The Phantom in the Hall

The Phantom of the Opera has been making "The Music of the Night" for three decades in London and on Broadway -- not to mention across the United States and around the world.

Maybe it's gotten a little dusty after 30 years. So producer Cameron Mackintosh and director Laurence Connor have given it a new sparkle with the so-called Spectacular New Production, currently on tour, featuring new staging, scenic design and state-of-the-art special effects.

"Even if you know the original well," Mackintosh says, it's a revelation.

"I remember when Andrew [composer Andrew Lloyd Webber] came to see it when we started doing the tryouts in England, and he said 'I thought you were doing the current production.' I said, 'I am.' 'But this is as big as the original!' 'Well, what did you expect?'

"We designed it so we wouldn't have to actually make it smaller. It's just as spectacular in its own way, and in some bits even more spectacular than the original."

With a cast and orchestra of 52, it's one of the largest productions on tour in North America. And because Little Rock voters agreed to finance a $70 million rebuild of Little Rock's Robinson Center, expanding the size of the stage and the backstage facilities, it can finally come here.

The touring production has a two-week, 16-performance "sit-down" in Robinson Center's Performance Hall from Wednesday through March 19. Shows Wednesday night, Thursday afternoon and Thursday night are billed as previews.

"I'm totally amazed that there is a spot in the United States where Phantom has not already appeared," says Mackintosh. "The new cast we've got is absolutely fantastic. Derrick Davis is just terrific. Your audience won't be disappointed."

Davis, who plays the title character, initially had his doubts. "I was worried, because I'm an extreme fan of the brilliant original," he says. "I've seen it 14 times.

"The music and the dialogue are unaltered. But [director] Laurence Connor came in and had a new vision for

the production. He makes it a lot more historically accurate to the Paris Opera House, and takes it in a much more human direction. It's the same beautiful story, told in a new way."

That story: A masked figure lurking beneath the catacombs of the Paris Opera House, where he's engaged in a vengeful reign of terror, falls madly in love with innocent young soprano Christine Daae (Katie Travis), and devotes himself to making her a star by using all the devious methods he can contrive to nurture her talents -- and to remove her rivals. That includes dropping a chandelier upon the startled crowd below.

"And after 30 years, there are technological advancements that in the '80s weren't in existence -- the sound system is pushed forward, and the lighting design, and oh my God, the pyrotechnics! People will jump out of their seats," Davis says. "It's frightening. It frightens me still, sometimes, so many shows in."

ORIGINAL STILL A HIT

"The original is still a marvelous show in London and on Broadway," Mackintosh says, at Her Majesty's Theatre in the former and the Majestic Theatre on the latter, as well as in cities around the world.

"But this [new] version, one of the reasons this has been such a gigantic success is that it's both enchanting in terms of the original, and it has delivered every expectation to a new audience that has never seen it. It really is a complementary production to the original."

Mackintosh has been producing shows large and small for half a century, but it's the really big ones have made him a theatrical titan -- Miss Saigon and the three longest-running musicals of all time: Phantom, Les Miserables and Cats.

He has been continually guiding new lives for Les Mis, including licensing it to schools before it became available for regional and amateur theaters. (Little Rock's Parkview High did a production a couple of years before it hit the stage of the Arkansas Repertory Theatre, which has now done it twice.)

He says he and his collaborators haven't shrunk the size of the show, but they have shortened it a bit -- it used to run three hours and 20 minutes, and "Les Mis only runs two hours, 50 [minutes] now. Michel [composer Claude-Michel Schonberg] and I have managed to snip the odd thing out over the years. But it's still a great show, packing them in everywhere."

Les Mis, based on the sprawling, classic Victor Hugo novel, started out life as a French concept album. "That's how I first heard it," Mackintosh recalls. "Then [it] was staged in sort of the French equivalent of Madison Square Garden, a series of great tableaux; it was a great success. It only ran 16 weeks because that was all it was meant to run, and then nothing happened to it.

"Several years later somebody brought me the concept album; that's when I tracked down Alain [librettist Alain Boublil] and Michel and said, 'Look, I want to reinvent it as a big, proper musical for people who don't understand the story.' The French understood all the references, so they didn't need all the plotting that the show now has in it.

"Who would have believed it's 32 years since it first opened, and still going strong." And, following a more than two-year Broadway revival, "a new American tour I'm starting this autumn will follow on Phantom's heels."

MANY IRONS IN THE FIRE

Mackintosh is quite probably the busiest man in show business. "This year I will have 22 productions running around the world concurrently, probably the most I've ever had," he says.

That includes a new production of Miss Saigon opening on Broadway this month, with national tours of the United States and the United Kingdom to follow. His stage version of the movie School of Rock is currently playing at Broadway's Winter Garden Theater and opening at the New London Theatre in London's West End in November. Also running in the West End: a new version of the classic British musical Half A Sixpence.

He also is the man behind the stage musical version (with Disney) of Mary Poppins, Little Shop of Horrors, Side by Side by Sondheim and The Witches of Eastwick.

He owns and has refurbished seven West End theatres: Prince of Wales, Gielgud, Queen's, Wyndham's, Noel Coward, Novello and Prince Edward, with an eighth, the newly acquired Victoria Palace, due to have a major face lift before the London production of Hamilton opens there in late autumn.

How does he keep them straight? "I do sometimes get mixed up if I'm doing an interview like this, which show I'm working on. Luckily, when I'm creating them, I know the people and I know which theater I'm in.

"There are so many places around the world where people want to see musicals that didn't exist even 15 or 20 years ago, never mind when Rodgers and Hammerstein were alive," he says. "You didn't dream of having multiple productions in Asia or running across the world. Thank God I've lived long enough for the musical theater to become hip.

"Our biggest audience now is young people. When I first opened these shows, the biggest portion of the audience was 35 to sort of 60. It has reversed, 60 percent is now under 35."

Mackintosh deserves a lot of credit for that, having essentially re-created musical theater in new forms with his many shows.

He started his theatrical career as an actor, in an early London production of Oliver! "All these years ago, I understudied Noah Claypole. Phil Collins, the great English singer -- I was his understudy for a bit. And he was one of the original kids, played the Artful Dodger in an early production, and then grew up and played Noah Claypole.

"I was just in the ensemble. I really wanted to be the stage manager. I realized I was not destined to be an actor. My sights from the age of 8 were firmly on being a producer.

"Now, 50 years on -- this is my 50th year as a producer and it's amazing, but I couldn't be happier that my shows still seem relevant, and new audiences want to come and keep seeing them. It keeps me energized to make sure it's a great production they see."

MAKING HISTORY

Davis, who started touring as the man behind the mask last fall, is making history in the role.

"It's been a thrill to be the first actor of color in the touring company of this new production and the third in the 30-year-history of the show," he says.

"And to be in the [company] of Robert Guillaume and Norm Lewis. It's such an honor and a huge responsibility as well."

Guillaume assumed the mask from the original Phantom, Michael Crawford, in 1990, while the show's first national tour was parked in Los Angeles. Lewis became the first black man to play the role on Broadway in 2014.

Like the lead role of Jean Valjean in Les Miserables, the Phantom is in a baritone range, but has to hit some very high notes, particularly in the musical's best known song, "The Music of the Night."

Davis considers himself a bari-tenor, "or a tenor-tone, depending on the role," he says. "In my training, collegiately and beyond my graduation, I often told my professors I didn't want to be put in a box. I wanted to explore the possibilities of my voice.

"There are parts in this show that require a soft tenderness, like in 'The Music of the Night,' moments in that where it's soaring through the sky and I have to flip it into the head voice and let it just float.

"And there are other parts where the belt and the full-bodied voice is required, and my gospel roots and my training allow me to bring all of the [music] out of my chest into the higher notes. It's fun, and it can be a little daunting at times, but when it works, it's quite magical."

It does make his pre-show warm-ups pretty interesting.

"Oh, you have no idea," he says. "Often times in theaters, stage management will be either above me or close enough to hear me warming up, and they'll say, 'What are you doing in there?' And I say, 'Don't worry about what I'm doing in here, as long as it produces what you need on the stage.'"

Though sometimes star performers, especially when they have to do more than one show in a day, take one off and give their understudies a chance to go on, Davis expects that he'll be onstage for all 16 audiences in this run.

"I try not to [take a show off]," he says. "I haven't been that guy. To my understudy's chagrin.

"If you do it enough, your body will recognize it as normal, so I've tried to do all eight or all nine shows in a week just so my body can recognize it as the norm. If, God forbid, I get ill or exhausted, I'll take a day off. I haven't taken a day off in a month."

Coincidentally, Davis performed in the other biggest show currently on tour: He played Mufasa in The Lion King on Broadway.

Celebrity Attractions is bringing that show to Robinson a year or so from now.

"And you never know," he says. "I might come back with that one."

Style on 03/05/2017