Broadway's Phantom Of The Opera plots a cautious return to the stage
Meghan Picerno was dorsum at work afterwards 18 months of pandemic limbo, overjoyed to be singing and dancing once again with her Phantom Of The Opera castmates as they apposite for the render of Broadway's longest-running show.
Equally the musical's late Oct reopening neared, sometimes all Picerno could remember about was making information technology to the showtime curtain telephone call unscathed past the breakthrough COVID-19 cases that had sidelined vaccinated actors at other shows.
Outside long days in a chilly mirror-lined rehearsal studio virtually New York City'southward Times Foursquare, Picerno had put herself back on what she called lockdown.
"I'k a full-on monk now," she said during a rushed luncheon interruption between back-to-back run throughs.
She knew her job came with risks of exposure. Playing the testify's heroine Christine required Picerno to kiss 2 co-stars daily and to sing full-throated love songs with them unmasked and at close range.
"Hopefully, none of u.s. take information technology, because if one of us have it, we all have it," she said.
The crowded Broadway theatres, vital to the city's tourism industry, were the first places closed by the New York government as the coronavirus began to ravage the land. Word of the abrupt shuttering came during a Phantom matinee at the Royal Theatre on Mar 12, 2020, as some cast and coiffure themselves were falling sick.
At present, after an unprecedented shutdown, the theatres are among the last workplaces to reopen. Their return this fall is viewed every bit a test of the city'south efforts to restore some new sense of normalcy.
Reuters watched as the Phantom company prepared for its return. The pandemic left unmistakable marks.
Within a few weeks of the evidence going dark, COVID-xix had claimed the life of a dear dresser, Jennifer Arnold, who had been with the show for more than than three decades.
Subsequently protests filled U.s. streets last twelvemonth in outrage at the killing of George Floyd, a black human, by a white police officer, newly unemployed Broadway workers pushed the industry to make overdue changes to increase racial diversity in theatre companies.
In Baronial, Phantom producers appear they had cast the first-always black player to play Christine since the show opened on Broadway in 1988. The player, Emilie Kouatchou, would brand her Broadway debut every bit an alternate for Picerno.
For the returning cast, there were tweaks to lyrics and staging to learn, making it more than straightforward to cast non-white actors in primary roles. The entire company was required to exist vaccinated and twice a week went to become their noses swabbed at a nearby theatre lobby repurposed as a temporary coronavirus testing site.
Picerno said she was happy to embrace any was needed to go dorsum on stage.
In the dark days of 2020, living back in North Carolina with her parents and claiming unemployment benefits, she said she "almost felt like a failure". She sang her part every day to go along it fresh in her mind until the singing made her too sad and she stopped.
Emotion over again overcame her on the first day reunited with her castmates in late September. Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber had swung past the studio to evangelize a pep talk to the bandage before they sang through the familiar score.
Picerno'due south singing dissolved in tears during the love duet All I Inquire Of You.
"Sing along! Help her!" the usher urged the masked chorus, whose voices carried Picerno until she regained her composure.
"Think OF ME"
A few days later, the cast practised dance steps in a mix of street apparel and the bulkier parts of their 19th-century-mode costumes.
Picerno drew a scarf through her fingers as she danced and sang Think Of Me in her bell-similar soprano. Off in a corner of the studio, Kouatchou silently mirrored Picerno's every motion.
Kouatchou, the daughter of immigrants from Cameroon, grew up in the Chicago suburbs. Phantom was the showtime Broadway evidence she e'er saw, on a trip to New York with her high schoolhouse. She remembers being transfixed past Christine.
"I could sing that role in my sleep," she recalled thinking.
Even so, she worried near stereotyping, that some would meet a mismatch in her phonation, an operatic soprano, and her advent, which was not the sort of "petite white girl" who seemed to always get cast as a show's ingenue or heroine.
"I didn't experience like I had a place in musical theatre considering I didn't run into anyone who looked like me who sung similar me," she said.
COVID-19 had both upended alive theatre and made infinite for progress.
"The pandemic was terrible," Kouatchou said. "Just we wouldn't exist able to have conversations like this and change things like this if information technology hadn't been for the pandemic."
Now, as the Phantom begins making his terrifying presence known in Act One, a frightened ballet dancer turns to the heroine and sings: "Christine, are you alright?"
Before the pandemic and Kouatchou's casting, the lyric had ever been: "Your face, Christine, information technology's white!"
The quondam, creepy Christine doll that stood in the Phantom'southward lair, her features unmistakably white, too was out. A new doll, designed to exist racially cryptic, would debut on reopening night.
Later that week, Kouatchou got her outset glimpse of one of the new Christine wigs designed to match her pilus texture.
"Information technology'south curlier and frizzier and I love it," Kouatchou said.
THE POINT OF NO RETURN
On the offset total twenty-four hours of phase rehearsals at the Majestic Theatre, members of the visitor waited to show vaccination proof in an alleyway lined with trash cans leading to the phase door.
Backstage, masked dressers who aid actors chop-chop change costumes in the darkness of the wings were testing alternatives to the bitelights they had gripped in their teeth pre-pandemic. They experimented with little lamps strapped to their foreheads or on gloves, hoping they wouldn't confuse audiences by shooting out beams of light across the stage mid-testify.
From the orchestra seats, John Riddle, who plays the show's hero Raoul, marvelled at one of the dazzling spotlights loftier up in the proscenium. Its axle used to illuminate a "constant deject of dust", he said.
"The fact that it's articulate now means something to me," he said. "They say it'south the cleanest a Broadway theatre has ever been."
Even so, at that place was worrying news from shows nearby. The Disney musical Aladdin was forced to close for 2 weeks shortly after its September reopening considering too many actors tested positive for the coronavirus.
Maree Johnson, who plays the blackness-clad ballet mistress Madame Giry, said she was resigned to the likelihood that Phantom too would record breakthrough coronavirus cases.
"It's going to happen sooner or later," she said.
Nine days later, on Friday afternoon, Picerno was in her dressing room when she opened the electronic mail with results of her concluding coronavirus exam alee of reopening night. Relief washed over her. Information technology was negative.
That night, audition members dressed in evening gowns, bow ties and the occasional Phantom-style costume crowded the theatre doors, angling out proofs of vaccination.
"Welcome back to Broadway!" chirped the newly hired COVID safety monitors who waved big signs maxim "MASKS UP" at the audience inside.
Backstage at the acme of a staircase, a few members of the company had placed a vase of flowers and a photograph of Arnold, the dresser lost to COVID-19. Some of the cast and crew paused past the memorial before resuming the final minutes' rush in nearby dressing rooms.
The house lights dimmed, and the familiar descending chromatic chords of the Phantom theme surged from the orchestra pit. Picerno danced across the stage as Kouatchou watched from the audience, sometimes mimicking her manus gestures. The new Christine doll lurked in the Phantom's lair, her face up at present silver.
At the final mantle phone call, the audience roared with please. Picerno ran to the front of the stage to take her bow, her face crumpled and shining with tears.
Source: https://cnalifestyle.channelnewsasia.com/entertainment/phantom-opera-broadway-musical-reopening-286071
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