In recent weeks I received several mails
and Facebook messages from fans of
The
Phantom Of The Opera outraged that Andrew Lloyd Webber should
have written a sequel at all, never mind one which travestied the
original characters and relationships. They’re not entirely
unjustified. It’s possible that heroine Christine’s beloved and now
husband, Raoul, might turn out to be a wastrel and a drunkard; less
conceivable that her single kiss with the Phantom ten years ago (yet,
oddly, 26 years earlier by the calendar) should have borne a son. And
of course the bogeyman resurrected for the sequel is now a staple of
popular culture. Enough liberties, then, to provoke high dudgeon in
devotees, but not necessarily to irritate newcomers seeing this musical
on its own terms.
But what are those terms? Lloyd Webber and director Jack O’Brien seem
resolved to repudiate simple continuation; nevertheless, it is hard to
engage much with the proceedings without an initial emotional stake
from the original story. The show begins with a prologue number which
almost acts as an anti-overture, followed by some whirling CGI visual
effects and a sequence of spectacles that seems to telescope one of
Cirque du Soleil’s lesser offerings into about three minutes. This
establishes the setting as turn-of-the-century Coney Island, where a
new complex of delights and bizarrerie has just been opened by one Mr Y
– mystery, geddit?, only there is no mystery whatever.
The Phantom (for it is he) engages Christine to travel from Paris and
sing in his theatre, thus igniting a whole tangle of love and loyalty
conflicts: the Christine/Raoul/Phantom triangle is revived, the
question of young Gustave’s true fathership no sooner raised than it is
admitted, and Christine’s former Parisian opera friend Meg Giry is now
besotted with the Phantom under the encouragement of her mother, who
has in effect become Mrs Danvers from
Rebecca,
the jealous housekeeper. What happens? Nothing much, nor do we care,
and nor does Ben Elton (principal writer of a book partly based on
Frederick Forsyth’s novella
The
Phantom Of Manhattan): someone dies, some others are reconciled,
others still just hang around or disappear. Big deal.
As for the meat of the show, I cannot recall ever finding such a
yawning chasm between a score which is so determinedly, persistently
soaring and majestic (although a number of arrangements sound cheaply
over-synthesised beyond the necessities of fairground pastiche) and
lyrics that seldom even rise to banality. “Who concealed you safe
away,” Mme Giry demands of the Phantom in a perfunctory explanation of
his survival, “SMUGgled YOU up TO CalAIS?” Lyricist Glenn Slater has
little or no sense of metrical stress. Lloyd Webber’s score is, as I
say, determined, but less than two hours after the final curtain I
still cannot recall a single tune. What I do remember are a number of
occasions when a vocal line flukes up or down an octave for a single
line before reverting, as if a bad karaoke singer were belting it out
in an unhelpful key.
Ramin Karimloo does a solid job as the Phantom, and Sierra Boggess as
Christine has a particularly powerful and clear upper register (bats
are probably concussing themselves all along the Strand), but Summer
Strallen is wasted as Meg and that fine actor Joseph Millson may in
later years care to excise the role of Raoul from his C.V. Bob Crowley
designs some fantastical sights for the Phantom’s eyrie and also a
selection of Americana that includes a Hopperesque bar-room, all of
which Paule Constable then half-hides in shadowy, “atmospheric”
lighting. I can’t see it winning over the “Love Should Die” Facebook
group.
Written for the Financial
Times.