SP: Interview with Ron Bohmer

NR: And then you went into a whole roller coaster.

RB: Then I went into a crazy roller coaster. Douglas decided to stay and they called to tell me they didn't have a job for me. The hardest part about that...it came at a time when financially, I really needed the job. It was hard to have it disappear, but also, there was no guarantee I was ever going to get to do it again. Nobody knew what was going to happen. The next three months were tough because I had achieved something that I really was excited about, and was looking forward to doing, but it just sort of went into nether land. In the long run, it ended up being the best thing for me I think.

NR: Really? Why is that?

RB: I think it would have been really tough to come into that company replacing Douglas. I think the way that people would have viewed that would have been a very different thing - taking over a role in that sense, where you're just coming in for somebody, as opposed to having the six weeks of rehearsals. I started with a brand new company, with Carolee (Carmello), with Marc (Kudisch), and we really had a chance to make it our own thing.

NR: When you did Phantom, you probably felt that you had Michael Crawford on your shoulder.

RB: Yeah, and Davis Gaines, because I did it out in L.A. and Davis had done it out there for so long. I was held up to all of their ghosts.

NR: That's got to be hard and Douglas is one tough act to follow in this part.

RB: Totally. He took a role... he took a show that was struggling and was not getting along. He found a way to make it come along. He found a way to make people come back again and again to say, "What's he going to do now? What's he going to do next? How is he going to develop in this part?"

NR: Well, the ad libs went away in SP2 but people still came back.

RB: Yeah, they went away with Bobby, but that's the way that Douglas likes to work and in a star performance I have to respect that. He felt he had the right to go down a different path every night with the role, and it worked for him. He's great at that.

NR: But the audiences still came to SP2, so it wasn't only the ad libs that kept people coming.

RB: I think what was good to find out, and what version 3 proved to people, was that although Douglas' quality and his ad libs made it an engaging and a fun show and sort of hooked people, what was achieved by SP2 and consequently SP3 was that the story really is wonderful, and that also was enough to keep people coming in.

NR: How did you approach walking in and expecting people to say, "He's not Douglas"?

RB: They still do. Some people do. I get a mixed bag. We rented The Music Man the other night and he's got this wonderful line where he says, "Well, that's one for and one against." I get that every night. I'll be at the stage door and I'll have a line of people that will say, "It was wonderful. It was brilliant. I've never seen anything that I loved so much." And then I'll get somebody who's a big fan of Douglas' and they'll say, "Good job."

NR: How do you know they're a fan of Douglas?

RB: Oh, you can tell. They have a button or something that says they're in the League.

NR: If you had come in and completely imitated him they would have thought you were very weird. That would have been sad.

RB: It would have been a huge mistake for me to try to imitate Douglas because I can't. I can't do what he did.

NR: Well, you shouldn't.

RB: I knew what I wanted to do with it from the moment I saw it. I did the same thing with Phantom. I read the novel and I thought, "Oh. It's about this. It's not about that." That's what I made it about. This is about a man who is not relishing this character of this fop that he created. He loathes it. It's a disguise that is a huge weight for him to carry. More than anything, he desperately loves his wife and he's destroyed that he believes that she betrayed him. When he finds out that she hasn't, he can do anything. He becomes Superman at that moment because it's all he's ever wanted. He adores her. You know, Percy risked everything just to marry this woman. She's an actress. Let's face it, "actress" was a bad word in that society for years and years. They were whores, they were the worst people. All of his friends told him he was marrying way below his station and she was going to bring a disgrace on his house. But he believes in her and he marries her. What happens is his friends bring proof to him that she's his worst nightmare. He's destroyed by it. Hence, through that, he says, "I'll make amends. I'll do this." That's what drives him, but what a relief when he finds out.

NR: You do that scene (the footbridge) very differently and I really enjoy it. It's a very interesting take.

RB: I also wanted to redo Grappin. I wanted Grappin to be less of a big nose and all this stuff. I wanted him to be something where if Chauvelin REALLY looked, he would say, "Oh, my God. You're Percy Blakeney." I wanted it to be a thinner veil. Bobby and I decided that we wanted Grappin to be as if Percy Blakeney was a coin, and when you turned it over, Grappin would be on the other side. I didn't think it was the Grappin that was in the other version. I thought it was somebody slicker, and somebody a little more dark, and sort of creepy sinister, and that's what we tried to make in this version.

Continued in part 2...