A Ghost of What Might Have Been

The moment Diane Flogerzi has dreaded is at hand.What should have been the deliriously happy culmination of a 15-year wait to see Michael Crawford in the movie version of “The Phantom of the Opera” instead has gone so unbelievably sour.

The film of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that stands as the highest-grossing stage or screen production in history will open Dec. 22. But for Flogerzi, the producers shouldn’t have bothered.

There will be no Crawford, who created the role on stage in 1986 and wowed audiences at Los Angeles’ Ahmanson Theatre a few years later. Instead, the film Phantom is Scottish actor Gerard Butler.

And so I had to reach Flogerzi, remembering her as the woman I’d written about in 1998 after she created a website arguing that only Crawford could properly immortalize the Phantom on film for future generations. Back then, there was talk that Antonio Banderas might play the role. Or John Travolta.

I sensed Flogerzi wouldn’t be taking this well. But just maybe, I thought, her passion had wilted. Perhaps now, 6 1/2 years later, she looked back on her Crawford crusade as frivolous.

Uh, not exactly.

“I think it’s sad,” she says. “I don’t think I’m as sad for myself as I am for people who never had the opportunity to see that performance.”

No Crawford is bad enough, she says. But Webber and director Joel Schumacher cast the Phantom as a man in his 30s, as opposed to the tortured older man portrayed by Crawford. Playing Christine is teenage actress Emmy Rossum. Flogerzi thinks they’re straying from the essential strength of the story. And then there’s the music.

“I just heard the soundtrack two days ago,” Flogerzi says. “There’s only one vocal performance in it that I thought was good, of any quality.”

She’s not alone. Time magazine’s review said Butler “despite a silky falsetto, hasn’t got the range or kick for the big sing.” Rossum, Time writes, “is a virginal, thin-voiced Christine.”

Disclosure time: I’m also a Phantom and Crawford fan and, within days of writing about Flogerzi in 1998, I received e-mails from across the country and abroad, thanking me. “Just wanted to let you know that you have my support 100% in your noble quest,” one reader wrote.

I liked the idea of involvement in a noble quest. Last week, I asked Flogerzi -- who lives in Palmdale, works for the FAA and is married with a 19-year-old son -- how she recalls those glorious days of nobility. “We had a lot of camaraderie and strong friendships were made, but I wouldn’t think of it as a fun experience,” she says. “It was work. We approached it like a political campaign. If you asked if it was worth it, I can assure you everyone would say, ‘Yes, we had an opportunity to be heard.’ ”

The website remains -- www.phantommovie.com -- but doesn’t require much attention anymore. When in high gear, Flogerzi and her “working group” of about a dozen people had a fundraiser and eventually took out 15 ads, most of them in Variety, pushing for Crawford’s casting.

All for naught, but Flogerzi says she’s not bitter. There will be no organized protesting of the movie, nor will she say she wants it to flop. No, she won’t see the movie. She says she can’t in good conscience contribute to box office receipts.

As one who succumbed to the musical and Crawford-as-Phantom, I feel Flogerzi’s pain. I’m bummed that I won’t hear him in theater sound. “I cared about it,” Flogerzi says of her efforts. “It had meaning for me at that time in my life. It was special and it was the most incredible performance I ever saw on stage. I wanted everyone to see it.”

But instead of celebrating a great grass roots victory on Dec. 22, she can only reflect on what might have been.

“We can’t change what’s happened,” she says, glumly. “Everyone has lost the performance.”

Dana Parsons can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at

[email protected].