wig of waist-length red hair. She sang a couple of numbers and talked the album up--not easy, since it tends to fall through stylistic cracks. Its ballads, sung in her high operatic soprano, are tunes either cut from shows before they opened or culled from shows that had brief runs.

Its inspiration was a concert Brightman gave that included “Half a Moment” from Lloyd Webber’s only flop, “Jeeves.”

“People kept saying, ‘We love it. Where is it from? Tell us about it.’ So I thought there had to be other songs composers have written that must have been lost or cut.” She did some research and a year later “ended up with 14 tracks.”

The album she’s cutting now is “more contemporary, more folky,” she said. “I suppose you’d call it folk rock.” One more song to do and she heads back to Europe.

In the private jet?

The very idea seemed to vastly amuse her. She explained, patiently, that it’s mostly “Andrew” who uses the jet, “hopping around” from meeting to meeting. “I use it only when he’s using it and we have to get somewhere together.”

The lack of pretentiousness, the regard for a nosy stranger, is refreshing. Brightman, after all, has had enough unpleasant run-ins with the British tabloids (alleging everything from marital difficulties to affairs) to make her wary of reporters bearing tape recorders.

“The flak has died down a lot,” she said in answer to questions about the scandalmongering that followed her 1984 marriage to Lloyd Webber (he divorced his first wife, the mother of his two children, to marry Brightman). “It hurts,” she said, “but the British press can be like that and I’m not the only victim of it. If you’re a successful artist in England, you’re often affected.”

How “successful” Brightman may be is something she’s not prepared to call. Beyond the glamour of the marriage to Lloyd Webber and the acclaim of “Phantom,” who is Sarah Brightman?

Long-legged and slender to the point of thinness, she showed up for the interview looking like any American you might meet in the supermarket: faded denims, white studded cowboy boots and belt, turquoise-and-silver Indian jewelry and a white T-shirt. The mouth is sensual, the hair bobbed, the face round with eyes of light blue draped in heavy lids.

“I’m at a bit of a crossroads at the moment, I have to admit,” she said, analyzing the question. “I find myself a difficult person to categorize. I can’t say I’m ‘just a dancer’ or ‘just an actress’ or ‘just in musical theater.’ At some point I may have to make a decision. Someone like Kiri Te Kanawa started off as an opera singer and came to the show tunes. I started with rock and pop, then started training to do opera.

“In a way, I’m glad I did it that way, because the natural rhythms in your body, when you’re training operatically, are trained out of you. These have not been knocked out of me. If I feel like singing ‘Mr. Monotony’ (one of the tracks on her “Songs That Got Away Album”) or a pop song, I can go back and do it. So for me it was the right way.”

Brightman, 29, has sung all her life. Her mother claims that she sang nursery rhymes before she could speak, but “my mother had been a dancer,” she said, “and wanted me to be a classical ballet dancer, which is how I trained.” As a young girl, however, she was buying Joan Sutherland and Maria Callas records. “Their voices fascinated me,” she said. “I went toward that type of music instinctively.”

The daughter of a London developer and the eldest of six children, she attended performing arts schools in London, with emphasis on the ballet. Realizing that “technically, I was only going to make corps de ballet,” she opted for jazz dancing, leaving school at 16 and going into those “two very well-known commercial dance groups” on British television, Pan’s People and Hot Gossip.

Hot Gossip, especially, “although it was physically a rock dance group,” Brightman said, “required dancers of ballet training to be able to do the kind of choreography that (choreographer) Irene Phillips did. She changed everything. A lot of what you see nowadays in videos is actually the result of her work.”

Brightman went from that to cutting pop and disco records, scoring a few hits, but at 19 stopped everything. “I wasn’t happy with what I was doing,” she said. An open audition came up for Lloyd Webber’s “Cats” and she got the job: “It was the beginning of a new career for me.”

And a new life. Brightman, who had been married at 18, was separated from her husband, an executive with Britain’s Virgin Records, and had begun her operatic training. While she had been hired for “Cats” as a dancer, Lloyd Webber and director Trevor Nunn, she found out, had noticed the voice.

“I knew I had a gift, which was this,” she said, pointing to her throat. “I wasn’t using it properly. It needed fulfilling more. I needed fulfilling more. I wanted to train, to use up my imagination. The pop dance world was not enough.”

It was fully a year and a half before she and Lloyd Webber became romantically involved--after she had left “Cats,” done “Pirates of Penzance” in London and moved on to a Charles Strouse opera for children called “Nightingale.”

Brightman loves cats and has no particular desire to have children (“maybe because I’ve always had them around me”). In Hollywood, she claims to stick close to her hotel. “I like my own company,” she said, but she did go see Dolly Parton at the Universal Amphitheatre and added, chuckling, “I quite want to see the movie of ‘Batman.’ ”

Leisure is not really a part of her lexicon. “If I’m not on holiday with my family or Andrew’s family,” she said, “I’m working, learning a song or doing a lesson or recording. Doing something. Even if I don’t ‘get there’ in the end, I want to feel that I’ve used up my gifts as much as possible. So that when I get to a certain age I can say, ‘Well, I’ve done as much as I can, pushed and worked as hard as I can, so I’ll sort of feel satisfied.”

Brightman may be doing a concert tour of a Lloyd Webber anthology (“The Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber”) that started in Vancouver in May and might swing through the Southland. Another project is a film for London Weekend Television (with Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group) on the life of British musical comedy and revue star Jessie Matthews.

Musical films attract her (she’s a cinch to play Christine in any movie version of “Phantom”) and a future as a comedienne should not be ruled out. That’s the undiscovered Brightman.

You can hear that potential in the way her laughter builds from a sexy giggle to a small explosion. You see it in the round face, the astonished eyes, large teeth and lips that seem to stretch to meet each other halfway.

These elements all suggest she could be very funny. Brightman reacts with surprise to this idea, but acknowledges that she has been told as much, noting that her strongest audience response came from the comic passages in Lloyd Webber’s “Song and Dance.”

Whether marriage to Lloyd Webber has helped or hindered, Brightman feels only time will tell.

“I was so young, I couldn’t have done too much work before I met Andrew anyway,” she said. “If you said to me, what do you really love inside, I’d say to you I like to sing ‘Exsultate jubilate’ of Mozart or Sophie from ‘Der Rosenkavalier.’ They are my true loves, but whether in the end that is what my voice is right for doing, I’m not sure. Maybe musical theater and being Sarah Brightman, what I’m doing now, is the right direction.”