According to the press kit, the Andrew Lloyd Webber/Cameron MacIntosh/Harold Prince musical version of this tale is the most commercially successful entertainment of the twentieth century and, with the show having just passed its twenty-first birthday since its October 1986 London premiere, any efforts to critique the writing would be, at best, tardy. The issue at hand is if audiences for this particular tour, which has been wandering around North America for seemingly as long as the Israelites wandered the desert searching for the promised land, is giving audiences the goods.
Vocally, this cast is probably one of the better ones, with John Cudia as the Phantom, Sara Jean Ford as Christine and Greg Mills as Raoul displaying impressive voices and acting their characters convincingly. Cudia's a charismatic and menacing Phantom, and manages an appropriate balance of the character's menace and humanity. Ms. Ford gives Christine a bit more substance than the script provides and she's especially effective in the second act when she comes into her own by agreeing to bait the Phantom into entrapment. Mills does what he can with Raoul, and together with Cudia and Ford, real tension is created in the climax.
Though equally good singers, the supporting cast is not as successful. Their execution is frequently sloppy. It had been 13 or 14 years since I'd seen a performance of this tour, and from the looks of things, it's been about that long since the company's been visited by a decent assistant director. Timing is off, like in the way the performers feign surprise at the Phantom's words split seconds before they hear those words, or when they're not given sufficient time to react to the discovery of Piangi's murder before the next hurried scene change. The sound system makes the orchestra sound mostly pre-recorded (though it's not), and the vocals come off rather tinny.