Staging a gentler 'Phantom'

N.C. Theatre's version of classic musical adds nuance, compelling backstory

If you think the Phantom of the Opera isn't someone you'd want to cozy up with, actor Michael Minarik hopes to change your mind.

Minarik portrays a different phantom from the spooky outcast theater fans have come to fear in the long-running Andrew Lloyd Webber Broadway musical "The Phantom of the Opera."

Minarik's character is the star of "Phantom," an alternate adaptation that has come to be dubbed "the other 'Phantom.'" N.C. Theatre will present it at Memorial Auditorium, beginning Saturday.

Created by composer Maury Yeston and scriptwriter Arthur Kopit, "Phantom" presents a more sympathetic and deeply revealed title character. It's a rendering that prompted one Louisiana fan who had seen Minarik perform the role on tour years ago to bake him a pecan pie.

"On her note, it said, 'I, too, know what it's like to be an outcast,' because she weighed, like, 400 pounds," Minarik recalled. She told him his phantom gave her hope.

"There's so much more of a person, a human element, which I think makes people relate to the character a lot more," says Minarik.

Yeston and Kopit's adaptation of the 1910 novel by French writer Gaston Leroux got under way in 1982, well before the Lloyd Webber hit. Approached by actor/director Geoffrey Holder, who got the stage rights, the pair began composing soon after winning a Tony Award for "Nine."

But before they could get sufficient funding for Broadway, the rights fell into public domain, and Lloyd Webber swooped in, mounting a hit in London and then on Broadway, where it opened in 1988.

Kopit wrote a TV movie of the tale that aired in 1990. But his and Kopit's musical, which premiered in Texas in 1991, never got a shot at Broadway because of the enduring and popular Lloyd Webber show.

Still, regional productions of the Yeston and Kopit version have garnered critical acclaim. The New York Times called it the "Phantom" of choice, saying it has better music and a more affecting title character than its competitor.

"Mr. Yeston's sophisticated score is the model of how a loving assortment of classical forms can make popular theater music bloom," a Times critic wrote in 2003 of a Long Island, N.Y., production.

The two musicals share much of the same plot. Their phantoms are both disfigured and live beneath the Paris Opera House, covering their faces with masks. Both fall in love with a budding singer named Christine. Both dread the thought of being unmasked and ostracized. And both resort to violence.

But Yeston and Kopit give their phantom -- named Erik -- more of an onstage back story, Minarik says. And their score is more in the musical theater style and carries the plot along better.

"The Andrew Lloyd Webber one is very bombastic," he says. "It's very in-your-face."

Christine interacts differently with the phantom in this version, too, says Rebecca Pitcher, who will play the role here and also performed in the Broadway version.

"In the Lloyd Webber, she's a little bit more cautious and a lot more frightened of the phantom, whereas in this one she really sees him, not as a guy with a mask that's kind of scary, but just, 'This is my voice teacher and he's such an amazing person. I wonder why he wears a mask,'" she says. "That's more her take on it."

Director Casey Hushion says she hopes to get past spectacle and illuminate the story's emotional core.

"When you do any kind of musical that has a horror element to it at all, it always rides a fine line," she says. "It has to be handled really, really well, or it can veer off into a little bit of corniness.

"What I'm hoping for is to be able to tell this story really honestly. but also with the massive backdrop of Paris and the opera and Gothic romance and those elements around it," she says. "But at the heart you'll find a real true story there."

And what of the massive plummeting chandelier -- the most famous element of the Lloyd Webber production?

Hushion will only say that this production, too, has a chandelier.

"I won't say too much about it," she says. "But I can guarantee you that there is a chandelier and something may happen to it within the show."