R.I.P. Phantom (Broadway) 1/9/88 – 4/16/23

[scenicdesign71]

As much fun as I've had razzing PotO over the years, and despite my distaste for the blockbuster mentality that it came to epitomize at the zenith (or nadir?) of the "megamusical" era, I'm nonetheless kinda annoyed with myself for having been too lazy to get back down to the Majestic, once the show's closing was announced (and then postponed) last fall, to see the show's Broadway incarnation one last time.

By contrast with Les Misérables, which I eventually ended up seeing at least eight times over the years, I only ever saw Phantom onstage two or three times, first on the West End in the summer of 1987, and later on B'way in the mid-to-late 90s when a friend was in town and wanted to see it.  (I'm pretty certain I returned for another look on B'way sometime in the mid-aughts with another friend who was doing some work for the 2006 Vegas version; and there's even an outside chance I may have seen the London production a second time too, on a subsequent trip sometime in the 90s, potentially bringing the total to four.  But I would only absolutely swear to one viewing on each side of the pond).

In honor of Hal Prince, Maria Björnson and Andrew Bridge's era-defining production, I'm posting this still-interesting 35-year-old New York Times Sunday feature about their work on Phantom, originally published two days before the show's official B'way opening:

Conjuring an Eerie World for the Phantom
For the musical's designers, darkness was as important as light.

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VENICE AT NIGHT.  THE PAINTER DEGAS.  The Victorian theater, with its dim lighting and opulent spectacle.  A BBC documentary about the disabled and their sexual feelings.  Drapes.  The candles in a Greek orthodox church.  Shadows.  Silent movies.  The half-masks worn by some disfigured veterans of World War I.  Darkness.  And the Paris Opera House, especially the Paris Opera House, with its gilded statuary and stately rehearsal rooms and strange subterranean lake.  They're all part of the visual inspiration of The Phantom of the Opera, which opens at the Majestic Theater on Tuesday and, with a current advance sale of more than $17 million, is the hottest ticket in town.

But of course one can't underrate the human imagination, resourcefulness and savvy that transformed these incongruous elements into a living organism.  When Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical opened in London 15 months ago, the critics weren't unanimously delighted with everything and everyone connected with its creation and performance.  They had their doubts and their cavils. There was, however, unqualified praise for those responsible for the show's visual impact.  The designer Maria Björnson, the lighting designer Andrew Bridge, the director Hal Prince – together, they had staged something that struck many reviewers as refreshingly different from the high-tech extravaganzas that were threatening to redefine the musical theater.

It was this very difference that first attracted Hal Prince back in 1985.  "I was tired of what spectacle had become," he says.  "If this was a spectacle, it was another kind, a romantic show with a sense of theatrical occasion and a Victorian feel to it."

What attracted Maria Björnson, who had built a reputation designing operas at Covent Garden and other major European addresses, was partly the challenge of collaborating on a popular musical with people at the very top of their profession, partly the opportunity that the strange disturbing story of The Phantom gave her to create emotionally haunting effects.  "What I'm really interested in is distorting reality," she says.  "Designing in a subtextual way, reaching the subconscious of the audience and getting a reaction without them realizing exactly what I'm trying to achieve."  As most people must know by now, both Gaston Leroux's original novel and the present adaptation involve a mutilated genius who lives beneath the Paris Opera House.  He becomes emotionally obsessed with the unknown singer Christine, decides to intimidate the theater management into letting her star in the freakish opera he's composed for her and lures her across the underground lake into his secret lair.  Scenes like this last one particularly attracted Andrew Bridge to The Phantom.  "It's the sort of piece a lighting designer loves, because you're moving around darkness as well as light,'' he explains. ''In fact, the darkness is just as important as the light."

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But what was the significance of that darkness?  What was the overriding appeal of the Phantom myth to the audience's collective unconscious?  Why had it proved so much more durable than most thrillers and horror stories?  As 1985 evolved into 1986, the director and designer talked and talked, sometimes in London, sometimes in New York.  Then came what Mr. Prince regards as a major breakthrough.  Quite by chance, he saw a BBC documentary in which desperately crippled men and women were seen talking, playing and generally behaving in ways that left him feeling that the truly twisted people were the "normal" ones, with their instinctive horror of deformity.  A clip from The Elephant Man, in which an actress kisses the misshapen hero, emphasized the point.

"A particular quality that came leaping through the television screen was these people's healthy, uncomplicated assertion of their own sexuality and their own needs," he remembers.  "I showed the program to Maria, and I could see from her eyes that it meant the same thing to her as it did to me.  We realized that the real emotional pull of The Phantom is erotic.  It's not so far beneath the surface in Leroux's book, and it's in our show, including the scenery."

That explains why the first thing you'll see as you enter the Majestic is a proscenium arch lavishly encrusted with huge gold figures which, if you look carefully, you realize are in various stages of ecstasy.  This took two sculptors eight months to make, but Mr. Prince thinks the time and money well spent, since the images are insidiously shaping the spectators' attitudes from the very start.  "And once we knew we were talking about eroticism, and we had the picture frame, we could begin to fill in the specifics.  The fabrics, the patterns, the drapes, especially the drapes, since drapes have a lot of mystery about them.  You can't go up and touch our props and our sets, but I think you can feel them.  These solid elements give off an emotional, sensual, texture."

They also give off a strong sense of place.  That's the result of the visits that the director, designer and lighting designer all made to the Paris Opera House itself.  Mr. Prince climbed up five stories, to a dizzying pinnacle above the final parapet, and stood in the wind alongside a sculpted Spirit of Music, looking across the rooftops to the Eiffel Tower and fancying himself almost as high.  He also went five levels down, threw a coin into the darkness, and heard it plop into the hidden lake.  Miss Björnson ventured less high but just as low, and came back with 400 photos recording a tour that seemed to go on for miles.  She remembers the opera house's lower depths as "very dark, very creepy" and one "little" rehearsal room as a "cross between a palace and a brothel - all mirrors and rococo paintings of opera singers."  Mr. Bridge, too, came away marveling at the building's "scale and grandeur and shadows and sense of drama."

The Paris Opera House is, as Miss Björnson says, itself almost the star of both the original novel and the Lon Chaney silent movie derived from it.  So it's inevitable that the sets for Phantom in London and New York directly reflect what the designer saw in that visit: the vast chandelier in the auditorium; aspects of Christine's dressing-room; the great staircase, though it's re-angled to display its most beautiful carvings; even the gigantic table in the manager's office.  Everywhere, Miss Björnson has drawn heavily on her photos, isolating details, picking out significant fragments, and sometimes transposing them to different places.

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"This show is very thoroughly researched and very detailed," she says.  "But the same research and detail are available to anyone.  It's their use and their impact that's the important thing.  You can distort, enlarge, change.  It's very subjective, really.  You can heighten the fear or the romanticism or whatever.  I'm not interested in pretty set rendering,  I'm interested in emotional scenery and I'm interested in getting across ideas."  Indeed, Miss Björnson feels no more influenced by the Paris Opera House than by German expressionist art – and the silent movies that embodied its deliberate grotesqueries.

"I feel that black-and-white films are much more powerful than colored ones," she says. "And though of course it's very colorful, I've always thought of this as a black-and-white show."  Indeed, she'd sum up the style as "Cabinet of Dr. Caligari."  The effect was to be weird, vaguely threatening and, of course, subtly erotic.  A feeling of repressed sexuality, itself very Victorian, was to be everywhere in the shadows and the scenery, but most especially in the Phantom's private bunker.  "This is, after all, a story of Beauty and the Beast," she says, "the ugly man who's half man and half animal, and lives deep down in a secret place beside an underground lake."

By 1986, time had become an indeterminate blur of creative activity, for everyone working on the show, but for no one more than Maria Björnson.  She dashed off 100 or so sketches, some derived from the trip to Paris, some from her own imagination, but all, logically enough, in black and white.  And before long, her ideas were hardening into choices.  Within one hectic three-week period, she designed all the show's 180 costumes, up to 13 of them a day.  Scale models of the sets began to appear, some 15 in all; each of these was unusually large, one-twenty-fifth of the full size, and unusually detailed, including even the candles that eventually illuminated much of the opera-house furniture.

Nor had she skimped or cut corners when it came to preparation.  She read and read; she did "piles and piles of research."  An opera singer's dress is a composite of costumes worn by Caruso.  The dancers owe much to Degas's statuary, as well as to his paintings.  In order to suggest something strange and sinister about the chorus, posing on the grand staircase for a masquerade, Miss Björnson drew on the circus and commedia dell'arte, as well as the gaudier reaches of her own fancy.  But the costume that gave her the most satisfaction was that of the Phantom himself, culminating as it does in a half-mask suggested by the curious visors worn by some scarred, blinded soldiers after World War I: plates, colored by an artist to match the skin tone, with eyes actually painted on top.

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How did she do it all?  "Fear," she replies succinctly.  "You know there are going to be so many technical drawings, meetings, explanations and so on, that you have to get the creative bit done early.  So time becomes an obsession.  An average day becomes 9 a.m. to 11 p.m., a non-average day 6 a.m. to 12 at night, seven days a week.  Putting on a show, especially one like this, is like Christmas and moving house rolled into one.  There's no time for a private life."  Then came the business of preparing technical drawings for the sets, another mammoth task for Miss Björnson.  "It's much more complicated than building a house," she says.  "The precision required is so much greater.  Half an inch here or there can make all the difference.  Also, you have to work out precisely where everything is to be when it's not onstage.  It's like a huge jigsaw puzzle."  That has proved even more daunting a challenge at the Majestic than at Her Majesty's, the London theater where the show has run since October 1986.  That's because the stage is less deep.  Also, there's much less room for storage during performance.

The second of these disadvantages has been overcome by sheer mathematical ingenuity, the first by reconstructing the Majestic's back wall, in order to extend it a foot or two.  There's also been extensive excavation beneath the stage, to provide a counterpart to the subterranean machine room that's recently been restored to full operation at Her Majesty's.  There, men actually crank up some of the scenery by hand, as they did a century ago.  In New York this is done by computer; but the principle is the same, and the effect, too.  It reinforces the attempts of the design and directing team to give a distinctly Victorian feel to their production.

There have been remarkably few visual changes for the show's transfer to New York.  As previews got under way at the Majestic, Miss Björnson began to design something Mr. Prince belatedly realized was missing and needed: a sarcophagus for the important graveyard scene, the tomb of the dead father Christine goes to visit.  Otherwise, the only significant alteration involves the rooftop across which the Phantom makes his escape at the end of Act One.  In London, pressure of time and money meant that a filmed projection was used.  Here, the top of the opera house is evoked in more substance and detail.  "The look of the show was perfect in London," says Andrew Bridge, only half-joking.  "Why change something that's excellent?"

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Mr. Bridge's contribution is even more crucial than a lighting designer's customarily is, given the kind of atmosphere everyone wanted to create.  A feeling of menace was necessary.  So was one of secrecy.  Audiences were to sense the unspoken sexuality in the late-Victorian air.  They were to wonder what was happening in those encroaching shadows.  They were to feel disoriented and troubled and not quite sure why.  Above all, they were to be encouraged, in Hal Prince's words, "to be contributors, to be collaborators, to use their imaginations to fill in the spaces we've deliberately left blank."

That's why there's so much darkness around sets that are often simpler and more economical than one might have expected.  It's also why Mr. Bridge has relatively few lighting fixtures, 400 or so, compared with the 700 or 800 normal in a Broadway show.  He's made much use of beams, rays, sometimes unbroken, sometimes striated, picking out what's significant and leaving all else dim and spooky.  When the Phantom crawls across the floor at one point, there's a man actually on his stomach in the wings, directing a spotlight at his face.

Here, Mr. Bridge has revived an old technique, but with a sophisticated flashlight substituting for a glowing lime the Victorians knew.  He's been similarly enterprising elsewhere.  There are many more candles in the show than either London's or New York's fire regulations permit; so he designed tiny lamps containing still tinier bulbs that flicker inside a silicon gel, giving an irresistible impression of moving flame.  He's also used motorized wheels and rotating disks to create the wobble of gaslight or the shimmer of light on water.  Again, hidden lamps in the orchestra pit reinforce visible footlights, thus giving the opera house's professional presentations the flat, amber look of their period.  "What's been fun has been using modern technology to create an old-fashioned look," he says.

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Perhaps the best example of his and Miss Björnson's creative collaboration comes when the Phantom guides Christine to his subterranean kingdom.  In order to give the impression of a long, intricate journey downwards, Miss Björnson invented a ramp that tilts, rears, backtracks and leads both characters from the very top of the stage to its bottom.  Then suddenly the pair are in a gondola, floating through what's actually dry ice but looks like mist; and clusters of candles are rising through the floor, adding to the mystery and sense of magic.  It was a scene suggested to Miss Björnson by spiral staircases, by a photo of light reflecting in the water in Venice and by the memory of candles seemingly floating in the air in a Greek Orthodox church.  "I wanted a sexual connotation," she says, "but also something slightly religious, ritualistic."

Early on, she and Mr. Prince talked of cramming the Phantom's inner sanctum with opera memorabilia, props and costumes he'd purloined on his forays upstairs.  But in the end they opted for a suggestive simplicity: a cracked mirror, a dummy in the wedding dress prepared for Christine and, at the back, iron bars with a great, black vista beyond them.  "Closing her in, a caged bird, a portcullis, that's the way you think when you're a designer," says Miss Björnson.

Everyone involved in the show's staging seems genuinely to have enjoyed their partnership.  Mr. Prince admires Miss Björnson's spareness, her sensitivity to light and shadow and her eye for minutiae – "she's a workaholic, and a perfectionist."  In turn, she found him a refreshing change from the kind of directors she knows best: those who tell her nothing, because their bias is intellectual and literary, and those who tell her everything, because they don't really trust her.  "But he has a history-of-art background and a visual sense.  He'll say, 'I see dark, and people coming out from nowhere, and shadows, and heavy drapes that drop and thud and pound.'  He's a springboard for ideas."

Nor is anyone underrating Mr. Bridge's contribution, nor he theirs.  Quite the contrary.  "Maria's feeling for texture and attention to detail is extraordinary – and Hal.  Well, he's always excited, always trying things out, like a kid with a new toy, always doing the unexpected.  Most directors tell you, 'More light, more light.'  Did you know he came up to me and said, 'I've never asked this of a lighting designer before, but can you make things darker?'  I won't forget that."

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[scenicdesign71]

The first ten minutes of this video, and the last five, are production footage from 1988 and 2021 respectively.  The forty minutes in between consist of extensive rehearsal-room outtakes from late 1987, presided-over by Hal Prince and music director David Caddick; they include Crawford and Brightman title-songing and music-of-the-nighting; the company masquerade-ing; and a rehearsal-skirted Judy Kaye prima donna-ing.

(Also keep an eye out for Cris Groenendaal as M. André, Nicole Fosse somewhere in the ballet chorus, and a then-unknown Rebecca Luker playing the creepy Bridal Barbie prop).

[scenicdesign71]

In this week's New Yorker, three critics (one an avowed "Sondheim snob") chew over PotO's pop-cultural significance after taking in the final performance from the nosebleeds:

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-theatre/the-phantom-of-the-opera-takes-a-final-bow

Vulture's long-form analysis seems to have ruffled some readers' feathers, but it's a gorgeous piece of writing:

https://www.vulture.com/2023/03/andrew-lloyd-webber-phantom-of-the-opera-closing.html

And someone in the Facebook FTC group recently posted this excerpt from Pure Imagination!, the 2015 "sorta-biography" (say it with a British accent: it's a twee pun on "autobiography") of the late Leslie Bricusse, confirming -- if anyone was in doubt -- that SJS was not a Phan:

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I imagine Sondheim, with his aversion to the "show business bullshit" pitting him against ALW for public sport, may not have been too pleased to see his zinger immortalized on the page when Pure Imagination! was published.  Judging by the Guardian Angels reference, the remark itself may have been decades old, and the object of its cattiness, likely a billionaire by 2015, surely can't have been too devastated; but still.

In all seriousness, I was moved by Sir Andrew's dedication of Phantom's final performance to his late son Nicholas.  I cannot imagine his loss; still less, having to then fly over here just three weeks later to be the fussed-over centerpiece of this huge public celebration, itself memorializing a loss of sorts, and (adding insult to injury) in the wake of Bad Cinderella's poor reception on both sides of the Atlantic.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/17/opinion/andrew-lloyd-webber-phantom-broadway.html

[scenicdesign71]

A friend of mine, Ms. Björnson's American associate on the B'way Phantom, has been posting dozens of photos and video clips of its load-out on Facebook over the past couple of weeks.

They provide a fascinating glimpse of the set's (de)construction, and of the stage as it hasn't been seen in decades (PotO had, as of its closing, been occupying the Majestic for more than a third of that theater's entire existence) -- notably the original 1927 proscenium arch as it emerged, looking surprisingly fresh, after 35 years of encasement behind Björnson's iconic gilded tchotchke.

Unfortunately my friend has set these images to be visible only to her FB friends.  But many of them, or similar, have been posted by others on IG and TikTok -- albeit without her annotations from an artisanal perspective, citing such details as the tinted "pumpkin glaze" under which all that gilding (itself layered from multiple hues of metallic gold paint) is sealed, Björnson apparently having been partial to the use of vegetable color-names in her paint notes.

After thirty-odd years I can finally reallocate the brain cell I had devoted to idly wondering (perhaps as often as once per decade?) what the central Angel of Music, with its perch for the Phantom, actually looked like from behind.  Curiosity satisfied: it's hard to describe, but all those writhing figures actually somehow resolve themselves, in back, to a steel-framed more-or-less flat 45-degree angled surface hugging the gilded prosc, with a level area containing a built-in padded stool so that the actor can sit beneath the Angel's wings while riding the sculpture down to await his surprise appearance near the end of the first act. 

From another of my friend's FB posts I learned that the tiny repeating face detail near the top of the proscenium is actually a miniature portrait of Ms. Björnson:

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https://www.costumearmour.com/phantom.htm                   

A good bit of this wildly labor-intensive set will likely go into storage, awaiting the show's inevitable (though probably judiciously slimmed-down) revival at some point.  Whatever's cheaper to rebuild than to move and store -- calculated, I suppose, by some obscure algorithm of bulk, weight and a presumably years-long storage time-frame -- will get chopped up and discarded.  (I would assume the show's acres of hand-painted, hand-dyed and hand-beaded-and-tasseled draperies and painted drops will be safe, along with the tons of exquisite custom sculpture for the proscenium and elsewhere, and props including Hannibal's elephant and of course the chandelier).  And the Majestic itself will undergo a major, allegedly nine-month-long renovation before hosting its next (as yet unspecified) tenant.

[scenicdesign71]

My friend Kis (of Walter Paisley fame) has been at it again -- "it" meaning another sort-of prop gig involving sculpture.  And while I didn't dive into the clay with her again myself this time, I was on hand virtually, for advice and moral support during long overnight work sessions... along with some last-minute Photoshop assistance.

The project in question was a sizable table centerpiece for a charity gala which happened tonight at a venue in Grand Central Station, designed by a new friend of Kis's.  And its slender relevance to this thread is that his design inspiration had tangentially to do with Phantom, specifically the Palais Garnier as depicted therein.  (I guess the show has become briefly locally-topical once more, due to its recent closing across town -- or perhaps he's just a Phan).

His design therefore required a gilded Winged Victory (based on this streamlined 1932 American Art Deco example, rather than on any of Garnier's Belle Époque confections, but never mind), perched toe-wise upon an alabaster orb surmounting a Corinthian capital atop a custom-built two-tiered pedestal encircled by antique-gold moulding, tiny globe lamps of gold-flecked glass, and Marc Chagall's 1964 Opéra ceiling redo (here re-redone by yours-truly: converted from a concave dome into a convex cylinder, hence the Photoshop; see below) at the base of the centerpiece, largely buried in an avalanche of freshly-decapitated red rose heads.

As that description suggests, it's rather a lot for a single centerpiece, especially given a limited budget (a fraction of K's original bid) and time-frame (barely a week from start to finish).  But apparently the designer -- seen, below, posing by the table onsite this afternoon -- has been dreaming of the goddess Nike, or the Paris Opéra, or both, for decades ever since he was a baby decorator growing up a stone's throw from the Bronx Victory Memorial, or something... so hopefully Kis's craftiness has made his fondest wishes come true.

The results might not be mistaken for one of Björnson's angels as executed by the late master Nino Novellino; the Nike figure on this centerpiece ended up being sculpted in putty, over just a few days, on the armature of a 32" poseable Barbie doll, with paper "drapery", cardboard wings, and plenty of gold spraypaint (no time for "pumpkin glaze" here).  But I think Kis has done an amazing job under daunting circumstances.  Between this and Walter a few months ago, these little projects have stirred up an interest in sculpture that's left both of us curious to learn and do more of it.  (We've each separately only dabbled in all-too-rare, all-too-brief instances like these -- where pulling miracles out of a hat, on tight budgets and deadlines, left little room for developing serious figurative-sculpting skills in any sustained or methodical sense).  I've had a pretty busy week myself, but in retrospect I kinda wish I had found time to trek out to her Floral Park studio and join in some more puttying fun.

(CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE)

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[scenicdesign71]

Walking a razor's edge between tribute and apologia, Zachary Stewart condenses the conventional wisdom on ALW's 43-year Broadway run with a precision and diplomacy that made me alternately gasp and chuckle:

Theatermania:  Andrew Lloyd Webber's Reign as King of Broadway Comes to an End

Presumably there will be other think-pieces by the time Bad Cinderella ends its 15-week run on Sunday (notably from the NYT, which hasn't published anything thus far).  Or maybe not; perhaps the out-with-a-whimper anticlimax of BC's closing will rate only a few tactful squibs, after all the valedictory "end of an era" coverage of PotO's closing in April.  (Phantom's own run filled 35 of those 43 years, making up over 80% of the composer's unbroken B'way streak, even while other ALW shows opened and closed alongside it throughout the 90s, aughts and teens).

Probably my favorite word on the subject, by a comfortable margin, remains Andrea Long Chu's from a few months ago:

Vulture:  The Opera Ghost

Given that this thread is already longer than many of those devoted to SJS's works (and that, in revisiting it, I keep perpetuating my own depressing recent-ish trend -- unintentional, but still disconcerting -- of threads beginning with "R.I.P."), I'm going to give this one a rest for the foreseeable future.