Phantom Mania

By RICHARD CORLISS

He is a figure of power and poignance, horror and mystery. He dwells in the fetid cellar of the subconscious; from those depths rises the music of passions we hardly dare attend. He is the Id aching for the Ideal, loathsomeness wanting to be loved, unknown fear reaching up to touch or break our hearts. He is every teacher who fell in love with a beautiful student, every middle-aged man who has a star-struck boy's swoony soul. He is kin to Pygmalion, Cyrano, Quasimodo, Dracula, the Elephant Man and King Kong -- artists isolated in their genius, Beasts pining for Beauty.

Quite a rich story, The Phantom of the Opera. Gaston Leroux's 1911 novel about a deformed, love-sick masked man haunting the Paris Opera has inspired half a dozen movies, from Lon Chaney's silent classic to Brian De Palma's rock-'n'-roll Phantom of the Paradise. But Leroux's theme -- of ripe passions that can be spoken only in song -- suggests an apter venue than cinema. Mightn't The Phantom be the source for a passable Broadway-style musical?

Or seven?

Andrew Lloyd Webber created a phenomenal hit. The composer's lush, legerdemainic Phantom of the Opera has played to SRO houses since it opened in London (October 1986) and on Broadway (January 1988), with Michael Crawford as the Phantom and Sarah Brightman as his beloved Christine. The Los Angeles company will conclude a record-breaking four-year run this summer.

Audiences around the world gawk at the production's snazz and scope: / lightning bolts, trapdoors, a musician's tomb that is bigger than Grant's. They bathe in the show's warm melody and soap-opera suds. They thrill when Christine kisses the unmasked Phantom and, by this display of courage and tenderness, wins her freedom from his spell. "There's something about the title and the mystique surrounding the show," says Cameron Mackintosh, producer of Phantom as well as Cats, Les Miserables and Miss Saigon, "that makes people desperate to see it -- not once, but many dozen times."

Fine, but why are there so many different Phantoms? Most musicals that play the larger theaters are tours or revivals of Broadway hits. "Original" hits are rare; and these days they all seem to be Phantoms. In 1989 Ken Hill's version recouped its $1 million investment in an amazingly quick eight weeks and has since toured profitably. Another Phantom, by Maury Yeston and Arthur Kopit (Broadway's Nine), ran for a boffo year in Chicago, has been playing for seven triumphant months at the Westchester Broadway Theater in Elmsford, New York, opened this month in Kansas City, Kansas, and St. Petersburg, Florida, and is due in six other cities. The show may never play Broadway, but who needs Broadway when Phantom Mania grips the land?

Let us count the plays:

Ken Hill's Phantom of the Opera. First produced in England in 1976, this comic melodrama had a book by Hill and a score by Ian Armit. In 1984 Hill dropped the original music and wrote new lyrics to arias by Gounod, Offenbach, Verdi, Mozart and Donizetti. Lloyd Webber considered producing an embellished version of it, then decided to do his own. Thank heavens. Hill's backstage farce is a kind of Noises Off without the wit, and the cast plays it as hammy gaslight farce -- a penny dreadful that at today's prices plays like a $32.50 dreadful. It alights this week in Indianapolis and Kansas City, Missouri.

Phantom. Yeston (music and lyrics) and Kopit (book) completed their version in 1985, but when Lloyd Webber announced his Phantom, they found it tough to raise money. Kopit and Lloyd Webber briefly discussed collaborating, but their visions of the Phantom didn't mesh. The Yeston-Kopit version was dead for nearly six years, then miraculously resurrected at Houston's Theater Under the Stars. Yeston's melodies often skim the roiling emotions Lloyd Webber's music swims in, but they are sophisticated show tunes, operatic and operettic by turns. Kopit balances the Phantom-Christine romance with an All About Eve , rivalry between Christine and the diva Carlotta, then a Star Wars father-and- son relationship in Act II, when the play finds its heart. The production is suave, intimate -- a glittering bauble to Lloyd Webber's grand chandelier.

Drury Lane's Phantom of the Opera. Book by David Bell (who directed the premiere), music by Tom Sivak, with additional airs by someone named Tchaikovsky. Commissioned in June 1991, the show was written, rehearsed and opened by September at the Drury Lane Oakbrook Theater in suburban Chicago. This version, which imagines that the Phantom is the brother of Christine's ordinary beau Raoul, stresses the spectacle and italicizes the sexuality. Christine not only kisses the Phantom after he has removed his mask, she also helps him remove his shirt. The production has flourished in regional theaters; a new edition starts touring in April.

The Hirschfeld Phantom of the Opera. Commissioned by Abe Hirschfeld, the New York City real estate magnate, this version was written by Bruce Falstein, with some decent songs by Lawrence Rosen and Paul Schierhorn. It opened in February 1990 at the Clarion Castle, Hirschfeld's Miami Beach hotel, and played for four fat months. This Phantom is a dream creature, the spirit of Christine's musical and romantic ambition; he tells her, "I am whatever you want me to be." A videotape of the show was briefly released as a movie in 1991, but neither the play nor the film has been seen since.

John Kenley's Phantom of the Opera. A play with music (most of it adapted from Gounod, with new songs by David Gooding) that was commissioned by summer-stock impresario John Kenley, it toured the U.S. in 1989-90.

The Pinchpenny Phantom of the Opera. "An affordable musical" by Dave Reiser and Jack Sharkey (authors of Jekyll Hydes Again! and "Not the Count of Monte Cristo?!"), this musical farce is designed for threadbare theater groups with a taste for tastelessness. "Welcome to the opera!" the opening number announces. "Where gals with lung disease/ Can hit high Cs with ease!/ Their doom is sure to please/ The connoisseur!"

Connoisseurs of musicals know that the story has limitations. The Phantom can sing only one kind of song to Christine: I-adore-you-and-you-ab hor-me. Poor pastel Raoul can never be much more than a Parisian Freddy Eynsford-Hill. And yet -- in the magnificent Lloyd Webber version, the appealing Yeston-Kopit or even the lame Ken Hill -- the story works. The Phantom and Christine sing ) their volcanic sentiments in a plot as spare and potent as legend.

"All these little Phantoms are springing up," says Hill, "purely because of the enormous success of Andrew's show." Yet very few theatergoers attend other Phantoms in the belief they're getting the Lloyd Webber. "People are coming to our show," Kopit says, "not because they can't get tickets to the Webber version, but because of the Phantom story. There is something dreamlike and mythic in the story of an innocent girl and a dark, foreboding, romantic figure who gets her under his power. We can identify both with the girl and with the deformed figure, who is perhaps not as ghoulish as he would seem."

"There's a current fascination with disfigurement," Yeston says, "not only of the face but of the soul. The Phantom is the outsider, the Steppenwolf. In many ways he captures a central irony of our times: it's the one who has the imperfect appearance who has a kind of moral perfection." The superiority of the wounded: it is a metaphor that speaks -- no, it sings -- to every loser in love or in life.

"What Andrew and I loved about the book," Mackintosh says, "was that it took itself terribly seriously." And so, for a few hours, do we take the Phantom. We live fully in his grandeur and pain. And when we leave, he keeps singing. The Phantom of the Opera is there, inside our minds.

With reporting by William Tynan/New York