"Coverage"?

[HARRY HILL]

        I thought, earlier this year in Toronto, that I would finally
join the Western human race and see *Phantom Of The Opera* in that
beautiful theatre on Yonge Street. Sitting in the front row of the
balcony, I was visited again by that magical sensation of waiting for the
overture to begin and curtain to rise that had been so much a part of
my growing-up in the fifties. However, what I and the assembled multitude
was presented with was a series of totally hack performances from all but
the understudy playing the title role, accompanied by a tinny collection
of instrumentalists playing pseudo-music.

        The essential *thinness* of the experience galled. The infamous
chandelier thrilled only those few in the audience who were determined to
pretend to be frightened by it, the misty underground lake was
too technical to be an aesthetic success, the only slightly memorable song
with its one or two singable phrases was empty of recognizable emotion
was appreciably even worse in melodic and lyric thrust than *Climb Every
Mountain*.

        As a theatrical experience it was better and more gifted than
*Love and Human Remains*, certainly, although philosophically and
dramatically about the same level; it was better than Michel Tremblay's
self-indulgent new play *For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again* which will
doubtless tour the country in its paucid and paltry English translation,
and better and more honest than Paula Vogel's much-travelled Pulitzer
prizewinner *How I Learned to Drive*.

        The theatre has been through times like these before. Renaissance
audiences flocked to thoughtless revenge plays before Shakespeare shaped
them; 19th.Century crowds palpitatingly patronised the melodramas and
pageants before Ibsen and Checkhov brought household spiritual struggles
to the stage. George F.Walker has with some effect returned the power of
language to the bored boards of the theatre in Canada.

        A public does of course to some extent get the entertainment it
deserves, and if state funding doesn't provide the artistic climate for
good acting in good plays, musical or straight, then we are doomed to the
pretentions of basement productions and the vacuity of expensive
spectacle.

        Harry Hill
        Montreal