The musical’s world tour, now in Seoul, weathered a cast outbreak to become perhaps the only major show running. Can theater learn from its example?
“The Phantom of the Opera” has garnered plenty of superlatives over the years, including the longest-running show in Broadway history. But in recent months, it has also laid claim to a more unlikely title: pathbreaking musical of the Covid-19 era.
As theaters around the globe were abruptly shuttered by the pandemic, with no clear path to reopening in sight, the world tour of “Phantom” has been soldiering on in Seoul,South Korea, playing eight shows a week. And it has been drawing robust audiences to its 1600-seat theater, even after an outbreak in the ensemble led to a mandatory three-week shutdown in April.
The musical, with its 126-member company and hundreds of costumes and props, is believed to be the only large-scale English-language production running anywhere in the world. And it has remained open not through social-distancing measures — a virtual impossibility in the theater, either logistically or financially, many say — but an approach grounded in strict hygiene.
And it’s one that its composer, Andrew Lloyd Webber, is arguing can show the way for the rest of the industry, a point he is hoping to demonstrate to the world, as he prepares to turn the Palladium, one of seven theaters he owns in London, into a laboratory for lessons learned in Seoul.
“I don’t think we should just be sitting on our hands and saying, it’s all doom and gloom, we can’t do anything,” he said in an interview last week. “We have got to make the theaters as safe for everybody as we possibly can,” he said. And South Korea, he said, shows that it can work.
That the show, at the Blue Square cultural complex in central Seoul, has gone on is a testament not just to the protocols in the theater, but to South Korea’s rigorous system of test, trace and quarantine, which has kept the virus largely under control.
It was also a matter of sheer timing and luck, though it didn’t seem that way at first.
When the tour’s previous stop in Busan,South Korea’s second biggest city, wrapped up in mid-February, the country was emerging as the latest epicenter of the pandemic.
The company mostly went home for a break to Britain, Italy, North America, Australia and elsewhere. Serin Kasif, vice president of Lloyd Webber’s company, the Really Useful Group, and the producer of the tour, said she was fielding daily messages from company members anxious about whether to return.
On March 2, when Kasif flew to Seoul to begin preparations to open there,South Korea had the second-highest number of confirmed cases, and the pandemic had not yet fully hit Britain.
She contrasted the “overwhelming sense of fear” that developed in London with what she had experienced in Seoul, with its clear governmental directives and local partners who had lived through previous epidemics like SARS.
“When I was speaking to our Korean partners, in lead-up to the decision to continue, one said, ‘The word “unprecedented” keeps getting used, but it’s not unprecedented here,’ ” she explained.
