"El Fantasma de la Ópera Está Ahí" en Buenos Aires!

Who needs to go to Broadway when you can go to Avenida Corrientes? That’s the question I was asking myself as a group of friends and I strolled down the theater district of Buenos Aires. As we made our way to Teatro Opera to watch El Fantasma de la Ópera (The Phantom of the Opera), we passed by theater after theater and big shiny sign after big shiny sign just beckoning to us to come in. When we got to the intersection of Avenida Corrientes and Avenida 9 de Julio (the main center of town), we felt like we were in Times Square (see picture at left).

The show itself was truly spectacular. I had just seen The Phantom of the Opera about four weeks beforehand on Broadway, and I must say that there was very little difference between the two productions. Well…except for the fact that one cost approximately $75 and the other one cost approximately $17. Can you guess which one was which? And the other difference, of course, was that one was in Spanish and the other one was in English. I was amazed at how well they were able to make the words match the score without changing the overall meaning of the lyrics though. Having just seen the play in English certainly helped me understand it when I saw it in Spanish, but the experience also made me realize how much of the emotion and spirit of a show is conveyed in the visual aspects that are unrelated to the verbal aspects.

Although there were some problems with the audio in the theater, the visual special effects came through nicely. They didn’t have the same pyrotechnic equipment here as on Broadway, but I felt that the set, lighting, costumes and other aspects of the design and appearance were just as superb as their counterparts in New York.



After the show was over, we hung around outside the door to take a group picture (which is displayed at left). While we were there, we noticed a well-dressed and attractive woman being interviewed by some sort of television crew. We assumed that she must have been an actress from the show so we quickly opened our playbills and realized that she had played the role of Christina, one of the three principle characters. But how did she get out of the dressing room so quickly?



Anyway, I didn’t have much time to think about this if I was going to make a move so I quickly approached her and asked her for her autograph on my playbill and told her that I thought she did a very fine job. She personalized the autograph for me and even wrote “con amor” (with love) and drew a heart at the end, acting extremely kind the entire time. By the time I got back to my group of friends, they had figured out that she was not Christina. Not only that, but she didn’t even have a role in the play. Rather, she was Sofia Zamolo, the top model for the entire country of Argentina! Please note the photograph that I was able to snap of her here at right.

So the stunningly attractive and world famous Sofia Zamolo is in love with me! Not bad…