by Rick Goodstein
I was recently reading in The Wall Street Journal about Alan Lampel. You may have never heard of Alan Lampel – I certainly hadn’t. Alan has been the lead electrician of “The Phantom of the Opera” since the show opened on October 9, 1986, and retired on April 23 after the final performance of “Phantom.” Except for vacations, sick leave, and touring, that’s more than 36 years and 13,000 performances.
We can’t imagine working the same show for multiple years, let alone more than 36 years. According to The Journal, Alan began working on “Phantom” before the show even began its historic run as a technician in a scene shop preparing for the show’s opening on Broadway. There may not be a Guinness record for longest tenured theatre technician, but if there is, it’s likely that no one has seen or worked more Broadway shows than Alan.
According to the Journal, Phantom will close after 13,981 performances on April 23, far exceeding any run in Broadway’s illustrious history. (Chicago, which is still running, has been running since 1996 and The Lion King since 1997).
We’ve been thinking about Alan’s job – hitting basically the same lighting cues in the same script for 8 performances a week for more than 36 years. That takes a remarkable dedication and focus!
From personal experience, we can understand the challenges for anyone who is working on a show in rep. How do you “get up” for the same show night after night? How can you keep it fresh? What do you do to mitigate the inevitable boredom and lack of focus.
For Alan, he hilariously keeps up with his beloved Mets baseball team when they play in the summer. We’re not sure if the producers knew this; but undoubtably he has the show down cold and isn’t going to miss a cue every time first baseman Pete Alonso hits a home run. If he did, his time with “Phantom” would quickly be over regardless of his tenure!
However, for those of us who have the privilege of working a show for an extended run, there are ways and tricks to “keep it fresh.” For one, it’s being professional – you’re getting paid for your art!
It’s not just backstage crew members who have to maintain a professional consistency, but cast members or musicians have the same expectations for nightly perfection. Being a professional performing artist is one of the few professions where perfection is expected. Nobody is going to pay for an actor to only deliver 30% of her lines, a musician to miss more notes than they hit, or a dancer to forget the choreography.
Think about this, Pete Alonso, the New York Mets 1st baseman. In 2022 he hit 40 home runs and batted in 131 runners. A remarkable year by any measure in major league baseball and good enough to be named to the All-Star team. On the flip side, Pete failed to get a hit more than 7 times out of every 10 at bats last year and struck out 128 times out of 597 at bats. That’s good enough to be an All-Star. And Major League Baseball isn’t the only career where you fail more than you succeed. For example, Michael Jordan missed 26 game-inning shots in his career. Let that sink in.
But such a rate of failure might be an anomaly. There are plenty of jobs where perfection is expected such as bridge engineers, accountants, pilots, and surgeons; however, they are only in the public light if they fail.
Arts professionals have the expectation of perfection and thus must maintain their focus. There are “tricks” that each individual has to develop to keep each show fresh. For us, we remind ourselves that it’s the audiences’ first time seeing or hearing the performance. For others it might be thinking of someone who is in the audience or how you could improve on a certain area of performance. It’s up to you to figure out what works for you.
Always remember that each audience has an expectation that the performers won’t “phone it in.” Sometimes you may not be on “A” game – the secret is to ensure that the audience doesn’t know!