Every time associate director Rainer Fried opens The Phantom of the Opera in a new city, he makes it a point to hang out in the lobby after curtain call to soak in the audience’s reaction. German-born Fried has been with the touring company of the iconic Andrew Lloyd Webber musical since it made its Hamburg debut in 1990, and has spent the last 35 years travelling with it to practically “every country” it’s ever been performed in—from Australia to Mexico and most recently, South Korea, China, and now India.
You’d think someone who had worked their way up from local resident director to helming the international tour production would have a “been there, done that” attitude about it by now, but Fried knows better than to take things for granted. “I don’t want to be cocky and presumptuous about audience reactions ever,” he shares a few hours before the show was due to make its India debut at Mumbai’s NMACC. “We don’t say just because we’re The Phantom of the Opera, everybody is going to love us. We have to earn that everywhere we go.”
When the original The Phantom of the Opera opened on London’s West End in 1986, it was lightning in a bottle. “It was an unusual musical for the time that was created in,” Fried explains, “In the mid-’80s, there were either pop rock musicals, which were more modern-style, which we call belting, or there were the older Roger and Hammerstein musicals that required classical voices, but there wasn’t anything at the time that had that combination.”
The intrepid Andrew Lloyd Webber, who had always dreamed of doing a The Rocky Horror Picture Show-style adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s Gothic mystery novel Le Fantôme de l'Opéra, became the first to blend the classical vocals with rock guitar riffs that have become Phantom’s musical signature. “I think that’s what keeps it fresh to this day.” And this month, the most iconic D minor in musical theatre will be heard in Mumbai.
Jonathan Roxmouth, who plays the titular Phantom, was discovered in South Africa over a decade ago, and has been with the company on and off ever since. “He is incredibly powerful and incredibly charismatic on stage,” offers Fried. “Matt [Leisy], who plays Raoul, has also been with us for a while now, and he is a very beautiful, very caring kind of Raoul, a real romantic element in that constellation.” Grace Roberts, who plays the true hero of the story, Christine, is a recent addition to the cast—but just like her character, her time in the spotlight has been a long time coming. “We found her in an audition in London four years ago, and loved her and wanted to hire her, but then we had to interrupt the tour because of the pandemic,” recalls Fried, “Then a year ago, she came in again and we still loved her. She has depth and a freshness in the way that she goes at the role, and we all agreed immediately that she would be our Christine.”
