Broadway to Baldwin-Wallace

Just two of the 230 elaborate
costumes required for Phantom.

Phantom visits Berea by special invitation

By Faye Sholiton
Renderings by Charlotte Yetman

An ad currently running for the Baldwin-Wallace College Conservatory of Music carries the headline “B-W to Broadway” and boasts eight recent graduates and one current student with Broadway credits. Broadway apparently got the message, because in July, representatives of R&H Theatricals (a licensing division of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization) invited B-W to be one of six sites (two colleges and four high schools) to stage productions of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1986 blockbuster hit, Phantom of the Opera. R&H is testing whether the Broadway version needs revision before they release performance rights to nonprofessional companies.

When B-W director Victoria Bussert heard the offer, she was hard-pressed to say no. Never mind that she had already begun working on Follies, the musical slated for November. Never mind that she would have less than four months to pull the project together. She quickly assembled her artistic team of Jeff Herrmann (sets and lights), Charlotte Yetman (costumes) and Janiece Kelley-Kiteley (choreography), and took them to New York to see Broadway’s longest-running show. On a backstage tour, she learned (among other things) that the Majestic Theater stage has 150 trap doors and 10 fog machines. The B-W stage has one of each.

“I spent seven years doing national tours,” says Bussert. “I was hired to reconceive shows, so I always tried to have a new vision. With Phantom, it will be the same music, the same libretto and full musical orchestra as Broadway, but of course with a different visual look. Ours will focus more on telling the story.”

For the uninitiated, that story revolves around a man who haunts the Paris Opera. He wears a mask to hide his facial deformity, although few if any have ever seen him. He becomes obsessed with a young soprano, Christine Daaé, and from the shadows, has convinced her he is her “Angel of Music.” When he feels her slip from his grasp, however, he stops at nothing to win her back – from sabotage to murder.

Because Phantom was conceived in an era of mega-musicals (think helicopters landing on stage, as in 1989’s Miss Saigon), the script calls for all manner of theatrical effects. Cast sizes were bigger, too, creating a wardrobe nightmare. This one calls for more than 40 performers requiring some 230 period costumes.

With four months less prep time than usual, Bussert and her team quickly got to work. They immersed themselves in both the source material (“a 1911 Gaston Leroux novel – it’s really good!”) and meetings with professors of French, history and period art.

The design requirements have proved challenging, from the show’s famous dangling chandelier to a staircase as menacing as the one that zigzagged, mechanically, across the Broadway stage. Herrmann must create two worlds: the opulent Opera House, and a subterranean grotto that leads to the Phantom’s lair.

“We’re still figuring out as we go along,” he notes. He cites another prop, the music box with an animated monkey in Persian robes, as a particular challenge: “It’s not like you can ignore that, and it can’t just sit there.” Most daunting: He is working with his standard set budget of $7,000.

But this is one reason the pilot project is under way: Licensing agents want to see whether the show can be done on an amateur budget. They have asked the six schools not to share ideas, so that it’s clear what problems arise and how each production resolves them.

The other big question is the students’ ability to carry off the arduous roles in the show. The women alternating as Christine, for example, not only dance on pointe, they must also sing a high E. (Even on Broadway, that note has been prerecorded on a soundtrack.) B-W’s Emily Leonard and Libby Servais are hitting it on their own, while descending a precarious 22-step staircase. “Your heart is racing,” Servais admits.

Seniors Phil Carroll and Javar Parker have similarly immersed themselves in their shared Phantom role. Carroll has returned to the source material to explore what it means to hide from public view because of a physical deformity.

Carroll says one challenge is approaching melodrama in a way that isn’t a cliché. “I thought it was meant to be purposefully overacted… It’s a genre where things are grand and emotional, but [Lloyd Webber] creates a story – here, a gothic horror novel.” For an actor used to playing scenes naturally, he says, it is “a new level to achieve.”

Parker, who is proud to be only the second black male in the world to play the title role, cites the vocal challenge involved. “Andrew Lloyd Webber likes wide intervals, wide ranges,” he says. “The Music of the Night,” for example, takes the actor two octaves between low and high G sharp.

For the record, the rules permit transposing of music, if notes are out of reach. Bussert is proud to say that in this production, the songs are sung as written, under the musical direction of Stuart Raleigh. Even tempos will be consistent with Broadway. Look for the entire corps de ballet to perform on pointe, she adds, no small achievement for a group of musical theater majors.

But students came in droves for auditions, according to assistant stage manager Beth Bryan-Scoglietti. From the 126 who tried out, 45 were chosen, mostly musical theater majors. Thirty-four comprise the orchestra and 30 others are working behind the scenes, with a waiting list of students asking to serve on the crew.

Live was invited to sit in on an early rehearsal. Two weeks after the cast lists were posted, the students were all off-book and on their feet. (In another room, the dancers were on their toes, in one of their nightly marathon four-hour rehearsals.) Three couples were on the stage: two Christines and two Phantoms, and one pair of understudies. Beat by beat, they explored the scene where he leads her into his creepy lair (well, you had to imagine it, particularly when the trap door got stuck). By the end of the evening’s blocking, you felt the power of some lovely human connections.

One audience observer found himself participating in the process. B-W’s new Conservatory director, Peter Landgren, hopped out of his seat to join cast members at the piano. A musician himself, he wanted to be part of their discovery.

“As musicians, we get gifts throughout our careers,” he explains. “This gift dropped in our laps out of nowhere. We didn’t even know it was out there to be offered. It is such a testament to Vicky Bussert’s work.”

Another testament will come if one special alumna is able to return for a show. Rebecca Pitcher (’94) played the role of Christine on Broadway – and on tour, as far away as Singapore – for more than 3,000 performances.

The next B-W Conservatory ad will surely boast staging one of the first non-professional productions of a show that has sold more than 80 million tickets worldwide. They could add that in 2007, their entire musical theater program had earned a Broadway notice.

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