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"History Is Made at Night," goes the old movie title, but The Phantom of the Opera managed to achieve that feat Feb. 11 at a matinee, becoming the first show ever to turn in 10,000 performances on Broadway. This happened 17 days after the show's 24th anniversary at the Majestic; brace yourself for a silver anniversary within a year — not that anyone was packing for a fast trek to Disney World to mark the fact. There was, after all, a Saturday evening performance to give their nonstop loyalists.

The show must — and did — go on, but, in that theatrical limbo between performances, on a Majestic stage still hot with freshly made history, cake and champagne were served to the eight-times-a-week rabble, their friends, fans, former co-stars and agents.

The paparazzi went into a bulb-popping frenzy when the reigning Phantom (a former Raoul), Hugh Panaro, saturated himself on all sides with Christines — at least seven of them from the past as well as the current, Trista Moldovan.

Tony winner Brian Stokes Mitchell, Chairman of the Board of The Actors Fund which benefited mightily from this historic performance, hoisted a plastic cup of champagne high in the air and cheered, "May we all say, 'To 10,000 more!'"

The Actors Fund's president and CEO, Joe Benincasa, seconded that by citing his organization's past debts to the show: "Phantom of the Opera has done 23 benefit performances for The Actors Fund since 1988, raising two million dollars."

Plus, he said, Actors Fund galas for its composer, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and its producer,Cameron Mackintosh, earned another two million, and that its director, Actors Fund trustee Harold Prince, had at the start of the run donated four of his house seats every night to The Actors Fund to sell. "We're about up to five million dollars, guys," he concluded, "and I want to thank you very much."

Benincasa said that the 84-year-old Prince was in Miami, working on his new show — The Prince of Broadway, a look back at the Broadway wares which have won him an unprecedented total of 21 Tony Awards — and believed that the director would have been blissed out about the day's work by the Phantom folk: "Hal Prince would have one word for today's performance, and that would be 'perfect.'"

During the curtain call, before the matinee crowd was released into mid-afternoon reality, Panaro read a note from Prince, extending his special thanks to "Peter von Mayrhauser, our production supervisor; Craig Jacobs, our longtime stage manager; the music department, the crew, the producers and every one on this stage for keeping the show in mint condition. It takes a lot of love and housekeeping. Tonight's performance marks our 10,001st performance. Love, Hal."

The Lord Lloyd Webber extended "lots and lots of love," too, via a video: "Hi, guys. I'm really sorry I can't be with you for your 10,000th performance," he said, vowing to be "back in New York soon to see your 10,014th." Translation: He'll be tinkering his Evita and Jesus Christ Superstar back into Broadway life as well.

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Lastly was some cake-across-the-ocean footage from London, in which Sir Cameron and the London Phantom, wielded a knife over the 10,000-in-cake and wished the Broadway company a happy anniversary.

Then, on film and at the Majestic, canisters of confetti exploded, showering the crowd in colored steamers. They were sent to the sidewalks in soaring exit music.

In the first order of business, once the curtain fell on No. 10,000, Panaro did a bow in the direction of the late Maria Bjornson, whose sets and costumes spell spectacle in spades — an obvious source of inspiration for all hands and all departments.

Also remembered was the first Raoul (and later Phantom), the late Steve Barton, who formed the original triangle in England and on Broadway with Michael Crawford andSarah Brightman. The two have, said choreographer Gillian Lynne, "gone to That Great Rehearsal Room in the Sky."

Lynne, the show's only major creative in attendance for the afternoon's record-setting performance, put a mostly happy face on the show's startlingly easy evolution. Of course, there were times like when she had to start choreographing "Masquerade" before Lloyd Webber had completed composing it, and went to him with: "I'm so sorry, darling. You'll have to make something to fit that." He did, too.

Or the time she got so overexcited rehearsing Sarah Brightman that she fell backwards into the orchestra pit. "I was mad before, but it was worse after that," she cracked. "It was ten feet onto concrete. I didn't break a thing, and a darling stagehand did the same thing about three months later and broke three vertebrate and one rib. And the "physio" chap [physical therapist] I was sent to see said, 'The trouble with you is you got nine lives for putting that damn show Cats on."

Otherwise, she accentuated the positive: "It was glorious from Day One. Nothing gave us trouble. All the technical stuff worked, if you can believe it, and I was thinking, 'Why is this such a piece of cake?' It sorta wasn't a piece of cake, and then I thought that Andrew had actually written this story so much from his heart, which was full of love for Christine — Sarah, who was his then-wife — that he was suffused with his own pulse and strength right from the beginning. Sometimes, in interviews and things, people say, 'Why do you think the show is such a success?' Well, I always say, 'Andrew wrote the most glorious score.' It was such a strong story, [but] the most important thing of the lot . . . is romance. It's a romantic story and a romantic show that looks romantic. It's been staged romantically.

"Everybody needs romance, especially now with the world as hard as it is and as violent as it is, so our show keeps the flag flying for what we all need. I think it's the most powerful thing that we have to get through life with and make it wonderful. So, if anyone asks you, say 'romance,' because I think we could have all done our jobs as well as we did and all that, but, if it was not for this built-in strong sense of romance, it wouldn't have been such a hit, and it's there, and let's celebrate it for another — dare we say? — 10,000."