GASLIGHT PHANTOM

posted by James Reel

    Thursday has arrived, and with it my last contribution to the Tucson Weekly before I abscond to Italy for two weeks. (The Weekly will have a three-issue break from me, because even though it’s a two-week vacation, I’ll be gone for three theater weekends.) So if I become the victim of some airline mishap and don’t return to theater criticism, what will my final TW utterance be? A Gaslight Theatre review. Well, there are worse ways to go; Peter Sellers’ last movie was not the superb Being There, but the following year’s execrable The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu. Anyway, here’s how I ease into the Gaslight review:

    Gaslight Theatre started out nearly 30 years ago doing gentle musical spoofs of 19th-century Western melodramas. Over time, the company has branched out to parodies of 1930s adventure serials and more recent science-fiction epics, but its current show drops a load of fruit and nuts down closer to the theater's roots. The Phantom of the Opera may not be a Western, but it's the right period, and the source material doesn't need to be tricked up much to suit the Gaslight's peculiar needs.
    Writer-director Peter Van Slyke's adaptation has a bit more to do with the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical than with the original Gaston Leroux novel; in the beginning, the Phantom is clearly dangerous, but by the end, he's a sympathetic character, and everybody manages to live happily ever after, one way or another. (Come on, I'm not spoiling any surprises; surprise isn't what anybody goes to Gaslight for, anyway.)
    As you surely know, Phantom of the Opera is set in the Paris Opera House, and the extensive lake-soaked caverns beneath it. A mysterious, masked figure haunts the theater, intimidating singers and staff and meanwhile preparing an innocent young woman, Christine, for a brilliant operatic debut--not to mention for life as the Phantom's mate. Christine, though, has her eye on a dashing young count named Raoul. The Phantom is displeased. Various bad things happen, involving a crashing chandelier, a shocking unmasking and some questionable organ playing.