Why I am fanatic about ‘the’ opera but not quite a “phan”
View(s):It was a dark and stormy night. No, really, it was! And trudging through muddy puddles while sloshing through rivulets of water en route to the Wendt made my mood dark… Then my spirits lifted perceptibly as the bright young usherette at the entrance proffered a programme, interpolating, “One must suffer for one’s art, no?” Well, yes dear, but must we suffer for someone else’s art? And, more to the point, perhaps, is this art?
We were about to find out, ‘we’ being the ex-actress who accompanied your favourite dyspeptic theatre critic, and I. You are about to, too. Here we go, thespians!
The Phantom of The Opera is a world-class feast of sight and sound and sympathisch. Since you can read all about it online or in your respective souvenirs, let me spare you that repetition this beautiful Sunday morning.
That said, you need to know that this particular production of Phantom – as it is popularly abbreviated – shimmied on to the stage over the past fortnight with a macabre and maudlin history strapped to its neck, like some latter-day hunchback. That, too – the angst, the guilt and the shame, the tragic cancellation, the fear, the tears, the recriminations – you can hear or read all about on the drama-vine.
So it was with no small sense of trepidation tinged with excitement that we dripped our way up to a sodden balcony (the best seats in the house had long since sold out). So it was with increasingly dry eyes and ringing ears that we realised our worst apprehensions had been well founded.
Don’t get me wrong, dears. The opening-night spectacle was spectacular (with some ironies and nuances, in brackets). A set that was truly sophisticated (slumming it out on the hopelessly inadequate stage of the only serious auditorium in town). A cast that was really talented (whose vim, vigour, and vitality were squeezed in by a lack of space to caper and pirouette). Dance and music which were masterly, masterfully interpreted by the main players at least, and well mastered by the choreographers and sound crew (but looking a tad cramped and sounding synthesised or lip-synched or voice-enhanced offstage). Lights that were ingeniously devised to highlight mood and mindset (but falling short, no pun intended, as the chandelier crashed on opening night: slightly out of sync, though the effect was cleverly constructed). Effects that were full of a certain je ne sais quoi, such as never seen on Sri Lankan stages before (and being relied on to carry the pyrotechnics over the audience’s apprehension of the performance). Explosives that had audiences and theatre management alike at the edge of their seats (and cynics wondering how they swung that).
All in all, it was caviar to the general – and therein lies the rub!
Firstly, that caviar to the general does not mean what most people think it means. It does not mean a superlative luxury food to indulge the tastes of an epicurean martinet. It means standard or custom fare for the masses. (Caviar was a common enough staple for the hoi polloi in Shakespeare’s day.)
Secondly, that it was caviar to the general in that it was a superlative luxury food to indulge the tastes of an epicurean martinet. We mustn’t be slow to acknowledge that local audiences would hardly have the pleasure of witnessing such grandiose semi-operatic productions but for the creative and interpretive genius of Jerome L. De Silva. We shouldn’t be shy to admit that the élan and éclat of the successive performances depended largely on an unmentionably benevolent tyranny, for all the appearances of delegation, esprit de corps, and charming solidarity.
Thirdly, it was caviar to the general that this – like many other large-scale productions with ensemble casts and an army of engineers and architects and artisans behind the scenes and front of house – is put on mainly for the producers’ pleasure. And that of the cast and the crew. And their families and friends and fans (or “Phans”, as they are known in this incarnation of sycophancy). But not necessarily the theatre-going public. If there is any space left for us once the fast-selling tickets have been broken and multiplied and blessed and distributed.
Which is not to say that much of what has been said in the popular (or is that populist) reviews is not true… that this is aspiringly world-class, fit fare for fancy theatre-starved audiences who don’t have to fork out exorbitant West End or Broadway fares for the privilege of super shows. In the limit encapsulating some scintillating turns (like that of, most notably, Jehan Aloysius as the in-turns passionate and perverse Phantom, filling the mechanised stage with a memorable and lingering presence).
That said, as we left, the Actress and I, and made our way home over a flooded Colombo – wishing we had a motorised boat à la The Work Shop Players’ (WSP) Phantom – some questions lingered. This was a grand production, but did some of the performances lack the brio and panache we have come to expect of WSP (such as JCS)? Did the team focus too much on itself and not sufficiently on its audiences (the crowded balcony and haphazard ushering of the late noisy thespians was something of a dampener)? Was the spontaneous outpouring of strong emotion more a sign of respect for the master spirits and an affirmation of the emotional Phans’ sympathy for the long delay between desire in 2002 and consummation in 2014?
But surprisingly, maybe most surprisingly to us, the Actress and I confessed that had we too stayed on long enough, we would probably have joined the chorus and lent our hands and feet to the standing ovation that opening-nighters gave the real phantom of the opera, whose swansong this could have been… And shall be in the imaginations of many non-Phans of WSP who don’t love them less, but love theatre more…