'Phantom' outlasts 'Cats' as Broadway's longest-running

NEW YORK -- Broadway has a new long-run champion: "The Phantom of the Opera." \nAndrew Lloyd Webber's lushly romantic musical about a haunted, disfigured composer pining for a beautiful young soprano in the Paris Opera House, was set to surpass "Cats" Monday as the longest-running show in Broadway history.\nWith performance number 7,486 Monday night, the show was to top Lloyd Webber's feline extravaganza, which closed in September 2000. "Phantom" has lasted nearly 18 years at the Majestic Theatre, where it opened Jan. 26, 1988 -- and the end is nowhere in sight.\nAsk Lloyd Webber, whose other megahits include "Jesus Christ Superstar" and "Evita," to explain the phenomenal success of "Phantom," and he says with a laugh, "If I really knew, I would do it again.\n"I think there isn't another musical that has been written in the last two decades or so, which has a plot that is so escapist, that allows high romance to happen."\nCameron Mackintosh, the show's savvy producer, agrees.\n"The musical is a kind of beauty-and-the-beast story. It appeals to everyone because it is about an impossible love, which I think many of us have had," Mackintosh says.\n"The whole framework or design of the show is that you are sucked into this mythical world below the opera house and yet shown something where we can feel the same emotions as one can feel in normal life."\nMackintosh is now in the enviable position of having the three longest-running shows in Broadway history: "Cats," which closed after 7,485 performances, in second place, and "Les Miserables," which shut in May 2003 after, 6,680 performances, in third.\nAll have been enormously profitable, but the money made by "Phantom" has been staggering. Its worldwide box-office gross -- the show is still running in London, too -- has gone past $3.2 billion. More than 80 million people around the world have seen the musical, which has been presented in two dozen countries.\nNew York grosses have been nearly $600 million, with the show seen by nearly 11 million theatergoers at the Majestic. New York has had 11 different Phantoms, starting with Michael Crawford, who originated the role in the London production in October 1986.\nBoth Lloyd Webber and Mackintosh are wary about predicting how long the musical will run.\nA new generation has been turned on to "Phantom" through the release of the movie version and then the DVD, according to Mackintosh. Both have given the musical new life at the box office.\nAnd now, is there life after "Phantom" for the two men?\nMackintosh is busy with several other projects, including co-presenting the Broadway hit "Avenue Q" in London where the musical will open in June. And in the fall, Macktinosh and Disney will produce the stage version of "Mary Poppins" in New York at Disney's New Amsterdam Theatre. An opening is set for Nov. 16.\nLloyd Webber plans to put on his producing hat, too. He may have a hand in producing the first recording for young American singer, 14-year-old Andrea Ross.\nThen there is an upcoming London revival of "Evita," directed by Michael Grandage, that Lloyd Webber says is "going to be more Latin than the original." Auditions are down to three actresses for the title character, he revealed -- with a decision to be made after he returns to London from the "Phantom" festivities.\nBesides producing a revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "The Sound of Music," planned for next October at the London Palladium, the composer is reading three projects right now that may find their way to the stage, but he declined to elaborate.\n"I don't want to rush into writing something for the sake of it. Having written 14 musicals now, you don't want to make the 15th something you're doing because you feel you have to," Lloyd Webber says.