Review: THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA NATIONAL TOUR at Gammage Auditorium

THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA remains a terrific night of musical theatre. The score still soars and the touring production currently housed in Tempe’s Gammage Auditorium makes good on every ounce of spectacle its reputation promises. If you're one of the devoted "Phans" who've followed this show for decades, or you've simply never seen it, it is worth your time and your ticket. 

The Phantom of the Opera source novel, Gaston Leroux's "Le Fantôme de l'Opéra," entered the public domain in the mid-1980s, and two different Broadway composers raced to stake their claim on it. History remembers Andrew Lloyd Webber's version and largely forgets Maury Yeston's. That's worth pausing on, because Webber was, at the time, not exactly known for depth. After severing his celebrated partnership with lyricist Tim Rice (with whom he created thematically robust, complex shows like JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR and EVITA) Lloyd Webber soon pivoted toward less art-ambitious shows like CATS and STARLIGHT EXPRESS. THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA was the perfect subsequent project for him. It's a melodrama, a story that runs on the fuel of pure feeling rather than complex characterization, and Webber, freed from Rice's insistence on depth, was exactly the right composer to meet it there.

In the late 1980s, as a theatre-obsessed teenager, the original cast recording lived permanently in slots one and two of my five-disc CD carousel (LES MISERABLES took three and four). I hadn't sat with the show in decades, beyond a stray cabaret song or a track surfacing on a Broadway playlist. Seeing it now, after thirty years of development as a theatre consumer, is a strange kind of reunion.

While I was prepared to criticize it as a trifle, instead I was reclassifying it as a melodrama and adjusting my lens and expectation. Once you accept it as such, everything about the show clicks into coherence. Emotion is given priority over character depth and that's not a flaw so much as the operating instructions. You could sum up anyone's presence in a given scene with a single adjective: “innocent”, “dashing”, “tortured”, “scared”,”desperate”, “enamored”. Once the show is understood as melodrama, Webber's oversized, sweeping score stops sounding hokey and starts sounding correct. The music and the plot walk together to the cliffside of camp and both agree not to jump.

But my greatest take away is that this is Christine’s story, not the Phantom’s. Not only because she has tons more stage time and sung material, but because hers is the only character that changes across the evening rather than simply feeling things at us. Even the thinnest line can have an arc and we see Christine shift in real time from tentative chorus girl to passionate and bold, someone capable of making her own difficult choices. The Phantom's late reversal is not the same thing. A last-minute reversal isn't an arc; it's an epiphany. He remains himself granted new personal insight.

Christine's role also marks something of a genre event in its own right: the return of the true lyric soprano to a Broadway stage that had, by the 1980s, largely moved on to belters, the Roxie Harts, the Evitas, the Effie Whites. THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA was fresh on the ear with a true soprano lead. Sir Webber, known for those belty ballads, actually perhaps works better working in the soprano range. Perhaps the legit sound elevates it just a nudge more from being pop.

That legitimacy is, I think, the whole engine of the show's popularity. Many theatregoers like and appreciate ballet. They hold it in truly high regard. But those same theatregoers have never and likely will never attend a fully staged ballet (No shame there, include me in that group.)  In seeing PHANTOM, we get our ballet as a canapé instead of a full meal. The same could be said for the opera scenes. Just enough to enjoy. We aren't here to see TOSCA, but sure I’ll take an opera canapé from the tray. 

This touring production doesn't reinvent Hal Prince's original staging so much as execute it with tools that didn't exist, or were prohibitively expensive, in 1986. The chandelier is more dynamic, scenic elements shift with a precision the original couldn't manage, and an LED wall gives real depth to the underground lake sequences.

Isaiah Bailey's Phantom is stunning vocally and more vulnerable, more humanized, than the role typically allows. Jordan Lee Gilbert's Christine is a vocal decathlon, each event more impressive than the last, from the tentative "Think of Me" to the sweeping "Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again" to the surging, focused tension of "The Point of No Return". where we hear her robust chest voice for the first time. Daniel Lopez is serviceable and earnest as Raoul, doing what the role allows. Carrington Vilmont and William Thomas Evans as Andre and Firmin, alongside Midori Marsh and Christopher Bozeka as Carlotta and Piangi, are as funny as they are vocally skilled. It is always a treat to see those two skills paired.

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