McPhantom : A Cypress Man Cooks Up a Fast-Food Version of the Opera That Packs In 15 Minutes of Songs and Scary Special Effects

One night four years ago, Peter Parker popped down $200 a ticket to take his wife to the second- night Los Angeles performance of “The Phantom of the Opera.” He immediately fell in love with the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, and before you could say “Peter Parker produced a peculiar play,” he had set to work creating his own vision of it.

You might call it the Fast-Food Phantom: Parker took the hefty production and pared it down to a compact 15 minutes of songs and special effects. His “Phantom,” which he playfully describes as being “adapted for the garage,” will have its fourth run on Halloween, on Sunday. It is indeed staged in his garage, at 5803 Holmby Court in Cypress (off Valley View Street, south of Ball Road), repeating every 25 minutes from dark until the crowds are gone.

By day, Parker, 46, is a real estate appraiser, though his beard and curly locks suggest his onetime profession as a lounge entertainer. With his friend and business partner, Gary Rand, who plays the Phantom in this year’s production, Parker sat in his office recently and screened a video of last year’s show.

The stage is two slots of his three-car garage, with the third space housing part of the crew and equipment needed to make it happen, for this is no half-baked affair. Parker estimates that a conservatively spent $6,000 to $8,000 and hundreds of volunteer hours have gone into the production. It boasts a talking severed head, trick mirrors, digitally programmed lighting, stage fog and a slew of special effects.

Last year about 3,000 children and adults saw the show, seated on the Parkers’ carpeted driveway and crowding the planters and street of their cul-de-sac. The police blocked the street to traffic to make it safer, though a hook and ladder and ambulance were let in to aid a woman who fainted (Not the play’s fault! Parker insists). After they’d helped, the firefighters stayed and watched “The Phantom,” too.

There are a couple of mushy musical numbers, which Parker and Rand claim, to their surprise, the kids enjoy, along with scary payoffs like a flying decomposed corpse and the moment when the Phantom is unmasked. At which point, the kids recoil, screaming, “Aieeee! Eeeek! A real estate appraiser!”

Actually, wearing three hours’ worth of makeup, Rand and his predecessor are disguised beyond recognition, looking like a cross between burnt macaroni and the late Sen. Everett M. Dirksen. It’s enough to be spooky, in a Spielberg-lite sort of way, without causing nightmares.

Parker explained, “My first instinct, as I think anybody’s would be, was to come up with something that just scares the living crap out of these kids. But the more I thought about it, I thought if we really did it right, it could be scary enough, but also culturally rewarding a little bit, instead of somebody just walking out with some guts in their hands going ‘Wuuuuugh!’ This is different, a little more artsy. And it amazes me how well it holds their interest when there’s just dancing and singing going on. Some of these kids walk away humming the songs.”

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Parker is a Detroit native who moved to California in his teens, just in time to play in some south Bay surf bands. During the psychedelic era, he played keyboards in Sunset Strip bands with names like the Togas and Opus 1, and by the ‘70s was earning a living as a studio and lounge musician and jingle writer (his most famous client was Frederick’s of Hollywood). He quit music for real estate after marrying, because he and his wife, Penny, felt it would make for a more wholesome family if he weren’t out working all night. They now have three children.

He’d always loved Halloween and six years ago started to make a production out of it. Before that, when he and a friend had taken their kids out trick-or-treating, the friend always dressed as Dracula. Then, Parker figured it would be less work for them if they just stayed at home, with the friend in a coffin handing out candy to kids.

They had done that for two years when Parker saw “The Phantom” and really got the show biz bug again.

“I sat there just enthralled and thought, ‘This is what I have to do for Halloween!’ ”

He and a friend spent a long evening in a coffee shop brainstorming and cutting the musical down to some bare essentials. He then roped in some friends and business associates and got to work building props and blocking the production. Rand started out working lights for the show.

Rand recalled his impressions of that first time: “The thing that really impressed me was, here was this stupid production in this stupid little garage in this one-horse town of Cypress, and it still had to be done right , you had to hit your cues. Everyone’s working together and depends on each other do to it right. And I got caught up in it. It was really thrilling, a very exciting night for me, even though I was backstage, couldn’t even see the show going on and was only doing one task.

“I loved it. Everyone who has done this show has come back to do it again in some capacity, and I think that’s one reason why it keeps changing and growing. More people get involved, and Peter has to keep coming up with new ideas for them to be doing something.”

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Rand has some concerns about his first foray into the spotlight, in the title role no less. His biggest problem is that his voice projects. Usually that’s desired of a singer, but this production is lip-synced. Practicing along with the tape in his car, Rand finds that he can’t mouth the words without sound coming out, “and that’s not something you want to hear. I can’t sing at all,” he said.

Playing the Phantom isn’t as physically demanding as it once was. In earlier productions, a hydraulic lift was used to raise the Phantom in a coffin. The effect was always a little rickety and once chucked the previous Phantom, another appraiser named C.P. Morton, onto the ground during rehearsal.

The curtain in the first year was household drapes someone had donated.

“And then we started thinking, ‘How would it look if we got some professional curtains?’ ” Rand said. Like the nail soup of the fairy-tale, the once-modest enterprise kept adding a little of this and that until it became the hi-tech stew it is today.

New for this year are a clock facade mounted over the garage, on which a devil-tailed hand strikes the hour of 13, and new lighting effects. Those who can’t abide cheap severed heads will be pleased to know that Parker’s is state of the art.

He said that “it’s similar to the effect in the Disneyland haunted house, where you see the woman’s talking head in a bowl. You take a blank three-dimensional face, like a wig head, and project a film image on the head, and it looks like it’s floating there talking to you. It’s a wonderful effect and very difficult to achieve, I must tell you. It took a lot of experimentation using up a lot Super 8 sound film and help from people in the Cypress College photography department before we got it right.

“It’s all been redone for this year. The mortuary science department at Cypress is casting a 20-inch face for us out of an old death mask they had there. And we re-shot the projection on video, which will be much clearer and more lifelike.”

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It now takes 14 people to run the show, along with the four actors on stage and a volunteer who takes the participants’ kids out trick-or-treating. The local ERA Realtors office contributes operating funds and distributes flyers locally advertising the production. Parker also says the show wouldn’t be possible without his neighbors’ help and forbearance. One year he had to run a power line from a neighbor’s house after the arc lights he uses blew out the household fuses. Most years, the neighbors just have to put up with their cul-de-sac turning into a street carnival for the night.

Along with the candy wrappers littering the ground, in past years the audiences have also left canned goods, which Parker requests people bring to aid the HOPE (Helping Other People Everyday) program of the St. Irenaeus Catholic Church. The program’s Carl Re says that last year “Phantom” fans brought more than 10 cases of canned goods, which are distributed to homeless and needy families in the area. This year, he said, they have a particular need for baby foods, canned fruits and meats.

Parker said, “After the first year, when we saw how many people came with hardly any advertising, we thought, boy, it’s a shame to do this and not have anybody benefit from it. A friend of my wife suggested the HOPE program.”

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Parker has never sought permission for the rights to produce “The Phantom” in his garage, but he and Rand say they’re not worried about it.

Rand said, “With no one doing this for remuneration, or for any reason other than the kids and charity, anyone who would come down on something like that is really looking to get their . . . cut off.”

For Parker, there’s a reward money can’t buy.

“It’s evolved into a nightmare of work, a complicated maze of electronics and everything else. But it’s so rewarding to see it take place that night and to see all the little kids there with their mouths gaping open.

“I keep trying to imagine what I would think if I was an adult or child just walking down the street trick-or-treating and saw this taking place. And it reminds me of when I used to go to Briggs Stadium (now Tiger Stadium) ballpark as a kid in Detroit. It’s a dirty, old, rundown place, and underneath where they sell the hot dogs, it’s all dark and ugly.

“But the memory is still so strong to me, it gives me chills, that memory as a child of walking out of that terrible, dingy part underneath through the tunnel to where you suddenly see all the people in the stands and the beautiful grass and the colors and the sunshine. It was like walking into heaven. That’s what I hope this is like to those little kids walking at night, this glittering pearl, with color and splashy music and special effects, in the middle of no place for them.”

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