Calgary’s Phantom at the Jube gushes over city, audiences
Posted Aug 18, 2017 4:11 pm.
Last Updated Aug 18, 2017 4:26 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
It’s 15 minutes before the curtain will rise and all is quiet in Derrick Davis’ dressing room at the Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium.
“Nobody comes in,” he said. “I dim the lights and I focus and I kind of fall into the character.”
Makeup artists, engineers and other actors are nowhere to be found as he prepares to play one of the most iconic roles in theatre history during the two-week Calgary run of The Phantom of the Opera.
“It’s been absolutely amazing,” he said of his time in Calgary. “The only thing that I regret so far here is that we don’t have more time to explore and enjoy your incredibly beautiful city.”
Like most traveling productions for Broadway Across Canada, most of the performers’ time is spent at the theatre, but Davis has squeezed in as much sightseeing as possible.
Along with a white hat ceremony, he’s shopped and walked around the city, attended Taste of Calgary and took a trip to Banff.
“Breathtaking, it was so, so beautiful,” he said of the mountains, despite the smoke from the Verdant Creek wildfire. “It didn’t hinder our enjoyment at all, but I do feel bad and I’m sending all of my well-wishes to anyone who is affected by that.”
The warm homecoming Davis and the rest of the cast has felt has come through every night.
“The audiences have been so warm and welcoming and all that we know from the States about Canadians, about being so hospitable and so kind and welcoming, it’s just been proven so many times over in our stint here in Calgary,” he described.
Playing the iconic role certainly comes with pressure, not only on singing challenging numbers like the famous Music of the Night, but tapping into the varied emotions the famous character goes through on stage.
For Davis, that means trusting his opera training, preparation and dedication.
“I feel as an actor and as a performer, if I’m true to the art that I’ve married my life to, then they’ll get a show that will be unique from any other phantom experience that they’ve had,” he said.
But his connection to the character goes a little deeper.
Phantom was the first musical his parents ever took him to see, and while it was a role he always admired, he wasn’t sure he would get the chance to don the famous mask when he was younger.
But after Robert Guillaume and Norm Lewis eventually played the part, he eventually became only the third person of colour to take it on in the show’s 30-year history and the first for a traveling company.
“By and large, people just fall into and enjoy the story,” he said. “For some people it’s a big deal, but for the majority I’ve encountered, it’s whether you play the role well or not.”
The Calgary run ends Sunday night before moving on to Winnipeg next week.
For the veteran Davis, who has starred in The Lion King, Dreamgirls and more, the pressure is a little bit higher on a traveling show than on a fixed stint on Broadway.
“People have been saving for a long time and have been planning for this night and it’s a really, really special occasion,” he said. “We want to make sure that absolutely, every performance is like opening night for the audience.
“It’s exhausting on our end, but we go to bed feeling accomplished and feeling like we did what we came to do and I feel like the audiences have been experiencing just that.”
