Yeston Has His Night at the ‘Opera’ : Theater: The composer’s version of ‘Phantom’--delayed when Webber’s musical made it to the stage first--opens tonight in Fullerton.

If you ask Broadway composer-songwriter Maury Yeston which comes first, the music or the lyrics, he wants to know if you’ve heard the one about Cole Porter.

“Someone asked him the same question,” Yeston says. “And do you know what he said? ‘The check.’ ”

Yeston subscribes to Porter’s theory of music composition.

“A commission has a way of focusing you,” he says.

But Broadway commissions are few and far between. Even when you get them, you can’t always count on them.

In the early ‘80s, for example, he and playwright Arthur Kopit were asked to write a musical based on Gaston Leroux’s 1911 Gothic novel, “The Phantom of the Opera.” They had just collaborated on “Nine,” a Broadway smash that won the Tony Award for best musical of 1982, as well as Tonys for Yeston’s score (music and lyrics) and Tommy Tune’s direction.

But when Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “The Phantom of the Opera” opened first--in London in 1986--their financial backing dried up.

Although Yeston and Kopit had finished writing their show a year earlier, it wasn’t until 1991 that the Yeston-Kopit “Phantom” received its first professional staging at Houston’s Theatre Under the Stars.

Kopit says by phone from his home in Connecticut, “We had backers’ auditions and were ready to go into rehearsal. If it had been somebody else who had done a hit musical in London, I think we might have had ours on too. But Webber was a phenomenon. He’s in a category of his own. Nobody wanted to go up against him.”

The Yeston-Kopit “Phantom” has become a successful cottage industry, with roughly 150 productions around the country since the Houston premiere. But it is not bound for Broadway, Kopit says. (Fullerton Civic Light Opera mounts the show’s Orange County premiere tonight for a two-week run at Plummer Auditorium.)

“So,” Yeston says, “you need a day gig.”

*

The 49-year-old Jersey City native earned his master’s degree at Cambridge University and his doctorate in music at Yale, published several scholarly books, wrote symphonic works--including a piece for cello and orchestra, premiered and recorded by Yo Yo Ma--taught at Yale for nearly a decade and ran its undergraduate program in music studies, and now tutors the budding geniuses at the prestigious BMI Musical Theatre Workshop in New York.

Speaking by phone from Manhattan, where he lives across the street from Carnegie Hall, Yeston certainly sounds like a pistol from Tin Pan Alley rather than an Ivy League professor from the Groves of Academe.

If you ask him to describe the difference between Webber’s score and his, he says he has never heard Webber’s because he didn’t want to be accused of copying. But he has heard other Webber shows, and he doesn’t mind drawing a distinction between their styles.

“I write straight musical theater,” he says. “Webber writes opera.”

Does that mean the Kopit-Yeston “Phantom” is a modern musical update? Not a chance.

“If the Phantom were alive today, he’d have plastic surgery,” Yeston explains.

A contemporary Phantom not only wouldn’t need to hide his deformity behind a mask, he wouldn’t need to hide “down below” at the Paris Opera house fearful of discovery. He wouldn’t be driven to kill. It wouldn’t occur to him that he might be shipped to a circus and put on display like a sideshow freak.

Most of all, there would be no larger-than-life story of an ugly recluse who has a profound love of beauty and a passion for music.

Instead of updating the original, Yeston looked to the past. He infused his score with an operetta style reminiscent of Sigmund Romberg’s. “If I did too (modern) a musical,” he says, “I don’t think people would have bought the character. The exaggerated, superheated rhetoric of turn-of-the-century operetta is the Phantom’s language.”

Yeston trained for the stage in New York with the grand old man of American musical theater, Lehman Engel. Fellow students were Edward Kleban (lyricist for “A Chorus Line”), Carol Hall (composer-lyricist for “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas”), Howard Ashman (librettist-lyricist for “Little Shop of Horrors” and, with Tim Rice, lyricist for “Beauty and the Beast”) and Alan Menken (composer for “Little Shop” and “Beauty and the Beast”).

At Cambridge, Yeston also was in the legendary Footlights theatrical club, where he learned “the art of the skit and the British music hall” with future directors Trevor Nunn (“Sunset Boulevard,” “Cats,” “Les Miserables,” among others) and Nicholas Hytner (the recent “Carousel” revival).

But it was Alan Jay Lerner who gave him the best advice. “He taught me that you have to fall in love with your characters,” Yeston says, “or you don’t have a show.”

Meanwhile, the Yeston-Kopit team has taken a break and each has gone to work on separate musicals.

Kopit is writing the libretto for an adaptation of “Sweet Smell of Success,” to be produced by Garth Drabinsky, whose “Showboat” revival currently is the biggest hit on Broadway.

Yeston has already written the music and lyrics for “Titanic” in tandem with writer Peter Stone, who won Tonys for the librettos of “1776” and “Woman of the Year.”

“We’re calling it ‘Titanic: A Musical Disaster,’ ” Yeston quips. “Did I say that? Just kidding.”

* Fullerton Civic Light Opera presents the Maury Yeston-Arthur Kopit “Phantom” at Plummer Auditorium, 201 E. Chapman Ave., Fullerton. Thursday through Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 p.m.; Feb. 26, 7 p.m. Through March 5. $13-$27. (714) 879-1732.