The Hippodrome Foundation hosts an all-student matinee of The Phantom of the Opera.
NEW YORK CITY, NY / ACCESS Newswire / April 14, 2026 / Few productions carry the weight of the cultural expectation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera. Broadway’s longest-running show in Broadway history for over three decades, Phantom has performed to over 160 million people in 47 territories and 195 cities in 21 languages. Yet today, there are an unfathomable number of young people who have never encountered it at all. That gap between the cultural footprint of this musical masterpiece and the experiences of thousands of young people is exactly what Broadway Across America, which has carried Phantom to markets across North America for decades, looks to close.
On a crisp October morning, the France-Merrick Performing Arts Center in Baltimore, home to the historic Hippodrome Theatre, was filled with students. Middle and high schoolers from nineteen Baltimore City schools arrived to see Broadway Across America‘s North American touring production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera, most of them having never attended a Broadway musical before, and many having never set foot inside the Hippodrome.
The event was organized by the Hippodrome Foundation, a nonprofit that serves as the local presenting partner of Broadway Across America in Baltimore, and was made possible through corporate sponsorship from Baltimore Gas and Electric Company. Roughly 2,200 students attended what amounted to a dedicated all-student matinee, an entire performance given over to young audiences from across the city.
Ron Legler, president of the France-Merrick Performing Arts Center, has described student matinee days at the Hippodrome as his favorite performances on the calendar. There is a particular energy when an audience is encountering something for the first time, a quality of attention and surprise that differs from the familiarity of a regular subscription crowd. Broadway Across America‘s touring productions have long included student programming as part of the market rollout, and partnerships with local presenting organizations like the Hippodrome Foundation are how those programs take shape on the ground.
The Hippodrome Foundation’s investment in student access goes beyond logistics. For the Phantom run, the foundation worked with outside funders to develop academic programming that tied the production to Maryland’s mandatory curriculum. Students prepared for the performance by studying Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death alongside the Lloyd Webber musical, examining how different artists across different centuries approached questions of masquerade, obsession, and mortality. The idea was to use a touring Broadway Across America production as a lens for comparative literary analysis, giving students a framework for the experience before they took their seats.
Broadway Across America, which operates as part of the John Gore Organization and presents productions in more than 45 markets across North America, has worked consistently to enhance its touring schedule with educational experiences and programming. The Phantom of the Opera touring production, which continues to reach new audiences decades after the show’s Broadway premiere, represents a certain kind of test case for what a long-running property can do when it moves through cities with the right local infrastructure in place.
For the 2,200 students in Baltimore that October, the academic scaffolding was one part of a larger experience. Watching the chandelier fall, seeing the boat move across the stage, hearing the organ swell, these are the things that stay.
CONTACT:
Andrew Mitchell
media@cambridgeglobal.com
SOURCE: Cambridge Global
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