Author Ken Hill launches own version of hit show
September 25th 1988 | DAT: 37
Written for The San Crancisco Chronical by Calvin Ahlgren
Ken Hill rounded the doorway into the upper-story offices of Theater on the Square with the half-wild look of a Hollywood buccaneer searching for his missing rum barrel. Shirt awry and graying reddish hair flying, he plopped down his script, folded his arms and settled into an interview about the project that had brought him over only days before from London: The Bay Area premiere of his "Phantom of the Opera". His disarray was the result of little sleep and lots of rehearsal with the show's cast of 11 and a swarm of technical crew.
In the streets of San Francisco below, Secret Servicemen and city police were milling about in preparation for a passing motorcade with Vice President George Bush. Hill, who had come upstairs from a six-hour preview rehearsal of "Phantom" gazed through the window at the spectacle as if it held interesting possibilities for staging. He had flown here straight from readying a touring production of his "Hunchback of Notre Dame" adaption, and was scheduled to rush back again soon. The political pageantry and the transcontinental travel seemed hardly to touch him. What stirred his blood was the challenge of seeing his elaborate, multiset "Phantom" mounted on the TOTS stage.
"Jet lag doesnt affect me at all, really," he said. "I mean, I'd been up for five days straight anyhow."
It was Hill whose "Phantom" first was staged as a musical at Newcastle Playhouse in East London in 1984, and that attracted the attention of Andrew Lloyd Webber - whose own gigantic, subsequent production was to make headlines and ticket lines in London's West End and on Broadway. In fact, Hill said, rolling his red-rimmed eyes with a world-weary matter-of-factness, Webber had seen Hill's earlier production and had approached him about the possibility of their collaborating on a grand-scale "Phantom."
He and Webber had been chums, he said, having worked together earlier on a revival of "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat" at the Westminster Theatre. Webber and his producer Cameron Mackintosh had been highly enthusiastic when they broached Hill about "Phantom," Hill said. "Andrew was over the moon about it. I was bought lots of bottles of wine to be persuaded not to direct it, so we could get somebody else" with a different background. Hill had hoped to cast British singer-dancer Sarah Brightman for the role of Christine, the ingenue for whom the Phantom's romantic bell tolls.
As it turned out, neither Webber nor Brightman would be available for Hill's "Phantom". Webber disappeared without a further word to Hill, married Brightman and launched his own "Phantom".
The upshot for him, Hill said, was a temporary but not a crushing disappointment. "I'm not the slightest bit bitter about it," he said convincingly. "It happens in show biz all the time. After all, 'Phantom' was public domain; he had a perfect right to do it." Then he rested his bushy beard on crossed arms, gazed out of the window and said mischievously, "Though he could have sent me a postcard about it, or something."
Hill went on to other projects and dropped the notion of his "Phantom" until its first American production in St. Louis in 1987. There, Hungarian-born director Peter Farago and set designer Joseph Vanek combined to bring the masked fiend to life with 14 set changes. Both men are in place for the TOTS version, but with two more set changes still.
The result is a large, operatic, comically diverting show with lots of campy humour and one-liners, with its share of queens, bozos and bimbos disporting about lavish mock-ups of the Paris Opera House. Hill's version, however, is less a tour-de-force star vehicle, more a democratic dispersal of the 11-member cast. The Phantom is more a part of the ensemble and less the cynosure of the piece.
For slightly longer than half his 51 years, Hill has been dashing here and there in the cause of theatre, since he made a random decision in his teens to pursue the footlights. Born in Birmingham in England's Midlands, he worked in a factory and went to night school. "I was bored in my teens," he said simply. "I ran my eye down the [curriculum] list and picked drama. In other words, I had absolutely no knowledge of the craft of theatre. It took me ages to get my first script together."
As to his choice of subject about which to write, that was another matter. "That took about 10 minutes of thinking to decide. When I was a kid, I used to watch two movies a day - the adventure stuff, action films. So I said, yeah, what I'd always wanted to do was put those on a stage. So when I started [at a local repertory theatre in Birmingham] I did a series of swashbuckling female pirates, dinosaurs and all. People liked that sort of thing, and I was asked to do horror shows."
Among his commissions for various theatres were "The Curse of the Werewolf", "The Mummy's Tomb", "The Living Dead", "Dracula" and "The Land of the Dinosaurs", this last loosely wrenched from Arthur Conan Doyle's "Lost World". ("Since he wouldn't let me use his stuff, I wrote my own," Hill quipped.)
Though lighthearted and campy, Hill's writings, he insisted, are not offhand. "The stuff I do is good entertainment. It's not mindless by any means. I mean, if you do a play about dinosaurs, you've got to know your subject." "Land of the Dinosaurs," he said, is a twist on the "Beauty and the Beast" legend, in which the dinosaur is a young female menaced by a white hunter.
In all, Hill has written about 150 scripts, though, he admitted, "100 of those are television soap operas. I've had 30 or so plays produced to one degree or another. The vast majority of those would be in middle-scale theatres - what you'd call repertory theatres: 500 seats, with a three or four week run."
Rummaging in a junk shop in his teens, Hill had picked up a copy of Gaston Leroux's melodramatic 1911 novel, "Phantom of the Opera". "I was one of the few people at the time [1976] who'd read it. I don't think most people even knew it was a novel."
He adapted Leroux's melodramatic plot to the musical stage, writing original lyrics in English to arias by Verdi, Gounod, Offenbach, Mozart, Weber and Donizetti. It was a process he had become familiar with by then, and reviews of the East End and St. Louis production hailed them for the seriousness of their singing, for their wit and liveliness.
With "Phantom" opening Wednesday after massive previews - from September 9 until Tuesday - Hill's attention ranged among that show, the "Hunchback" to which he had to return, and another, unnamed work in progress. "I think to do any play, all you need is good actors, space and light." The project in the works would be kept secret until realised on stage, he said. "I won't tell what it is," he said, "but I'm flabbergasted that nobody's done it before."
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