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. Avantika Shankar chats with associate director Rainer Fried about why audiences today still can't seem to get enough of the musical.
