Ken Neufeld: Unscripted July 6, 2010
It’s an amazing feeling seeing the last curtain of the last show of the season come down. And, in this case it was a pretty big curtain—The Phantom of the Opera just closed Sunday night, June 27, after 24 performances in Dayton. That’s 24 standing ovations, 24 perilous falling chandeliers, and 24 disappearing Phantoms—surely we could have predicted a sequel. But, when Phantom first came out, it was a different time and place.
I first saw Phantom in the mid-to-late 1980s in Vancouver, Canada where I was living at the time. I can remember that the theatre community was given FREE tickets to attend opening night and we were seated in the top balcony of the Queen Elizabeth Theatre—a barnlike structure downtown. There was a lot of buzz around the performance because Phantom was being played by Jeff Hyslop, a local boy from Vancouver who would go on to play the role for three years in Toronto. And, it was the Phantom—and we had all heard about the technical wizardry and special effects. The show certainly lived up to the hype and even the assembled guests of the theatre community were impressed—not an easy thing to do!
Flash forward to my next view of Phantom, which was the Friday opening in Dayton. A couple of things struck me as I watched. First, I realized that I didn’t remember much about the plot. I mean I remember the gist of the situation, but vast parts of the show were like new. I would also say that I thought the staging of the show, while still effective, was quite “old fashioned.” There were “black outs” for transitions from scene to scene which made the show a little slow in sections, and the effects were not nearly as “effective” as I had remembered from the initial viewing. Having just gotten back from seeing a lot of shows on Broadway, I don’t think I saw one “black out” amongst them. Today, transitions are much faster and seamless with newer computer controlled technology helping to make this happen. And I think that audiences are looking for a more film like quality to the stage pictures they are looking at in the theatre.
I think it would be really interesting to restage Phantom using today’s technology and sensibilities. It would no doubt be a different show in some ways—different at least technically—but the amazing and timeless songs and story of unrequited love would certainly remain.
-Ken
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