a little night music; Emmy Rossum and Gerard Butler bring new energy to Joel Schumacher's film adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera.

Byline: John Powers

Ben Franklin once joked that the only sure things in life are death and taxes. These days we might add a third: The Phantom of the Opera. No matter where you've gone over the last fifteen years, from Seattle to Stockholm, you've been likely to find a production of Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber's gaudy crowd pleaser about the doomed romance between an opera singer, Christine, and her mysterious, masked mentor. This musical has become so familiar that when Joel Schumacher agreed to make the screen version, he insisted on taking it in a radically new direction. "I said I'd only do it with a very, very young cast who are beautiful and sexy. If the person playing Christine is not a teenager, I can't make it work, because her character's so innocent. If she's 35 years old, I just want to smack her and say, 'Grow up.' "

Enter Emmy Rossum, then sixteen, who boasted an ethereal aura to match her talent. "I really wanted this role," she says. "The character was so different from me. This is a girl who's tortured, emotional, and very, very spiritual. I'm a happy, sociable, rational person." Plunging into the role, Rossum squeezed herself into the tight, corseted costumes of Alexandra Byrne and even turned up, unidentified, at a seance in London's Belgravia district and was startled when the medium began telling her things about her dead grandmother that only she and her mother knew. "It was very frightening and upsetting," she admits, "but it's what I needed. I had to put myself through everything Christine went through. It was kind of like going down a rabbit hole-you don't see the light for a while."

Not that there's anything confused about Rossum: This is one young actress who knows precisely where she's heading. After following in Gwyneth Paltrow's footsteps ...