“Friends who are teaching have said to me, ‘It’s amazing how many young women have come to us and said it was ‘Phantom of the Opera’ and Sarah Brightman that made them want to learn classical music or work in musicals.’ Hearing those things is an absolute delight.”īrightman will revisit all eras of her music career during her new Las Vegas show, “A Starlight Symphony,” which will run at the Venetian from Oct. It’s about leaving - if you can - some sort of legacy for other, younger artists to learn by.
“It always comes from something in the past.
“I don’t believe anybody invents anything,” she laughs. “It’s like a little jewel - and it’s a jewel that will shine for many years to come.”īrightman has not starred in a stage musical since Lloyd Webber’s “Aspects of Love” in the early 1990s (the couple divorced in 1990), preferring to concentrate on a recording career that has seen over 25 million albums sold and is often credited with creating the classical crossover genre via songs such as “Pie Jesu” and “Time to Say Goodbye.” “It’s not going to be a piece that disappears,” she adds. Everybody somehow identifies with the characters and the love story it’s very personal and that’s its secret. “It can still go wrong - but it worked right from the beginning and that’s because people felt the spirit of it. “Everybody involved was truly great at their task, but that doesn’t mean everything,” she remembers of the original production. “I felt totally disassociated from it, but yet it was me that it was about.”Įventually a compromise was reached, and the show became such a smash hit that it has played ever since (save for a suspension during the pandemic), becoming Broadway’s longest running show – although it will finally end its run on February 18, 2023. “I still don’t fully understand it,” she laughs now of the fuss. She won a part in “Cats” and later married its composer, Andrew Lloyd Webber, who cast her as Christine Daaé in both the original London and New York productions of “The Phantom of the Opera.” She was nearly prevented from taking up the 1988 Broadway role by the American Actors’ Equity Association’s ruling that she was not enough of an international star to warrant taking the part from an American performer. Indeed, Brightman went from dancing on weekly British chart show “Top of the Pops” to releasing her own disco singles, before a move into musical theater. So, all the time I was doing Hot Gossip, I was training my voice, because that was what I wanted to end up doing.” “But I was still very young and it wasn’t time for that to come to fruition. “I knew I had a great gift in my voice,” she says.
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