“The Phantom of the Opera is there inside your mind.”
That’s the greatest lyrical melody that a theatre fanatic could dream of hearing. For years, the show I most wanted to see on a stage was “The Phantom of the Opera,” and thanks to $68 million of renovations to Little Rock’s Robinson Center Music Hall, I finally got a visit from the “Angel of Music.”
Since the 2004 film was produced by Andrew Lloyd Webber himself, I knew that the talent pool was going to be capable of pulling off the demanding vocal ranges and the intense emotional drama. However, as much as it hurts me to say it, Gerard Butler does not hold a candle to Little Rock’s Phantom, Travis Taylor. Upon digging through the Who’s Who of the cast in the playbill before the Saturday, March 18 show, I was shocked to discover that this man was only an understudy. Yet, the power and skill in his performance was still one of the most riveting I had seen by any actor on any stage in any show.
Since “Phantom” is known as one of the darker shows on stage, I was still captivated by the emotion and energy put into every portrayal. During intermission, I leaned over to my good friend and said, “I already know the story, so why is this so intense?” We soon learned that even from the balcony, the “Angel of Music” was always close by. An intricate speaker system hanging throughout the music hall made it really seem that the Phantom could appear anywhere at a moment’s notice.
Beyond the acting abilities on stage, even more fascinating was the design of the set. A friend of mine who had already seen the show had explained a cylindrical-type shape that rotated on stage, but honestly, that did not fully make sense until I saw it with my own eyes. Only serving to add to the ethereal, dreamy sequence of events, the set rotated on stage during Christine Daae’s first encounter with the Phantom. Without the audience realizing it, she was in the ballerinas’ dressing room, through a mirror, and then descending into “the dungeons of his black despair” on a set of stairs that appeared seemingly out of nowhere.
The selling point, the crown jewel, the long-awaited climax of the show, as every theatre buff knows, is the chandelier. The famed chandelier fall was a beautifully-timed surprise, for those who already knew the show and those who did not. Fans of the movie were amazed at the scene change, and newbies to the show were simply mesmerized by it happening at all. (In the 2004 film, the drop occurs during “The Point of No Return,” after Christine reveals the Phantom on stage. In the stage version, it occurs at the end of the first act, during the Phantom’s heated and angered reprisal of “All I Ask of You.”)
Even more amazing, in my opinion, was the initial reveal of the chandelier in the beginning of the show. When I saw it rising and the light growing brighter underneath its canvas cover, I kept thinking, “okay cool, but how are they going to drop that canvas, not hit an audience member and then successfully illuminate this entire theatre?” However, their reveal was not at all a disappointment. At that first heart-wrenching chord, the canvas cover immediately disappeared inside the chandelier, almost magically, too fast for me to notice. It shattered the room with extremely bright light while the stage erupted in activity. This trend continued, with the feeling that I couldn’t look in one place too long; I might have missed something!
The newly renovated theatre was a tremendous help to the show, contributing to the effectiveness of the acoustics and to the action of the show itself. My one and only disappointment in the show was the use of the “boxes.” While some of the theatre boxes were displayed on the stage, the music hall itself has boxes on the sides of the hall in which the actual audience can be seated. As we all know, “box five is to be kept empty for the Phantom’s use.” You cannot begin to imagine the how sad I was that box five was not in the audience with me.
However, this show, the actors, the stage crew, the set, the musical team, the costume designers and every other piece to this beautiful puzzle was light-years beyond any production I have seen in the state of Arkansas to date. Granted, I may be a little biased toward the show in general, but without a doubt, if you have a chance to see this show on stage, it doesn’t matter where you sit in the theatre, it doesn’t matter when you go, just go. Soon thereafter, he’ll soon be there, “inside your mind.”
– By Julie Williams, copy editor
