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Eye on Entertainment
Phantom marks 2nd anniversary
Milestones keep mounting for Toronto's production of The Phantom of The Opera.
Tomorrow night's 841st performance marks both its second anniversary and that of Yonge St.'s Pantages Theatre.
About 2 million people, from Metro, across Canada and from neighboring U.S. states, have paid a total of $120 million to see Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical. And audiences keep filling the theatre to capacity at virtually every performance.
Advance tickets, worth about $15 million, already have been bought for performances well into next year.
Co-producer Garth Drabinsky has no plan to end the run, which made Canadian theatre box office history days before it began. A national Canadian company also is shattering records on tour.
A current 22-week run in Vancouver is sold out, 450,000 people and not one seat left; the Montreal run later this year has an advance ticket sale of $8 million; a return to Ottawa's National Arts Centre next March has sparked an advance ticket sale of 35 percent.
"In August," Drabinsky reports, "the two productions in Canada, at the Pantages and on tour, outgrossed ticket sales of the three productions in the U.S. combined, and that's caculating the total figures in U.S. dollars."
So far this year, he says the national company "has taken in about $60 million."
An album of highlights of The Phantom's musical numbers, recorded by the original Toronto cast and released on Polygram, has gone "triple platinum". That means sales in Canada of 300, 000 copies.
During much of the first two years, about 25 percent of the audience at the Pantages came from the neighboring U.S. states of Ohio, Michigan, New York and Pennsylvania. That figure is currently about 40 percent, "real extraordinary for any show or event in Toronto," says Drabinsky.
"We're now spending two-thirds of our marketing dollars south of the border, from Detroit to Pittsburgh, in newspapers, TV and radio." There is another sidelight to The Phantom rarely mentioned: Its merchandising success.
"We're selling an average of $10 to $11 worth of merchandise per person who comes to the Pantages, everything from the souvenir program to key chains, " says Drabinsky.
Quebec soprano, Lyse Guerin becomes the first original Pantages cast member to leave. She's being replaced starting Tuesday by Winnipeg's Irena Welhasch Baerg.
Beginning Sunday, Phantom Colm Wilkinson takes a vacation, replaced through the fall, as earlier this year, by Peter Karrie, who played the Phantom on London's West End.
Some Phantom Phacts: the show's company of actors, musicians and stage crew have celebrated 11 weddings, the births of 14 babies and "accumulated the financial wherewithal to purchase 13 new homes."
And because of the stress of doing the show, company members "have ingested more than 10,000 pain reliever capsules and consumed over 2, 090 bottles" of antacid.
Co-star Rebecca Caine has worn 26 pounds of different wigs and or hair pieces.
Wilkinson has spent "over 1,300 hours" in make-up.
The props department "has provided 4,000 apples and 800 loaves bread for the Don Juan feast scene."
The chandelier has travelled "some 255, 600 feet during the performances and pre and post show safety checks." Phantom's stage crew "has stripped and buffed the Pantages's stage 24 times and sanded and refinished the floor on four separate occasions."
And the wardrobe staff has spent "more than 13,400 hours maintaining and repairing the show's more than 200 costumes."
By Sid Adilman
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