Phantom to Monster

The touring production of Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” that arrives Tuesday in Costa Mesa matches a new face with a no face.

Susan Owen is the new face playing Belle, the beauty who transforms the beast. At 28, she is carrying a major national production for the first time--although she received extensive seasoning as understudy for Christine, the female lead in “The Phantom of the Opera,” on Broadway and on tour, where she regularly performed two shows weekly.

Grant Norman plays the beast. Buttonholed over the telephone last week in San Francisco, where “Beauty” was finishing a five-week run before starting a two-week stand at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, he was confronted by a question that few experienced leading men have had to answer: “Does anybody know what you really look like?”

Norman, 38, laughed and said, “Well, lately, no. Not since 1994.”

That is when he became the Phantom of the Opera in one of the Andrew Lloyd Webber franchise’s touring companies. Norman spent about two years playing the maniacal masked musician all over the United States and in London. Now he resurfaces as this furry beast in a face-obscuring get-up that takes an hour to put on. (Norman says he passes his time in makeup chatting and “listening to an incredibly wide range of music, anything from acid rock to bluegrass to country to heavy metal to George Winston, and certainly classical and opera.”)

Like the character he played in “Phantom,” Norman abruptly disappeared when the curtain fell. Feeling burned out, he took two years off--twice what he originally planned--to regain some sense of normalcy and a refreshed perspective on his career.

When he returned in 1998, it wasn’t for another star turn but as a member of the chorus in the Broadway “Beauty and the Beast.” Norman says that, unlikely as it may sound, he planned it that way; a low-pressure reentry after the long hiatus was essential to rekindle his zest for performing in musicals.

Norman and Owen are Midwesterners--she from East Lansing, Mich., he from Wisconsin via the Minneapolis area.

Owen grew up in the theater; her mother was a drama teacher and directed shows at community colleges. Owen studied theater at the University of Michigan, landed in New York City in 1993 and found steady work. She won the understudy job in “Phantom” in 1996.

Norman’s climb was more gradual. He was a dancer early in his career, spending four years with a company in Fargo, N.D. He branched into musical theater in Minnesota, mainly as a dancer. But he always had sung, and it eventually dawned on him that singer-actors get more leading roles in musicals than dancers. He arrived in New York City in 1991.

Playing the Phantom has given others--notably Michael Crawford and Davis Gaines--entree into the star-making machinery. But Norman says he just wanted to concentrate on playing the part instead of using it as a springboard. When some Phantom lovers approached him about starting a Grant Norman fan club, he demurred.

“I just wanted to do my work,” he says, and at the time he didn’t feel he could devote the time to public relations that a fan club would entail. Norman acknowledges that playing the fame card more avidly would have helped him toward at least one career goal, becoming a solo recording artist. But he says he has no regrets, the post-Phantom burnout taught him the need to balance career with family. He recently celebrated his first wedding anniversary.

Owen jokes that maybe she and Norman are on the same karmic path. She has gone from playing one ingenue in “Phantom” to another in “Beauty,” while he has gone from monster to monster in the same two shows.

But the differences in the two musicals are much greater than the parallels, they agree.

For Norman, the main consistencies between the phantom and the beast are that both are feared and hated outcasts because of the way they look and that both find redemption--a much stronger redemption for the beast--by setting free a beloved captive.

But Norman thinks that the beast, antisocial and ill-tempered and selfish as he is, at least has the company of his servants, the fanciful household objects that come to life as characters in the show. That gives him the basis for becoming a likable and even a humorous figure. The Phantom, spurned and masked since infancy because of a congenital deformity, is strictly a dark, tragic figure.

Aside from that hour in makeup, the beast is an easier role for Norman than the phantom. “The beast has one big song at the end of the first act. Other than that you have to know how to shout and yell and growl without losing your voice.”

Owen sees Belle as a much more assertive ingenue than Christine in “Phantom,” who spends most of that show being dominated by men--her musical Svengali the phantom and her lover Raoul.

“With Christine a lot of things happen around her, and it takes a long time for her to stand up for herself and say, ‘This is what I’m doing,’ ” Owen said during a telephone interview from San Francisco.

“But Belle has a mind of her own from the beginning. The traditional musical theater ingenues from the ‘50s and early ‘60s are very pushover and don’t have a mind of their own. Belle really sticks up for herself. There’s a lot more to her.”

That said, Owen, whose 5-foot, 2-inch stature makes her easy to typecast in coming-of-age roles, says she wouldn’t mind graduating to something more mature.

“The more you play the good girl and the one who’s kind of nice, it does make you want to exercise the other muscles and say, ‘I’m singing the big, sexy number.’ ”

For now, Owen is happy to be the flesh-and-blood embodiment of a heroine most “Beauty” fans first met as an animated character in the Disney movie.

“It’s a great first theatrical experience for kids. It doesn’t talk down to them,” Owen said. “In the parts that are more tender and quiet, the great thing is you sense the quiet in the house--and those are [often] little kids who are wrapped up in it. It’s really wonderful to know that you’re affecting them.”

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Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Dr., Costa Mesa. Opens Tuesday. Schedule: Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Through July 23. $21-$61. (714) 556-2727 (box office) or (714) 740-7878 (Ticketmaster).