If on Thursdays they are uphill, think that there is a man who has among his obligations kidnap a soprano, blackmail his bosses, kill an opera tramoyist and throw a spider lamp on a armchair To overflow. If on Friday the week seems to never end, keep in mind how this routine continues: sneak disguised as an angel of death in a cemetery, manipulate and threaten the soprano and its relatives, hang up almost asphyxiation of an aristocrat in An opera on fire, discover the power of compassion, disappear. That day, by the way, all this is done twice. On weekends? It is not forgiven a day.
Gerónimo Rauch (Buenos Aires, 46 years old) embodies the ghost of The opera ghost five times a week From the premiere of this work, the most successful musical of the public of all time, in Madrid on September 4, 2023. His working day involves touring the dark arch of one of the most overwhelming characters of the genre function after function. “I am like a footballer who has to play every day,” defends the Argentine, based in Madrid for years, one morning at the Albéniz Theater, where for now he is represented from the play.
Rauch has gone through this story hundreds of times on this journey, which will end on April 20, and will continue in it when, in June, the production begins to turn throughout Spain until 2027: that month will go through Torrevieja, Burgos and Vigo; It will continue in July and August for Valencia, Gijón, Cuenca and Valladolid and will settle in Barcelona for four months at the Tivoli Theater until February 1 of next year. The tour will end in January 2027 in Gran Canaria.
In the end, Rauch will have played the ghost in Spain for three years, to add the other two, between September 2012 and August 2014, which passed with the mask placed in the West End of London. At this step, it will end up bordering the thousand functions as the most murderous composer in Paris. It is an honor and, also, a challenge for any artist. “The only way to maintain a character for so long is whether you feel that you can continue giving him something, or if I keep giving you something,” he clarifies. “I am vibrating, using the character according to my emotions of that day, according to what Christine inspires me (the soprano that the ghost falls in love) or Raúl (the aristocrat she loves, played in Madrid by Guido Balzetti). He is a very cyclotymic character, he has many contrasts. ”
The Madrid version has approached Rauch to a very unique line of the theater: actors capable of defending the same function year after year, season after season. It happens with the works of greatest endurance on the billboard, which are usually musical, especially with the holy trinity of The opera ghost (in the West End between 1985 and 2020), The miserable ones (39 years in the West End and counting) and The lion king (27 years in Broadway and without viewing). Broadway had the same ghost, Howard McGillin, during a decade, from 1999 to 2009, 2,500 functions, from one world with twin towers to another with Obama in the White House. Brad Little: Between Broadway and different international tours, 2,200 functions. The Welshman John-Owen Jones: Ghost in the West End about 1,500 times by gusts between 2001 and 2013. That in Spain we have a ghost of header is symbolic of how much the genre has settled in this country in recent years.
Rauch explains that, for him, navigating each function is, at this point, to enter a kind of trance. It begins shortly after the ghost between the scene, after a room of the first act, when the mythical duet ends up singing The opera ghost. “And when we finish, I already,” here Rauch clicks my fingers, “as I forget. I am totally within the function. I don’t let her loose anymore. I can be in the dressing room by answering a message and following everything that happens, ”he continues. People who work with Rauch say it is normal to see him seemingly calm, with his mate in his hand, scarce seconds before jumping to the stage to terrify the character on duty.
He defends – and the public seems to endorse him – the excellence of the score. “In that trance I already launched myself to the next song, The music of darkness. People think what nonsense to sing this. No, no, it has to be so elegant: it goes from the tiny to pure intensity and then returns to the small. It is really very difficult. I already make that song being inside the ghost. ”
When composer Andrew Lloyd Webber premiered THE GHOST OF TO THE OPERA In 1986, the work became a huge success in part thanks to a perspective detail. Yes, he told the same horror story as Gaston Leroux’s novel, published in 1910: a man with a deformed face and great musical sensitivity, hidden in the catacombs of the Opera of Paris, which murders and terrifies the company until they have been bent. But the musical allows you to feel some compassion for the ghost. Moreover, well interpreted, this monster can result in sexi: who is a fan of the musical (and they are counted by millions) is on the protagonist’s side. “Look, there is a phrase that gives me all the creation of the character: when he says that the first thing his mother did was cover him before cradling him,” explains Rauch. “I am Argentine, I have done therapy all my life, always Freudian: the mother, the mother, the mother, everything is the mother. I always say: here there is cloth to work. ”
That love is essential so that all the score is not crumbled and the challenge of the function in the me too era is not to lose it, although seen from the present the ghost seems less hypnotic antihero in its darkness and more a good abuser and sexual manipulator. “I work as if I were a child, an asperger,” Rauch continues. “I work a lot the repetition of movements,” here rubs the thighs with the knuckles compulsively, “as if the ghost were calming down. It is like a teenager who does not understand the world around him. He did not have a mother and a dad to give him love. It has not had limits. The only limits were rejection of society, people’s rejection, someone never said, this is fine, this is bad. He lived caged, exposed in a circus, like a weirdo. So, of course, from that place there is an immensity of possibilities that can happen. ”
Before arriving on this trip, Rauch already knew the demands of a megamusical. In the year 2000 he first put on the skin of Jean Valjean of The miserable ones, The only megaprotagonic capable of shadowing the ghost in musical demand, in Buenos Aires. “All Valjeans That I know they can do the ghost, but not all ghosts can make Valjean, ”he warns. He repeated as they are valid in the Madrid and Barcelona representations of the work, between 2010 and 2012, and from there, Cameron Mackintosh (“the most powerful, successful and influential theatrical producer of the world,” according to The New York Times) He took London. He made these two papers in the West End and made a hole in the world. Moreover, he tries to bring a new musical by Frank Wildhororn to Madrid, composer of Jekyll & Hyde. Do not release a garment on what is going. “But it would be to do the world premiere here,” he emphasizes.
Until then, it will be in the Paris Opera, rubbing the knuckles, learning from the greatest selfishness the power of compassion. “In the end, after all the trip, the ghost ends up understanding that love is something else, and it is not the obsession he feels. It’s a thriller Psychological, I find it fascinating. ”