NR: You did three Andrew Lloyd Webber shows, and now you're doing one by Frank Wildhorn. Can you compare the two experiences?

RB: What I love about both of them is that they really write for singers. They write music that is very singable and that takes advantage of your instrument. It's challenging and takes you to extremes. The guys who wrote Les Miz, Boublil and Schonberg, do not necessarily write for singers. Their stuff is harder to sing because they write strange extremes. They write things that are hard to sing as opposed to things that take you to the better part of your voice, the top of your voice, or the low end of your voice. For me, the difference, at least regarding this role, as opposed to roles that Andrew Lloyd Webber has written, I find Frank's stuff a little bit easier to sing because he defines the voice within a certain number of notes and he stays there. Percy is a true tenor role. He doesn't get down into the basement. He really stays up in that area. As the Phantom, you're singing bass notes, you're singing baritone notes, and you're singing tenor notes, so you're all over the place. Alex in Aspects of Love was like that too - huge extremes, low A's, high B-flats.

NR: How do you get through eight performances of that?

RB: Oh, very carefully. For the first year that I did Aspects, I did eight shows a week and it was a killer. You have to be careful and you have to watch it. You find a way to pace. You think, "This is Wednesday and I have to get to Sunday. This is how much I can give and still give the audience the show that they paid to see." Phantom was harder because the Phantom is a sick, sick man. He's messed up, and in that messed up quality, there is huge angst going on inside of him, so consequently, not just singing but in the interpretation of the role, you're putting your body through intense extremes. There's a lot of screaming, and I found that one really tough to do eight a week. By the end of my run in that I was only doing seven shows a week. It was regular for me to miss one a week.

NR: Before your first audition, how much did you know about this show and about the League? Had you seen it?

RB: I didn't know anything about the League. I had seen the show. I saw version 1 and I remember liking it, thinking it had a lot of things that were just terribly wrong with it, that bothered me, but overall, liking the show. I thought, "Despite some of the stuff that's dreadful, there's really some great stuff going on here." I thought Douglas was wonderful. I liked all three of the principals. I thought they were all great. I liked the essence of the story. I thought that if they could just tie it together somehow, I thought it would be really good. But, I never thought it would run. I never thought I'd get the chance to do it, because I expected it to be a two or three month run. I thought it could never make it because the critics had clobbered it. Despite some good performances, I didn't think it was going to happen.

NR: By the time you got to audition for this it was well into SP2.

RB: I auditioned at least a year and a half after I had seen it. I was auditioning for it in January of `99 when Douglas had said that he was going to leave. I had not seen version 2 yet. I auditioned that day...I remember that audition. I was doing Bed and Sofa in Philadelphia and they called me. They said, "We want you to come audition. Pick up the material." I had never gotten so much material for an audition in my life. They gave me "Prayer," "She Was There," "Into the Fire," and they gave me four scenes. It was the "Into the Fire" scene, the garden spelling scene, the footbridge, and a scene with Armand I think, which I never actually did. I ended up just doing the three scenes. I couldn't believe it. What could you do?

NR: Now that you know the part, you know why.

RB: Yeah, now I see why. There was so much they had to find out. I worked on the scenes, and the songs I just learned as best as I could. I held the music while I sang them. The scenes...I remembered that he creates this fop character. I remembered that the spelling scene was intended to be very funny, but I couldn't remember anything that Douglas had done with it, so I just thought, "How about this? How about that?" Apparently one of the things they liked the most about my audition was that I came up with all this stuff that nobody had ever done before. I did the audition and they were all way impressed. Bobby (Longbottom) said, "Have you seen the show since I took it over?" I said, "No, I haven't" so he said, "Can you come tonight?" I said, "Yeah, I guess so." I had the callback a week later and they offered me the job on the spot. Russell Garrett showed me a dance combination which was the only different thing that we had done. I read the footbridge with Rachel (York) and I finished everything. Bobby said, "We think you're tremendous. We'd love to offer you this part." Nobody's ever done that before. I've never been offered a role on the spot. That sort of happened with Les Miz. Richard Jay-Alexander said, "Are you interested in this?" but he didn't say. "We're going to call you." I was blown away. I went to the Majestic where Sandra, my girlfriend was playing in Phantom, and she said, "How did it go?" She was on stage in the rehearsal and I remember mouthing to her, "I got it!" She was just thrilled. Everybody was beside themselves.

Interview conducted and photographs by Nancy Rosati.