Michael Crawford

I mean, I was a kid.

I was a senior in high school, and David Foster called a voice teacher that I was with and said, you know, Michael Crawford was supposed to sing at an event for the governor of California, and he just pulled out.

Oh, it was Gray Davis' inauguration? Yeah, it was Gray Davis' thing, yeah.

And so he says, who have you got who's young who can sing the song? And I sent in, like, I was one of five tapes, and he picked my tape, and...

Yeah.

And Michael Crawford was doing that well before Bruce Willis did.

And doing it.

And doing it.

And I was going to say, it's funny, like we said, this was three years before the Weber one, but it's, if you look at, It was a pretty radical change just in those three years because this one show is still pretty much playing the old Phantom that we had.

But with the Weber one onward, there's always an attempt to make him into this romantic anti-hero type where he becomes sort of more swooning and like this, just this misunderstood lost boy or something like that, which is something Michael Crawford kind of kicked off.

And, you know, Argento kind of fought it.

He made him sort of more grotesque, but they really pushed that up.

Yeah, the classic.

Michael Crawford.

Oh, Betsy.

Yeah.

You can reduce guys and get them out of there when you have a decent lead.

You can find ways to do that without, it's like at a theater, you know, when the announcement comes, when the lights come out and the announcer comes on and says, tonight, the part of the Phantom will not be played by Michael Crawford.

It'll be played by Joe Schmuck.

And people go,

So Phantom of the Opera is a British musical based on the Gaston Leroux novel of the same name, featuring music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, lyrics by Charles Hart, additional lyrics by Richard Stilgoe, and book by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Richard Stilgoe.

It opened in the West End in 1986 with direction by Hal Prince, starring Sarah Brightman as Christine, Greatest Showpod alum Michael Crawford as The Phantom, and Steve Barton as Raoul.

An identical production transferred to Broadway in 1988 with the same principal cast, and these original productions won both Olivier and Tony Awards for Best Musical, as well as Best Actor for Crawford.

Uh, the West End production, the original West End production closed March 2020 due to COVID, but then a scaled down production with revised staging and, like, slightly more cost-efficient, uh, set pieces and a scaled back orchestra opened in the exact same theater in July 2021.

It's High School Musical, right? Maybe, I think it's the original High School Musical-

Mm-hmm

... where, uh, Corbin Bleu's character says something about how his mom is on a diet, and she puts [laughs] Michael Crawford in the fr- a picture of Michael Crawford in the fridge to remind her not to eat snacks.

[laughs] And I always think, like I, even then, I had no idea why Michael Crawford would be motivating.

My guest today is a singer-songwriter and a musician who was a former member of the Brian May Band.

She toured with Michael Crawford in the Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber, she appeared in the West End plays Only the Lonely and Sunset Boulevard, and she was a stand-in for the Broadway cast of Next to Normal.

Her newest album, Kath & Seth, will be released this fall.

Stay tuned for my conversation with Netweaver and the Nightingale of New York, Katherine Porter.

I was on this tour called The Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber in the UK.

I was touring at the Albert Hall.

Someone saw me in that, and six months later I get a weird phone call saying, "You'd be great for being a backing vocalist with Brian May." How they got that from me singing All I Ask of You with Michael Crawford in I Don't Know How to Love Him from Jesus Christ Superstar, I have no idea.

But I didn't ask, I didn't care.

Exactly.

And there's a moment, uh, in that monologue where it goes, "Ah, that strain again, it had a dying fall." And I'd said to the repetiteur in the room, "I want you to just underscore, and when I hit this phase, I'm gonna look at you and then stop playing." And because it was a Lloyd Webber piece I was auditioning for, I think it was Woman in White, which I did get but didn't do, um, to understudy Michael Crawford.

Um, I, I did that and Trevor laughed.

I went, "All right, well, there you go.