Front of House: Observations from a Decade on the Aisle by Denise Reich Page A

the “opera ghost” who lives under the theater. When Madame Giry, the ballet mistress, shows up, the girls scurry away. Giry is left onstage with Buquet; she essentially tells him, “Shut up and stop talking about the Phantom or you’re going to be murdered in a horrible fashion, just so you know.” Much more poetically, of course.
    The first time I saw this happen, the dancers just looked uncertainly at each other until Meg, the most visible ballerina and supporting character, got up and tried to tell a ghost story. The second time, Meg popped right up and recited all of Buquet’s lines perfectly. In both cases, Giry had to direct her lines to Meg instead of Buquet. It actually fits plausibly into the story: Giry spends a good portion of Act I reprimanding the ballerinas as it is, and Meg is her daughter.
    There were so many special effects and props in Phantom that it was inevitable that some of them would fail occasionally. The drapes that cover the golden angel and gilded proscenium are pulled away by stagehands dressed in period costumes during the overture at the top of the show. They step into the boxes closest to the stage, yank down the drapes, and step out again. The fabric is rigged to fall away effortlessly if it is tugged the right way, but every now and then, I saw it get stuck. Instead of making his pull and disappearing, the poor stagehand would end up standing there, hauling urgently on the drapes. They always gave way eventually, fortunately.
    In the climatic final confrontation of the show, the Phantom ensnares Raoul in the “magical lasso,” a garish red noose that seems to float in the air. I witnessed a few performances where the noose didn’t work properly, so the Phantom just used The Force instead and gestured toward Raoul with deliberate hand movements. Raoul got with the program instantly, obligingly froze in place, and writhed in pain.
    At the very end of the show, the Phantom sits down on his elaborate throne and throws a cape over his head. As Meg and several other characters climb down a metal gate to invade his lair, he vanishes. When Meg reaches the throne, she rips away the cape. The Phantom is gone, but he’s left his mask on the seat of the chair.
    Sometimes the Phantom’s chair doesn’t work and he can’t go anywhere. Meg is quickly given a heads up so she doesn’t tear the cape away. Instead, she just grabs the mask, if possible; or kneels quietly by the throne. I never saw this myself, but I was told that on at least one occasion when the chair didn’t work, Meg didn’t hear the warning and ripped the cape away anyway. She discovered the Phantom slumped over on his throne, apparently dead.
    At Les Misérables there were chair malfunctions, too. In one scene early in the show, there’s a confrontation between Inspector Javert and Jean Valjean in a hospital room. Valjean is at the hospital to visit the dying Fantine and reassure her that he will care for her daughter, Cosette. Just after Fantine expires, Javert shows up and attempts to arrest Valjean. The two men end up fighting at Fantine’s bedside. They sing, they stalk each other, and eventually, Valjean picks up a chair, smashes it to pieces, and brandishes a jagged bit of wood at Javert to hold him off.
    There was one particular Valjean actor who just wasn’t friends with the breakaway prop chair. The thing seemed to stymie him on a regular basis. He’d pick it up and it wouldn’t break. It broke before he had a chance to smash it. He tapped it lightly on the floor and the entire thing weakly crumbled. The actor playing Javert always pressed his lips together in a fierce scowl, but if you looked closely, you could see that he was trying to avoid laughing. He did his very best to make the audience believe he was very, very intimidated by the pitiful bits of wood that were scattered across the stage. A regular Les Mis usher told me that there was even a performance where the wood from the chair hit Fantine as she