Phantom Mania

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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.