Phantom of the Box Office

...And they will be dazzled by Andrew Bridge's lighting...

...In his pastiche "Hannibal" he has the Carthaginian general crossing the Alps accompanied by one huge elephant on wheels and a gaggle of appropriately underdressed female slaves cowering beneath the whip of their overseer...

...In the famous 1943 film starring Claude Rains, for instance, it was attributed to acid being thrown in his face during a dispute in a music publisher's office...

...But Sarah Brightman is a cold Christine who displays more ambition than innocence...

...Having failed as a playwright, he used his newspaper experiences and his unbridled imagination to write a series of mystery thrillers...

...Lloyd Webber and Richard Stilgoe's book for the musical, however, is faithful to Leroux in making the Phantom's problem a congenital one...

...The origins of the story told through a fusion of electronics and operatics go back to the beginning of the century, when an aspiring littérateur named Gaston Leroux worked as a crime reporter for a large Paris daily...

...Phantom became known worldwide in 1925, two years before the author's death, when Hollywood adapted the story for a silent movie...

...As for the work being performed, or rather sung, in the midst of these extravagant trappings, it is the latest in the wave of British imports that seems to be sweeping away the traditional Broadway musical, once justly celebrated as inimitable...

...it was not terribly amused by the rest...

...They will be awed-most of the time-by the deftness with which director Hal Prince and a trio of stage managers (Mitchell Lemsky, Fred Hanson and Bethe Ward) have coordinated the activities of a small army of stage hands, electricians and computer operators...

...The audience loudly admired the highly ornamented beast...

...She is, after all, aware that he exerts considerable influence at the Opéra...

...Christine is forced to make a great show of affection toward the Phantom to obtain his release...

...It is now 1881, and the Phantom, with the aid of an abandoned harmonium on the fifth underground level and light furnished by thousands of flickering candles, has managed to compose his own opera...

...The means employed to conceal the character's facial deformity have differed from version to version...

...Its title is not, by the way, "Moonlight Express" or "Kangaroos," but The Phantom of the Opera...

...There was, as it happens, a body of water deep within the Opéra where a boat would have been useful, and the gondola might have been left over from an Italian opera...

...His hero, the teenaged cub reporter Joseph Rouletabille, did for Leroux what, almost simultaneously, the gentleman burglar Arsène Lupin did for his creator, Maurice Leblanc-at least in the Francophone world...

...The noose is merely a flimsy length of red ribbon that Raoul manages to keep from closing with his hands, yet he is unable to extricate himself...

...Whatever his intentions, it is apparent that Lloyd Webber sees himself more in the tradition of Puccini than of Molière...

...In the United States, however, Phantom enjoyed considerable popularity, probably because of its affinity to the American Gothic of Edgar Allan Poe...

...The young Vicomte Raoul, following Christine on one of her trips into the Opera's nether regions, jumps from a gangway into a pit and is suddenly ensnared in a noose of the Phantom's devising...

...Several film versions and theatrical productions that followed took certain liberties in explaining the protagonist's disfigurement...

...Lloyd Webber that go beyond the huge duplex apartment on the 60th floor of the Trump Tower breathlessly described as part of the show's advance publicity...

...Well, he does have access to a variety of props and devices, and could easily practice prestidigitation when not composing or listening to music...

...The climactic scene is meant to give the heretofore forbidding "Phantom Superstar" a human touch, and to an extent it does...

...For many seasons to come-perhaps until the end of the century-a river of paying spectators will relentlessly flow toward Broadway's Majestic Theater, where the Shubert Organization has invested $1.5 million to adapt the interior for an $8.5 million production that opened with advance sales of some $17 million...

...How is it that the Phantom throws bolts of lightning at those who pursue him...

...in fact, some French reference works still omit it when listing the writer's works...

...But Lloyd Webber's music, cleverly orchestrated to fit the mood, is dulled by Charles Hart's pedestrian lyrics...

...Barnum never thought of that...

...This Christine does not easily succumb to love, even when her suitor is the youthful, fair, well-dressed Vicomte Raoul de Chagny (Steve Barton...

...Who lights and replaces the myriad candles that scintillate throughout the Phantom's vast lair...

...Those who are beckoned to the Majestic by the unprecedented blitz of sensational "news stories" will see a Broadway theater that designer Maria Björnson has stylishly transformed into a stunning evocation of the Paris Opéra...

...Apparently there are advantages to being Mrs...

...True, the book works hard at achieving pathos, and Michael Crawford's Phantom certainly convinces us that he is madly smitten with the chorus singer...

...It is unclear whether they are offered in the spirit of spoof, but that is surely the case with several other operatic performances presented within the musical...

...Christine's uncharacteristically romantic sacrifice seems so unnecessary...

...The figures are important, for they represent the most dramatic aspect of a musical drama that has been promoted with an intensity hitherto reserved for more candidly commercial products...

...Here our eyes are so captivated by the sight that our mind does not intrude to spoil our pleasure...

...Whatever the case, this moment is not the most suspenseful one of the evening...

...If indeed it was a sacrifice...

...Lloyd Webber favors the audience with excerpts from the Phantom's opera...

...What are we to make of his traveling around his subterranean world in a Venetian gondola...

...Its title is "Don Juan Triumphant,' an ironic reflection of his futile passion for a chorus singer named Christine Daaé (Sarah Brightman...

...And Harold Prince's direction, usually good at structuring scenes if not at lending depth to characters more shadowy than the Phantom, allows a flaw that is surprising in such a technically sophisticated production...

...The whole time, though, we cannot help wondering why the improbably helpless Raoul doesn't simply remove the noose and face down the Phantom...

...The self-centered prima donna in " IlMuto" (Judy Kaye), on the other hand, does manage to squeeze some humor out of the clichéd situations she is subjected to...

...Though the liberal use of special effects at the Majestic occasionally gives the impression that something supernatural is going on, one can, with a little effort, always come up with a naturalistic explanation of events...

...But win them over he did: The Americanborn British detective story writer John Dickson Carr (also the author of a biography of A. Conan Doyle) had his Doctor Gideon Fell nominate The Mystery of the Yellow Room-where Rouletabille made his first appearance-as "the best detective tale ever written...

...Or maybe the would-be diva speculates that the gesture might not be bad for her career, considering the Phantom's clout at the Opéra...

...As with Lupin, it took a while for Joseph Rouletabille to win over English-speaking readers...

...The real excitement comes at the furiously applauded end of the first act, when the enormous glittering house chandelier-consisting of 30,000 crystal beads and weighing in at three-quarters of a ton, we are told-slowly rises to the ceiling and then plummets toward the spectators, stopping just shy of their heads...

...The title character was played by Lon Chaney, whose face was daringly used as a field for screen makeup experimentation...

...Nor is it a successful musical romance, despite the avalanche of critical opinions and press releases to the contrary...

...Thus we can only imagine that behind her seeming attraction to the Phantom lies an ulterior motive...

...Rains wore a horizontal three-quarters-mask...

...The Phantom has been possessed by music all his life...

...Then in 1910, for a change of pace, Leroux wrote a melodramatic horror story entitled The Phantom of the Opera...

...Moved by her willingness to pull out all the stops for the man she supposedly loves, the miserable Phantom frees his prey...

...at the Majestic Michael Crawford sports a vertical half-mask...

...As a whole, though, Lloyd Webber's "opera" does not add up to an effective parody, except perhaps of his own style...

...While her voice comes over well on the excellent sound system-credited to Martin Levan-her acting is woefully inadequate...

...Employing terror and blackmail as his instruments, and the somber Madame Giry (Leila Martin), drillmaster of the dance pupils at the Opéra, as his messenger, the Phantom is able to make Christine a prima donna...

...Why aren't the tapers on the lake extinguished when their flames reach the water's surface...

...The most commercially successful of the imports are propelled by the name, the enterprise and sometimes the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber, and the spectacle at the Majestic is no exception...

...Perhaps Christine derives some perverse pleasure in kissing the man with the monstrous face...

...That's why he hides his hideousness from the world not in the Paris catacombs made familiar by Victor Hugo, but in the various subbasements of Charles Garnier's Opéra, a grand structure commissioned by the Second Empire in 1862 and finished in 1875 under the Third Republic...

...It was not a success in France...