Giving Phantom Theater Life – An interview with Rick Bastrup

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Giving Phantom Theater Life – An interview with Rick Bastrup

 

Kyle Kruthoffer Photo Kyle Kruthoffer |
May 26, 2022

If you visited Kings Island between 1992 and 2002, you might remember coming face-to-face with the Maestro, the main “scaracter” of the former Phantom Theater attraction. 

I had the opportunity to sit down with Rick Bastrup, president of R&R Creative Amusement Designs, who was largely responsible for the story and design of the dark ride attraction. 

Kyle Kruthoffer: You own and operate R&R Creative Amusement Designs with your business partner. How did the company get its start?

Rick Bastrup: I ran into my business partner a long time ago. I was running security at the Disneyland hotel and he came in to get a job. He was working in entertainment at Disney and we just started doing some work together. And I had a lot of ideas, I'd always been like an amusement park, that design guy. As a kid, I've got designs of rides and things. So we started working together, but see, it was a different time then. We built a couple of models, one of a shootout ride that now, basically, everybody does. So we basically started calling people up and going out and seeing them and it was a different time. And we went to Six Flags and went to Dave Bradley Carousel Company, some of these guys way back when, and showed them what we did. And pretty soon we started working for Magic Mountain and a lot of other things, we built some models in that, but we started doing design work. And that's basically how we started just from the ground up and it just wound up and we were working all over the country and all over the world sometimes.

KK: So what sparked the idea of Phantom Theater? Where did this come from?

RB: Well, we had done (the theming for) Adventure Express, and at the time I was also designing Yosemite Sam and the Gold River Adventure at Six Flags over Texas, which was their old Spelunkers cave. So it was all the Warner Brothers characters so we were designing that and at the same time and opening at the same time as Phantom Theater. So after Adventure Express, then they got all of us to talk to us about the dark ride and we took a walk through what was there already (Smurf’s Enchanted Voyage) and basically developed that from there. And we worked closer with the Kings Island people as far as the ride systems and all of that kind of thing, but the actual show itself and all the characters and the music and the lighting and everything, we did.

KK: There are some wacky and mysterious characters that house this haunted attraction. Can you introduce us to them?

RB: “The Maestro” - He is the theater music arranger and talent manager who keeps the show together. Once billed as the “Theater Organist of the Age”, he keeps the whole entourage together and plays the mighty “Wurlitzer” organ to entertain the guests at the start of the show. He is not known for his good disposition and easily becomes irritated at anyone daring to enter their forgotten realm.

“The Great Garbonzo” -  No one knows his real name, but he originally toured the country at the turn of the century performing death defying stunts such as jumping his motorcycle through burning hoops and blowing himself up. He joined the theater to perform stunts such as shooting himself out of a cannon and running around with lit dynamite sticks. He has blown himself up many times but always seems to survive to show up for the next performance.

“Hilda Bovine” - Originally a star of the Berlin Theater, she moved to America to continue performing operatic music. Some say she was asked to leave as her ear splitting high notes caused mirrors to shatter and could also “raise the dead”.

“Willard Warbler” - Willard is a tenor singer who lives with perpetual stage fright. He tends to drop out of sight whenever he is scheduled to perform.

“Houdelini” - No one knows where he came from, but he mysteriously appeared one day on stage. He produces floating cards and magical illusions including pulling a rabbit out of a hat. He has trouble performing this trick though as the monster rabbit tends to be unruly and does not want to go back into the hat. The magician's name is similar to the great Houdini which causes problems on the playbills.

“Lional Burymore” - At the turn of the century, he was considered one of the world’s best actors. However, he came upon hard times and now wanders about the theater quoting from Macbeth”. 

“The Usher” - Sometimes referred to as "No Legs Larry" by park guests, he is only known as the Usher and floats about the theater lobby with a British accent, welcoming guests to the show.

“The Electrician” - His name is Gus and he was working at the theater before the performers arrived. His job is to maintain the antique lighting systems. However, he tends to blow circuits and fuses and always carries a flashlight so he can guide performers and guests through the darkness.

“Stage Hands” - Ralph and Marty are the inept backstage hands who more often than not find themselves hung up and hanging from some of the set rigging.

“Boiler Men” - No one knows the names of the two burley boilermen, only that they have always been down in the underground basement stoking the boilers that keep the power and steam running in the theater. The only fact known about them is that they enjoy blasting unwelcome visitors with blasts of heat and steam from the boiler.

KK: So take us through the design and the construction phase. What was that like?

RB: Well, first of all,  we usually start with a written script of some kind, which is the script I wrote, and you follow it through, and at the time it was called the Haunted Theater, it was just the working name on it. And we started working up the idea and basically, I wrote up my story, that's my story, and created all the characters, Hilda Bovine and Houdelini and The Great Garbonzo and all these crazy characters. And I wrote the stories and we gave them the stories and we started it in sketches, all the different scenes and the different characters. And once that was all approved, I did a presentation on that. Then we went into full board design, which was actually designing the characters and doing maquettes. Doing the music, writing the scripts, recording all the voices, all that kind of stuff is basically what we do and direct from start to finish. But I say, at the same time I was working in Texas on another dark ride, which was a lot of fun. We're going to two dark rides at the same time, but we got through it and got them open.

KK: The music behind the attraction, it's all custom and it's just, in my opinion, quite iconic. I think a lot of people still remember it to this day. How did that come about?

RB: We had a composer, a guy we worked with, Kevin Nadeau, off and on, he does TV commercials and TV shows and things like that. So yeah, we worked with him to create the soundtracks

KK: Were there any ideas or plans for the attraction that may have been cut or didn't make it to the final product that you could recall?

RB: Not really. I mean, it was exactly how we envisioned it. If you read the story, and scene by scene, the explanation of the scene is basically what it was. One thing Kings Island wanted, they wanted a big reflection, pepper's ghost type thing as The Haunted Mansion. And obviously, when you look at this it's got the flavor of The Haunted Mansion, it's funny and it's a little scary, but it's not gruesome. We don't do Halloween blood stuff and that. This is more, a lot more fun. But it basically followed my story. If you read the script, that script was done before any of the characters were built or designed. It wasn't after, it was before. And then somewhere along the line, we determined to change it, KI wanted to change it to Phantom Theater. And at the time, Phantom of the Opera was a big thing going on so... And that is, it's a better name. So yeah, we changed it to that, but KI came up with that piece.

KK: What were you and your team most proud of regarding this attraction?

RB: Well, I'd say probably just the character design. We used illusions all the way through this, a lot of things happening that it's just some old theatrical tricks and that, but still a lot of fun things moving and come in the light and black light and reflections and all that kind of thing. But I'd say probably the characters themselves because I know there's several websites that people have about the Phantom Theater and people have shown me those over the years so that they are still alive is amazing to me. I guess, would be the thing I'd be the most proud of, is people talk about The Great Garbonzo like he actually exists. AVG animatronics constructed off of our plans. And when I do that, I spec out all the motions, Maestro in the queue line, playing the organ had a lot of motion and stuff. And he turned around and talked to the crowd and that, because you saw them for a long time. The other characters, you're going by them so they have less animatronic movements to them. And we basically decided, I'll pick out the head moves, the eyes blink, the hand raises. Each one adds money to the effect, certainly, so that's how we create that basically on how long you're going to see the character and what he is supposed to be doing.

KK: Tell me a little bit about the Maestro. Of course, he is the most iconic character of the ride. What inspired the Maestro? How did he end up being the main anchor of the attraction?

RB: You see him three times throughout the ride. Before you go in the prop room, you see him up in the queue line and so forth. But I don't know, it just seemed like the logical leader of this thing was the Maestro and he does the music and plays the big organ and does the announcing and that kind of stuff. So now you hear him, you even hear him at the end, he's still talking. You'll be back, you’ll be back.” And basically, somebody needed to be in charge so I picked Maestro to be the guy in charge. The Great Garbonzo has a screw loose, he's running around with dynamite, blowing himself up, and Houdelini pulls monster rabbits out of his hat and Hilda Bovine, when she sings, she cracks all the glass. So these are all characters, the stage hands are, get hung up and the rigging, the electrician blows the circuit and then has to use a flashlight in your eyes. So he, I guess, would be more sane. He's wacky, it's more sane than the rest of the group.

KK: When it came to pitching the idea of Phantom Theater, was Kings Island looking for a more haunted attraction, or was that something that you guys had the idea and presented it to them, or did they come to you and ask for this vision that they've already had?

RB: They already had somewhat of an idea of what they wanted. And so, sometimes they'll do these things from the ground up, like the whole story and everything, but, and we did with this, but they had the concept of what they wanted to put in there and they wanted to go towards the Haunted Mansion and Disney. They didn't want to copy it, but that level of feeling. Fun, a little spooky, kind of scary, surprises and that, but nothing gory or bloody. So they had a basic idea of a theater with some characters, as I recall, not the characters themself, but kind of that idea. So I took it from there and wrote the story about how the thing closed down, the vaudevillian days were over and it closed down, but these characters decided they were going to stay there. So for decades, everything was boarded up, but people would hear music playing out of there and laughing and things like that, that was the kind of thing. So they continued on, they weren't really ghosts, they're just, they're phantoms. So that was the premise of it. But they had an initial, I wrote the story from the fact that they wanted a theater and some characters in the theater and the automation. So I took it from there and wrote the story and the characters and so forth.

KK: What would you say your favorite element or scene of the attraction is?

RB: I would guess probably The Great Garbonzo. I like Garbonzo showing up with the dynamite, I think it's kind of my alter ego, I think. And that's my favorite character, but there's so many different things. I tried to put a lot of different kind of illusions. Like the usher is floating, just floating there and it's quite an effect, but he's being run from behind, and it's illusion. It's a magic illusion when you see people floating up and down and that. Well, there's something coming from behind that's doing that. So that's, say for instance, the usher. You say, come on in, the show's about to begin, but he's floating around. But that's created from a rod that goes in his back and it's moving around, but you can't see that. So that's how that works. So each scene had something different to it. The characters that came alive, you'd see the picture and then the scrim would... You'd light up behind it and you could see it, and then it would be Garbonzo with dynamite.

KK: Is there any other stories that you think people should know about, or that you wanted to tell?

RB:  One thing all the way through you see is the lighting, which is really important. And I did all the lighting myself up on a ladder, focusing and putting in the gels and bringing up the levels off and on and that. And so that's really important because you can see some of the old pictures you have like the flash photography, the characters, versus the ones that I took and then we redigitized digitally, what it looks like. That's what makes the ride a dark ride, is lighting, lighting and sound or half the ride. So we were doing that the day it opened, Rick and I were up all night. Still, I was lighting the scene with the boiler room. “How about some heat?”, right? Opens up and bam, you got hit. And we were still doing the lighting on that. I was focusing and my partner Richard was down inside there, readjusting all the fiber optics and that. That was like one hour before the grand opening kind of thing. But that's part of the fun of it. It's your creation. And so I say, we don't have a big staff of people doing that. I mean the art direction and onsite is all stuff that we do, which is fun. Now, one other thing we did was we went to stores all the way through Cincinnati, antique stores, which is kind of creepy in its own, is that we'd go down into these basements and stuff and we found chandeliers and we found pictures to hang on the wall. And we actually found pictures that had a round glass on them like they used to do in the 1800s and stuff. And we put those up on the walls and very soon, we started realizing that because of the round glass, it was reflecting all the light everywhere. So we had to take all the rounded glass off as it was reflecting. And as part of that too, we were looking at some old civil war pictures and we bought some and one of them was almost me. Everybody was saying, “You got to buy it, you got to put this in. You got to.” And I mean, it was very, very close - mustache and the whole thing, very close to me. And they were saying, you got to take this home with you. I said, “I don't want this hanging on my wall. It's a dead guy from the civil war.” Okay. Not a good vibe. So we hung it in the prop room.

The curtain rises once more for the Maestro and his troupe of ghoulish thespians in Phantom Theater Encore beginning June 4 at the Kings Island Theater on International Street.