The boys came home from school one day and announced that they were the only kids in the school who had not seen Phantom of the Opera yet. Yeah, right. Like they’d done a survey. ”One boy in my class has seen it four times!” the 10-year-old intoned. ”Yes, but how many of your schoolmates have watched the Shrek video 372 times?” I countered. They weren’t impressed. They wanted to see for themselves if Phantom was really just another version of Shrek with its monster and a beautiful girl.
Knowing that Father’s Day was fast approaching and that their opinions could be the difference between a pair of socks and a good book such as The Franchising of Musicals in a Global Economy or A Beginner’s Guide to Starting an Actor Union, I decided to give the family market what it wanted.
So we took out a second bond on our house, cut our meals to one a day and hired out the Shrek video to the neighbourhood kids for two weeks, by which time we had enough cash to buy four tickets. And that was for a matinee.
It was a dark and stormy Sunday afternoon. The theatre was packed. ”Eighty percent of the audiences for this run has been Afrikaans-speaking people” was the interval opinion of someone who’d been working at all the shows. I supposed that most English-speaking South Africans had already seen the original production at a matinee performance during a pilgrimage to the motherland. Either that, or they still suffered from cultural cringe and, on attending the local production, pretended to be Afrikaans, half-expecting the performance not to be up to ”international standard”.
Apparently though, one of the conditions of franchising a musical cooked in a Lloyd Webber is that it has to conform to the standards set by its creator. So it was no surprise that the production was quite spectacular. The costumes were stunning. The set applausable. The technical wizardry impressive. And, contrary to various reports, the singing was easy on the ear. Except, perhaps, for one banshee who had obviously got a free transfer from an opera company.
It reminded me of my first visit to New York that coincided with the constructive engagement era of Ronald Reagan. Given the politics, I was determined not to like it. But within a few days, I was writing back to friends singing the praises of New York, New York!
Similarly, despite the reservations about who benefits from the staging of such musicals, the absence of black audiences, some of the performers’ conditions of service and so on, it has to be acknowledged that on its own terms, the local production of Phantom of the Opera is very impressive. And still cheaper than seeing it in London.
I had to hold a six-year-old hand throughout the performance, with the other six-year-old hand being the screen from behind which the performance was watched, at least every time the Phantom made his appearance. Later, there was general agreement that the Phantom was definitely scarier than the soul-sucking dementors in the Harry Potter movie, yet another milestone in the Long Walk to Father’s Day.
How children can watch the battles of Digimon, negotiate the violence of cartoons, play with bionicles and still be scared by the Phantom, beats me. Perhaps I’ll console myself with the thought that it is the superiority of live performance.
Whatever, it saved me from having to fork out for a plastic mask of merchandising.