”Attention, ladies and gentlemen: Michael has left the building. We repeat. Michael has left the building.”
It`s not quite that bad-yet. But, more surprising still, the entertainment phenomenon dubbed Michaelmania isn`t all about Michael Jackson, either. It`s about a nondescript British stage performer many Americans don`t even know by sight.
Yet, one of Michael Crawford`s female fans (and they are mostly female, by the way) is said to be a former Reagan official who seriously considered quitting her high-level job when an important, upcoming trip to China conflicted with a Crawford performance.
Women go ape for this guy, in a big way, and there are lots of them, including a 2,200-member international fan club based in the U.S.
The beloved subject of it all, Crawford, whose long, bumpy career took a big leap when he starred as ”The Phantom of the Opera” in London and on Broadway, and who is to open here Feb. 4 in ”The Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber” at the Chicago Theatre, sighs resolutely whenever the subject is mentioned.
”I just don`t go along with it,” he says. ”I mean, the L.A. Times writes this `Michaelmania` article when I was doing `Phantom` out there, and everyone has been picking up on it. But it`s grossly exaggerated. My mail tends to be 60 percent male and 40 percent female. And a lot of the 40 percent is from youngsters. I think it has to do less with my sex appeal and more with my characterization in `Phantom.` They saw him as a passionate and romantic character, which is how I played him.”
Nice try, Michael. Glynis Fuller, president of the Michael Crawford International Association, says her membership is 80 percent women. And they`re intense. For $25 in annual dues, members get access to a 24-hour hotline, detailing upcoming projects, times and dates of personal appearances, television and radio spots, any recent publicity and an ongoing clipping file. ”He`s a handsome man, yes, but I think it`s more a matter of how he thinks of things and how that comes through in his music,” says Fuller. ”Our members aren`t screaming teenagers. They`re mature, adult women who don`t go to rock concerts. They appreciate his incredible voice and that, when on stage, he gives everything he`s got.
”He`s also the sort of performer who expresses emotions on the surface that a lot of men don`t,” she adds. ”I think men tend to hide their feelings and women have a hard time understanding that. Women connect with Michael because, like them, he doesn`t hide his feelings.”
No one who has heard the ”Phantom” recording would deny Crawford`s beautiful, velvety voice. But part of the intensity that attracts fans to Crawford`s live performances also could be the result of his near-legendary industriousness and perfectionism, a passion for throwing himself into roles and theatrical jobs in a kind of stage echo of the early Robert De Niro.
For ”Barnum,” the Broadway show he turned into a personal triumph in its London version, he mastered tightrope walking and circus acrobatics. For an obscure film called ”The Games,” in which he played an Olympic athlete, he ran for three months and managed to get himself down to a 4-minute, 20-second mile. For ”Phantom,” he exercised his voice seven hours a day, six days a week, to stretch its limits to hit the notes, actually enlargening his diaphragm in the process.
”I`m a little intense about what I do,” he says. ”But for me the Phantom is an extraordinary character, and I felt I had to find sounds to bring out that extraordinary side, that unworldly side. I sang parts of that show crawling around on my hands and knees, not a particularly healthy or easy way to sing.”
Even for the current tour, where Crawford and an ensemble of other singers take turns romping through several dozen Lloyd Webber songs, Crawford arrives at the theater some three or four hours before curtain-to answer fan mail and go through a rigorous vocal warmup. ”It`s like being an athlete,”
he says. ”You have to stretch your voice in order to make the high jumps.”
Crawford leads the cast in the ”Phantom” selections, of course, including the beloved ”The Music of the Night,” and he usually performs
”Tell Me On a Sunday” from ”Song and Dance,” the soaring ”Love Changes Everything” from ”Aspects of Love” and ”Gethsemene” from ”Jesus Christ Superstar.”
”By the time I finish `Gethsemene,` I`m hyperventilating,” he says.
”There`s an immediate blackout, then the lights come up again, and I`m so out of breath I feel a little bit on stage as if I were George Burns stumbling around, looking for an ashtray for my cigar.”
Crawford was born Michael Dunbell Smith, ”not a name you could travel with,” and began singing professionally at age 12, with the English Opera Group. (Even before that he`d been a chorister at 9 at St. Paul`s Cathedral.) He sang for awhile on radio, left school at age 15 and got his first break in Richard Lester`s movie ”The Knack.”
A few other British movies, including Lester`s ”How I Won the War,” led to his role as Cornelius Hackle in the Hollywood film version of ”Hello, Dolly!” He returned to London for many years after that, performing regularly on stage and helping to launch a legendarily successful television show,
”Some Mothers Do `Ave `Em.” ”Barnum” came in the early `80s, ran on the West End for four years-longer than on Broadway-and helped win Crawford the title role for ”Phantom.”
The burgeoning success that has been a result of ”Phantom” is partly attributed to the singular passion and seductiveness Crawford brought to what at base is a fairly creepy role.
”I put a lot into the character, but I also had a lot more time to work on him than other actors who stepped into the role later,” Crawford says.
”I also went back to the original book (by Gaston Leroux) and I worked hard to discover where his pain comes from, where even his limp comes from. It`s deep. It`s not like a sore thumb. It`s a shattering, human pain.”
In any event, he wouldn`t want to shortchange what ”Phantom” won him.
”I love singing love songs. Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee and Ella Fitzgerald are great idols of mine, and if women-and men-want to respond, then it`s great that the work I`ve put into it has paid off. Otherwise, I might be back in England, stuffing cushions.”
