Plamen Kartaloff, stage director of the production:
In the search of always new horizons with a repertoire, which is long since on the stages of the world theatres, you see that this title thirty-three years after its creation, will be produced on Bulgarian stage too. Well-deserved, its place is at the Music Theatre, already with tradition of different musicals by Andrew Lloyd Webber. The interesting for me as stage director is the audacity to give a new reading for really new stage life to this music and stage masterpiece also in the genre of the musical, after my productions of “Black Mask” by Domenico Modugno, “Fiddler on the Roof” by Jerry Bock, “Candide” by Bernstein, “Vlastitutka” by Ralin-Leviev, “Sunset Boulevard” and “Mamma mia!”.
And now, like always in my work on the analysis and the visualization of the scores of every composer, whether Wagner with the tetralogy “Der Ring”, “Tristan und Isolde”, “Parsifal” or whichever work from the French, the Italian and the Russian opera treasury, my task is to find a creation in my own and quite new director’s aspects and messages of the work to the audience.
“The Phantom of the Opera” is a masterly work, in which Webber shows his absolute skill in the complex tasks of the music and stage form of the opera. Not only in his composer’s power and understanding of the ambivalence of the theatre, which has to be created out of it, but also in managing of the virtuosity and the vocalism of the roles. Exactly for this reason I enter into unity with the composer for homogeneity of the means of expression of the musical language of the scores with requirements to the artists in the interpretation of the complex psychology of the characters, and to the obligatory technical conditions for creation of the spectacle too.
I am thankful that I received the full cooperation of the Music Theatre, of course, according to the possibilities, to have those important categorically requested by me because of the dramaturgy chandelier and construction – a façade of a theatre building for the acting of the characters in their flight to its basements, where the action takes place. As well as mechanisms (with the cooperation of the Sofia Opera) for the dynamics and the rhythm of the numerous frames and episodes, continuing often several minutes. For the stage form of the musical this is obligatory – the speed in the changes of the circumstances, the surprising metamorphoses and transformations in them, to get just into situations always new and different.
This is why the technical, as well as the actor’s mastery are at other levels, more different from those in other stage and music genres. The common is always one – to make the spectator enter into the fantastic parables of the imagination of reality and dreaming. This is what possess both main characters The Phantom and Christine.
Interesting is the metaphor of the Mask and the Phantom, as a hiding place in a world, enclosed in capsules, or a test in the play of “the Beast” and “the Beauty”. Very deep is the philosophy of the characters in their doubleness of development. The fatality of their meeting and parting, I would like to provoke the audience in a real human witnessing and identification with the behaviour and the situations, in which grow and develop the passions of kindred souls, surrendered to their spontaneous attraction and love.
The romantic striving is a dream, and reality. Elated by noble love and spiritual beauty, with their devotion, both connected in their souls characters, are ready for everything, in order to be together forever. But, however, they are dependent of contradictory circumstances. The mysterious world of their happiest dreaming remains. Because the awaited Angel of Music has come, and the dream has turned into reality. The awakening from one strong attachment and love has created from the tender girl not only the woman, but also the talented actress, who made her dream come true, and the credo of the Phantom of the Opera – the great art is made from a striving to perfection and by talents, and not by the widening mimicry and mediocrity.
I am happy to work again with the stars from my production of “Mamma mia!”, and these are Vesela Delcheva, Vladi Mihaylov, Lucy Kozareva, Denitsa Shopova and Denko Prodanov, as well as with the other wonderful soloists of the theatre – Kalina Angelova, Nikolay Borisov, Hristo Sarafov, Rumen Grigorov, Aleksandar Panayotov and all the rest for all roles.
I would like to thank my creative adherents: the conductor Yuli Damyanov, the designers Miodrag Tabački, Tsvetanka Petkova and Ivan Savov, as well as the Director Mariana Arsenova, the technical direction of Penyo Pirozov and eng. Nikolay Arachkov.
https://newsbgreporter.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-phantom-of-opera-parable-of-world.html
