Let Your Fantasies Unwind: Ben Crawford Says the Phantom of the Opera Is the 'Lady Gaga' of His Time

Ben Crawford, The Phantom of the Opera’s current leading man—and former Broadway.com vlogger—is starting to go a little stir-crazy. “I made a boat out of some cardboard boxes, and I take the broom and push myself around the apartment,” he joked in a #LiveAtFive: Home Edition interview with Broadway.com's Paul Wontorek. To make matters worse, “You know what I can’t get out of my head?” he asked. “‘Music of the Night!’” Apparently, peace of mind during a viral pandemic that’s closed Broadway doesn’t entail escaping Andrew Lloyd Webber’s notoriously catchy score. “I mean, we all know that Lord Lloyd Webber can write some good stuff,” Crawford laughed, “but you sing it every day for almost two years and it becomes a real earworm, apparently.”

Crawford, who began playing the Phantom in April 2018, said he has had a recent dramatic adventure, though. "I hadn’t been out in a couple days, and yesterday I got some masks from Amazon with filters," Crawford said. "I got a couple, cleaned them off, and I went out.” Crawford said the trip was worthwhile. He made an exciting score: soap. “It’s a weird kind of situation in Manhattan right now,” he laughed.

Yet Crawford, who took the necessary precautions to protect himself while venturing outside his apartment, was dismayed at what he saw on the street. “I just want to remind everyone: social distancing,” he said firmly. “It’s a little frustrating on the streets of Manhattan right now—people just not taking it seriously. It’s a little shocking, and it’s why New York has thousands of cases.” Stay inside, he implored. 

As for the Phantom, what if he was trapped in the dungeons of a conceivably shuttered Opera Populaire? “I don’t think he’d be handling it too well,” posited Crawford. “He likes to piss people off, so I think he’d be having a lot of problems just kind of sitting down there, self-quarantining.” A smart guy, the Phantom wouldn’t take the risky chance of exposing himself to the virus. “He understands how, you know, viruses travel and things like that. But he’d be very frustrated. He’d probably make some more traps for the theater." Crawford thinks the Phantom would be working on his operatic masterwork, Don Juan Triumphant—a piece of musical genius not to be ignored. According to the show’s leading man, its score suggests the Phantom is ahead of his time. “The opera that he writes has a lot of dissonance and a lot of chords that are not pleasing to the ear,” said Crawford. “It’s him trying to pursue the next level of what music is in the time. It’s like when rock ‘n’ roll came out.” Crawford says we ought to consider Don Juan a piece of 19th-century pop music. “He’s the Lady Gaga of the period.”

Watch the rest of Crawford’s #LiveAtFive: Home Edition interview below.