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Jan 26, 2017 · Fifteen actors have been cast as the Phantom on Broadway, with an additional five who played limited engagements. Current Phantom James Barbour is the 15th actor to officially take over the role ...
- Michael Crawford (Performer) | Playbill
as The Phantom of the Opera (Original) Black Comedy Opened...
- A Look at All of the Christines of Phantom of the Opera on ...
January 26, 2021. The Phantom of the Opera, the...
- Michael Crawford (Performer) | Playbill
- There Have Been 52 Leading Actors.
- Emilie Kouatchou Is The First Black Actress to Play Christine.
- Broadway’s First Black Phantom Was Norm Lewis.
- Michael Crawford Prepared For The Wrong Part Before His Audition.
- A British Rocker Almost Played The Phantom.
- Howard Mcgillin Is The Longest-Running Phantom.
- This Cast Member Set A World Record For Most performances.
- Hamilton Led The Way For A More Diverse Phantom Cast.
- Two Phantom Actors Had Wardrobe Malfunctions.
- One Phantom and Christine Pair Tied The Knot.
In total, 16 actorshave portrayed the titular Phantom on Broadway, while 36 actors have played Christine Daaé. Michael Crawford originated the role of the Phantom in 1988, winning the Tony Award for his performance. Sarah Brightman first portrayed Christine. The celebrated soprano was married to Andrew Lloyd Webber at the time.
Emilie Kouatchou, who plays the current and final incarnation of Christine Daaé on Broadway, made history as the first Black actor to play the part. She began as an alternatewhen the show reopened after the COVID-19 pandemic closures in the fall of 2021 and was promoted to the full-time role in January 2022. “Phantom was the first show I ever saw o...
Seven years before Kouatchou joined the cast, Norm Lewis was the first Black actorto play the Phantom on Broadway, joining the cast in May 2014. Robert Guillaume was the first Black man to play the role in any production, having succeeded Michael Crawford in the part in a Los Angeles production in 1990. “Andrew Lloyd Webber even said that this is a...
When Webber first approached Crawford about The Phantom of the Opera, Crawford assumed he would be auditioning for the part of Raoul, the clean-cut nobleman who also vies for Christine’s affections. Crawford spent a year studying Nelson Eddy’s portrayal as Raoul in the 1943 film adaptation of Phantombefore realizing Steve Barton had already been ca...
While developing the show, Webber wrote the title song “Phantom of the Opera” as a pop single and created a music video featuring Brightman as Christine and British rock star Steve Harley as the Phantom. Harley was favored to play the lead role on Broadway, but the music video was seen as over-the-top, and the producers feared Harley didn’t have th...
Nobody has played the Phantom more often than Howard McGillin. With more than 2,500 performances, he holds the record for playing the title role on Broadway. He was playing the role when Phantom broke the record for the longest-running Broadway production in 2006. “It was exhausting, because he’s such a maniac, but it was a thrill to sing that musi...
Although McGillin has played the Phantom the most often, he doesn’t even come close to having appeared in the most Phantom of the Opera productions. That honor belongs to George Lee Andrews, who played the supporting role of opera house co-owner Monsieur André an incredible 9,382 times over 23 yearsbefore departing from the role in 2011. He holds t...
Ali Ewoldt, who is of Filipino descent, was the first Asian American and first woman of color to play Christine Daaé. By the time she joined the cast in 2016, she was already a veteran stage actor and singer, having made her Broadway debut as Cosette in the Les Misérables revival in 2006. She also performed in national tours of The King and I and W...
Although the Phantom wears his iconic white mask for most of the musical, he is dramatically unmasked at several points in the show, revealing a hideously disfigured face. The makeup for these scenes has led to some memorable mistakes in the past: Two different Phantom actors—Crawford and Hugh Panaro—have gotten their lip prosthetics stuck to the a...
Gary Mauer and Elizabeth Southard, who have played the Phantom and Christine several times together during the show’s United States tours, are married to each otherin real life. Mauer had played Raoul on Broadway as well, and Southard was a Christine understudy and played other minor roles alongside him. They have two children together.
- colin.mcevoy@hearst.com
- Senior News Editor, Biography.Com
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- Michael Crawford. Michael Crawford was the original phantom back in 1986. Anecdotally, Michael was offered the part after Andrew Lloyd Webber and his then wife Sarah Brightman arrived early for her singing lesson and happened to overhear the end of the previous students lesson.
- Ben Forster. After winning ITV’s reality TV competition Superstar in 2012, Ben Forster stepped up to don the infamous mask in 2016. His next turn in musical theatre wasn’t so lucky as in 2018, he came off a ladder during a performance of Elf The Musical, breaking his ankle, and was unable to finish the run.
- Ramin Karimloo. At only 28, Ramin was the youngest ever Phantom on the West End. In another piece of Phantom history, in 2010 he originated the role of the Phantom in Love Never Dies – Andrew Lloyd Webber’s official sequel to The Phantom Of The Opera.
- Peter Polycarpou. Peter Polycarpou has had a long and varied career. He played the Phantom back in 1991, while he was also starring in BBC sitcom Birds Of A Feather.
The dazzling replica of the Paris Opera House chandelier is made up of 6,000 beads consisting of 35 beads to each string. It is 3 metres wide and weighs one ton. The touring version falls at 2.5 metres per second. The original version was built by 5 people in 4 weeks. The Phantom’s make-up takes 2 hours to put on and 30 minutes to take off.
Jan 26, 2013 · He is one of the few actors to play both the roles of Raoul (1991) and the Phantom (1999) in the Broadway production of The Phantom of the Opera. In late 2005 he created the title role in the ...
Sep 29, 2022 · The Phantom of the Opera, by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Charles Hart, and Richard Stilgoe, is the longest-running Broadway show of all time. This musical has appealed to theatregoers for over three decades, but after a record-breaking run that will go down in history, the music of the night will soon play for the last time when the show closes in ...
