STAGE : ‘Phantom’ Jobs Have Meant Plenty of Work for Actor

David Cleveland has been doing a bit of phantom-hopping during he past few years.

His first New York acting job, in early 1989, was understudy for the role of Raoul in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “The Phantom of the Opera” on Broadway. Then, early this year, he was simultaneously offered the part of the phantom in Ken Hill’s version of “The Phantom of the Opera” and in an independent version in Florida of the phantom story--neither Hill’s nor Lloyd Webber’s. Cleveland took the Hill job.

The 36-year-old actor will play the phantom in Hill’s “The Phantom of the Opera” coming to Copley Symphony Hall Wednesday through New Year’s Eve.

So is all this phantom-casting just coincidence?

“I think it’s going to be one of those shows that I’m right for,” Cleveland said in a telephone interview from his home in West Orange, N.J. “I guess I have a quality that lends myself to that era. I guess I have a quality that makes people want to cover my face with a mask.”

The mask is something he intends to hold onto tightly in San Diego. His last one (valued at about $2,000) was stolen--in Dayton, Ohio--possibly, he speculates, by some phantom-in-training.

But there are also specific qualities required to play the phantom that Cleveland hopes will help him if he ever gets offered the part in the Lloyd Webber version. He said he intends to stay in the Hill version for “as long as they want me.”

But would he take the part in the Lloyd Webber version if asked?

“God yes, of course. You’d be an idiot not to. It’s a perfect role for me.”

Actually there is more to the job than looking good in a mask, he admits.

“Technically, there is something you have to do as the phantom in both shows, which is sing a high B-flat. And there are few high tenor leading men. When you’re looking for a tenor who is tall who can act, you start eliminating people.”

Also, Cleveland likes the phantom. Others may see him as a warped, twisted spirit who tries to lure the ingenue singer, Christine, away from her true love, Raoul. Cleveland usually just sees him as a guy who tries too hard.

“He’s extremely complex. I’ve made jokes that he’s everything from a completely obsessed, sexually repressed human being to a Joel Steinberg. He will do anything to get Christine to be his love. But, if the phantom would just cool his jets a little bit, Christine might get a look at him.

“And yet it is the dilemma of the woman: do I want this showpiece (Raoul) to show to my girlfriends or this disfigured father figure?”

Cleveland even believes that the audience is rooting for the phantom--even though the legend dictates that she will never ultimately fall into his hands.

“Everyone wants to see Christine choose the phantom, but then you get the outcome of her doing laundry in the lair. It’s a romantic fantasy, not reality.”

When the San Diego City Council held up $500,000 worth of promised money for the Commission for Arts and Culture’s special projects program, it caused a half-million-dollar headache for the 69 local arts organizations that had been counting on the funds.

Nearly a dozen theaters including the La Jolla Playhouse, the San Diego Repertory Theatre, Starlight Musical Theatre, the Bowery Theatre and Teatro Mascara Magica are anxiously awaiting the outcome of the debate between the commission and the City Council on how to spend the transient occupancy tax (TOT) monies that had been set aside for arts projects.

The issue is whether attracting tourism should be a major component of each project or whether the projects should be designed to “pursue the vision of San Diego as a cultural destination by fostering the diversification of San Diego’s arts and culture base,” as was stated in a city manager’s report recommending approval of the Special Projects Program.

Most organizations, relying on the official description and guidelines for the funding program, say they applied with the latter understanding and are now finding themselves in limbo because they are now being held accountable by what they feel are newly articulated demands to prove themselves to be tourist magnets.

And yet, even if bringing in bodies to fill hotels is determined to be the be-all and end-all of arts funding in San Diego--certainly a questionable focus for those who care about the quality of culture here for the people who live in San Diego year-round--one still has to wonder just what the objection to many of these projects can be.

Wouldn’t brand new musicals for Starlight Musical Theatre and the San Diego Repertory Theatre bring in some tourists? Starlight had been earmarked for $15,800 for the commissioning of “For My Country,” a tribute to the USO during World War II. The San Diego Rep had been approved for for $15,360 for an African-American arts celebration augmenting its premiere of “The Life and Life of Bumpy Johnson.”

The Starlight show is timed to the 50th anniversary of the USO, and Starlight reports that interest has already been expressed by potential visitors, associated with the USO over the years, traveling in to see it. The San Diego Rep production, already in danger because of under-funding, promises to be an important new work featuring a script by African-American poet Amiri Baraka and music by jazz Hall of Famer Max Roach.

One of the first theater events to be affected will be the Plays by Young Writers, a Playwrights Project program to be produced by the Playwrights Project in cooperation with the Bowery Theatre at the Kingston Playhouse. This excellent San Diego-based statewide program had been slated to receive $11,800. It features the work of five writers under 19 from all over the state of California in their first professional production.

Both the Bowery and the Playwrights Project have promised, independently, to continue with the project which opens Jan. 16, but there is no doubt that pulling out the money, especially at this late date, puts a significant financial squeeze on both organizations.

“We will go ahead no matter what,” said Deborah Salzer, founder and director of the Playwrights Project. “But for a newly independent group like the Playwrights Project to have the likelihood of this kind of support offered and then withdrawn five weeks before the event is terribly disappointing, particularly when organizations follow all the guidelines made available to them throughout the application process.”

PROGRAM NOTES: After a year’s search, Starlight Musical Theatre, has found and named a replacement for former executive director Harris Goldman. Filling the position beginning Jan. 7, will be C. E. (Bud) Franks, former executive producer-general manager of Ft. Worth’s Casa Manana Theatre, the largest professional producing musical theater in Texas, with a budget of $3.5 million, for the last 16 years . . . .

Les Waters, who directed the world premiere of Keith Reddin’s “Life During Wartime” at the La Jolla Playhouse this summer, will direct the play again at the Manhattan Theatre Club in late February 1991 in New York. The show has already been produced at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre and at the CAC Performing Arts Center in New Orleans.