STAGE REVIEW : Another ‘Phantom’ in the Southland

There’s a new “Phantom of the Opera” and you have to ask yourself why and why not at the same time.

This “Phantom” has music and lyrics by Maury Yeston and a book by Arthur Kopit that goes well beyond the 1911 novel by Gaston Leroux, source of all phantom of the opera lore (films, plays and musicals). It centers on the miniseries Kopit wrote for NBC last year.

Or the other way around: The miniseries was based on Kopit’s libretto for this “Phantom,” written shortly after he and Yeston had collaborated on their 1982 musical, “Nine.” But “Phantom” the musical remained unstaged until January of this year, when Houston’s Theatre Under the Stars, co-presenter of this California premiere, spent $1.5 million to produce it.

Much of it shows, particularly in designer David Mitchell’s sets (except for a very slow-moving, one-dimensional chandelier), Jonathan Tunick’s orchestrations, Clarke W. Thornton’s lighting and Abe Jacob’s sound. Less so in Charles Abbott’s predictable and sometimes clunky direction.

Why, you might ask, run with yet another musical based on the mythic Leroux character, when Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “The Phantom of the Opera” is such a phenomenal success? The short why-not answer is that Kopit, who wrote his “Phantom” before Lloyd Webber, has different things to say about the character. But lousy timing aside, Kopit and Yeston have also opted for an operetta style that feels impossibly quaint and whose high-flying romanticism too often veers to the maudlin.

In this “Phantom,” pretty Christine Daae is a street singer and flower girl a la Eliza Doolittle, who is spotted by Count Philippe de Chandon (as in the champagne). Being a bounder with a good ear for voices and an even better eye for the ladies, he sends Christine to the Paris Opera with a note of recommendation for its director, Gerard Carriere.

But there has been a change at the opera. Carriere (Jack Dabdoub) is out while Alain Cholet (Stan Rubin) and his untalented diva wife, Carlotta (Patti Allison), are in. Carlotta relegates wide-eyed Christine (a beautiful performance by Glory Crampton) to helping out with the costumes. But she’s overheard singing by the phantom of this opera, Erik, bedecked in an endless succession of spectacular masks, who offers to give her lessons if he can remain anonymous.

Erik (eloquently played by Richard White) not only teaches her, but falls in love and masterminds an audition at a bistro (shades of Harmonia Gardens) that lands Christine a contract with the opera.

What transpires from this point to the end of the show is a frustrating mix of comedy, spectacle, sentimentality, revelation and suspense, with great highs and great lows. In some of Yeston’s best songs (“My Mother Bore Me,” “My True Love” and especially the father-son duet “You Are My Own”), it achieves something approaching the enlightened compassion at the death of Jean Valjean in “Les Miserables.”

There is a lot more understanding of Erik than of Lloyd Webber’s more furtive phantom, but also less mystique. Kopit puts in details Leroux never imagined. The humanity makes for a different kind of show that hasn’t found a stylistic identity. The operetta thrust makes it an old-fashioned crowd-pleaser, but traps Yeston’s music between the old and the new.

There are touching, even deeply emotional scenes, but no fresh air. The show is a little too pretty to live up to its better instincts. The opening number on the streets of Paris is irredeemably trite and some father-son dialogue at the end sheer soap opera. Yet in between are nice comic touches and delicate ballads (Erik’s little-boy-lost “Where in the World” or “Home,” sung separately by Christine and Erik, or their romantic “You Are Music” duet, though the candelabrum on the piano is too Liberace).

The problem: Finding the will to work out the difficulties. The Kopit-Yeston version may have been written before Lloyd Webber’s, but it was not produced first, and it may be stuck with playing an impossible game of catch-up.

‘Phantom’

Glory Crampton: Christine Daae/Belladova

Brian Sutherland: Count Philippe de Chandon

Stan Rubin: Alain Cholet

Jack Dabdoub: Gerard Carriere.

Jeff Caldwell: Young Carriere

Patti Allison: La Carlotta

Richard White: The Phantom

A presentation of the San Bernardino Civic Light Opera in association with Houston’s Theatre Under the Stars. Producer C. Dale Jenks. Book Arthur Kopit. Music and lyrics Maury Yeston. Director Charles Abbott. Musical director/conductor Kay Cameron. Orchestrations Jonathan Tunick. Scenery David Mitchell. Costumes Eduardo Sicangco. Additional costumes Malabar Ltd. Wigs Elsen Associates. Lights Clarke W. Thornton. Sound Abe Jacob. Production stage consultant Dennis Grimaldi. Production stage managers Rodger Allan Raby, Marc Rush. Stage managers Les Cockayne, Judith A. Dixon.