By Kathy Janich
The road ends here for The Phantom of the Opera. Or, more accurately, the road here is ending for Phantom of the Opera.
This Fox Theatre sit-down is the sixth and final Southeastern hurrah for a Phantom touring company since 1991. When Andrew Lloyd Webber’s road warrior leaves town, it will visit Cleveland and Pittsburgh before heading to Los Angeles, where sometime in November, the masks, machinations and operatic trills will be mothballed for good.
The music of the night still continues on Broadway, however. Well into its 22nd year, selling at 86 percent capacity, the Phantom is easily the longest-running show in history. (Lloyd Webber’s Cats is a distant second, trailing by 2,000 performances.) The tour has garnered impressive numbers as well. In all, there have been three national touring companies, affectionately dubbed “Christine,” “Raoul” and “Music Box” for the Broadway house the musical calls home. Together they have grossed more than $1.5 billion and, by the time the Music Box troupe shutters in L.A., will have played a mind-bending 205 engagements in 98 cities for a total of 36 years and 14,605 performances.
But, back to the beginning for a moment.
The Phantom of the Opera, based on Frenchman Gaston Leroux’s serialized novel, opened on Broadway on Jan. 26, 1988. The show won seven Tony Awards (including best musical, best actor for Michael Crawford’s Phantom and best director for Harold Prince) in a season that also included Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods, the cult fave Chess and revivals of Anything Goes (with Patti LuPone), Cabaret (not the Alan Cumming version) and Dreamgirls.
In its two-plus decades on Broadway, Phantom has seen 20 women warble as the naïve heroine Christine Daaé, 16 men play the combustible Phantom, and 21 women take on the role of the tempestuous prima donna Carlotta Guidicelli.
Among those Carlottas is Kim Stengel, who appears here and is the longest-running Carlotta in the world, having performed the role over 5,000 times. She’s sung the part in Hong Kong and Singapore, in much of Canada, and in at least 47 of the 50 United States. Her Broadway turn came in March 2008, opposite Howard McGillin’s Phantom, and “must have gone very well,” she says, “because the woman I understudied never talked to me again.” Stengel eventually took over the role.
Carlotta is the big cheese in a legitimate but small and struggling Paris opera company. She has worked very hard to become the reigning soprano, Stengel says, and isn’t willing to step aside for the timid, and in Carlotta’s view, far less talented Christine, despite the Phantom’s escalating threats. “Who is this little twit taking my job?” Stengel says, citing the diva’s point of view.
As for Phantom’s ridiculous staying power?
Stengel says it’s a show that touches people and makes them want to see it again and again. “It’s an everyman story,” she explains. “And everyone seems to have some kind of emotional connection to a character.” Some like Christine’s rags-to-riches story, others the score.
Among Stengel’s favorite moments are the act two opening number “Masquerade,” when the company pauses on the stairs, turns slightly and climbs in unison to thrilling harmonies, and an earlier moment when shrouds are ripped from the proscenium, and what looked like an auction house is revealed as the Paris Opera. She calls it “one of the greatest moments in all of musical theater history.”
Her rituals, however, happen out of sight. When she takes her place during the overture, awaiting Carlotta’s first appearance she sings one note, the same note, every time. And just before the panic surrounding the discovery of Don Juan’s body, she jingles the medals worn by the fire inspector.
Stengel, a single mother and Houston native, has lived in New York since 1985. Her dream role? “It’s the one that’s not written yet, that fits me like a glove and wins me a Tony,” she says in an affable way. Failing that, she’d happily play Margaret Johnson, the mother in Adam Guettel’s The Light in the Piazza. She last played Carlotta in Atlanta just after Hurricane Katrina, she says, recalling that moment in time (and a taste for chicken and waffles).
The story of the mysterious, disfigured musical genius gets a second act in Lloyd Webber’s newest musical, Love Never Dies, a sequel set in Coney Island. It opened in March, in London, to mixed/negative reviews, with plans for a Broadway bow at the Neil Simon Theatre in April 2011 — and has already faced delays, Lloyd Webber’s tussle with prostate cancer among them. Love Never Dies brings back the Phantom, of course, along with Christine and Raoul but not the one-time diva of the Paris Opera.
“They probably had problems,” Stengel suggests tongue-in-cheek, “because they took Carlotta out.”
Kathy Janich is an Atlanta theater artist and freelance writer. After years in daily newspapers, she’s found a joyous second career as an artistic associate, primarily at the smart, gutsy and bold Synchronicity Theatre.
