One of my former employer's masterstrokes was building a brand new, 2,000-seat theatre, hiring Wagnerian tenor legend Peter Hofmann and still managing to get back in the black after a mere twelve months. Phantom in Hamburg was a huge deal: Peter Hofmann was still a huge name in the classical world (all the while maintaining his pop career) and all stops were pulled out (of the Phantom's organ?) to make this show a success. The marketing department worked overtime to sell the idea of a quasi-opera - it's a musical, not an operetta, after all - to an audience still unfamiliar with the nuanced difference. Cats you could sell easily as a dance show, Starlight Express, still selling out in Bochum after all these years, was successfully launched as a poppy, roller-skating spectacular. Selling the idea of a semi-serious musical entertainment as neither opera nor operetta was a more difficult task. In the end, they decided to play it straight and sell it as a serious work of art. The bet worked: Phantom sold out eight times a week for over 90% of its ten-year run in Hamburg. Considering Peter Hofmann was only on stage for the first fourteen months of the run the efforts of the marketing department cannot be praised too highly.
The music director, J, and management made me feel very welcome and I played my first show on the keyboard after about a week. All of a sudden, J panicked and told me I had to conduct earlier than anticipated. I blitzed the score day and night for a week or two and stepped up and conducted the show from memory one Sunday afternoon in July, 1991. The cast included Tim Tobin, Hartwig Rudolz and Silvia Krüger, whose husband, Klaus Florian Vogt, played first horn that day. Anyone familiar with the world of opera will know that last name: a few years later, Klaus gave up his job as horn player in the Hamburg Philharmonic and went on to become one of the busiest Wagnerian tenors on the circuit, a regular at the Bayreuth Festival, the New York Met, Covent Garden and Vienna, amongst others. Quite a career change.
For the first time in a long time I'd found myself single. I was approaching thirty and felt the time was right to maybe grow up. One of the cast members, an American girl called L, caught my interest. She was feisty, entertaining, talented and single. Maybe a bit brash for me, but worth a little investigating. I started hitting on her, she realised, remained civil, and that was it. Eventually, her dad came to visit. We were introduced and got on famously. After he left, L's attitude towards me changed completely. She started to seek me out, wondered if I could drive her home etc. Basically, the tables were turned but I'd lost interest. In her heart of hearts, she wasn't interested but must have adored her father so much that his opinion counted for more than her own feelings. I write this in hindsight, years later...Anyhow, I'd run her home then drive off and meet up with former girlfriends from my Cats time. The girl who sang the lead opposite Peter Hofmann had started making demands on my time, too. She needed to put an album together and wanted me to help her select from the songs her producer had sent for her approval. We ended up spending a lot of time together, all of it, sadly, platonic, but I was obsessed with her; she had a star quality you couldn't define. L had disappeared off my radar, but you must never underestimate a Jersey Girl. She now had a mission and it was to be my destiny to obey.
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