Phantom Rides Again

There's a new trailer for Love Never Dies, the Phantom of the Opera sequel. Sounds as if the story is largely the same as the one produced by Frederick Forsyth who, I think, was Lord Andy's book writer when a sequel was first mooted many years ago. Although I haven't yet seen Forsyth's name attached to any of the publicity for the new show, he did produce a novella called The Phantom of Manhatten. Spooky.

Anyway, good excuse to post a review of the film version of the original Phantom.

All musicals are, in the end, collaborative efforts and the more you look at Lloyd Webber shows, the more you appreciate his collaborators. Tim Rice initiated Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita. Don Black had his finest lyric-writing hour with Tell Me on a Sunday. Cats owes a lot to its choreographer, Gillian Lynne. Perhaps the exception is Phantom of the Opera. That’s not to say that the rest of the Phantom team were unimportant. Maria Bjornson’s designs were spectacular, Hal Prince’s direction was fluid and Lloyd Webber has never been as successful without Cameron Mackintosh as his producer. Only to say that, more than any of his other shows, Lloyd Webber’s contribution was the driving force behind Phantom.

For starters, it was his idea. He read the book and saw the potential. It’s hard to imagine now but Phantom wasn’t always obvious material for a musical. The original Gaston Leroux novel is a patchy pot-boiler. The silent film versions play up the gothic horror. The Hammer Horror versions focus on, well, mainly the blood and the heaving bosoms. What Lloyd Webber provided was the romance. For him, the story of a beautiful young singer and her ghostly, disfigured tutor was, in fact, a high romance; the pitiful love of the unlovable.

According to some it is also the most commercially successful entertainment in the history of the world, ever. I remember reading that fact somewhere and thinking that (a) there’s no way anyone could possibly prove such a thing and (b) it’s probably true. On a commercial level Phantom can easily compete with biggest blockbusters that Hollywood can offer. Which brings us neatly to the film version and the simple question, what went wrong? How do you take the most successful stage show ever and turn it into a dud film? Here are a few thoughts, roughly in order of importance:

1. The show is “through-sung” which basically means that they cut most of the talking bits. This was Lloyd Webber’s biggest break from traditional musicals. The difficulty in traditional musicals is to get the characters to move easily from dialogue to song. With a “through-sung” musical, the opposite problem occurs: nobody stops singing and you end up with banal conversations being sung for no good reason. The stage show gets away with it because the whole thing crashes along on a big wave of emotion and the audience is swept along by the live performance. On film, there’s more distance and the endless singing starts to feel awkward and unnatural.

2. The film tried to out-size the stage show. Can’t be done. Grand and spectacular designs are always going to look better in three dimensions than two. The most memorable images from the film are the small things - the rose in the snow, the toy monkey music box. They should have found a few more of these.

3. The film tries to provide a bit of back story. We’re shown the Phantom as a child being ridiculed in a freak show. There’s no need. It skews the story away from the romantic and towards the psychological. The Phantom should be driven purely by desire, not the psychological need to work out any lingering abandonment issues.

4. The Phantom’s disfigurement isn’t nearly disfigured enough. In the stage version, half of his skull is caved in leaving a moon-like crater where is head should be. When the mask is whipped off in the Big Reveal, it is genuinely shocking. In the film, he has some severe burn marks and a touch of hair loss. It’s really not that bad; at least, not bad enough to spend your life in a sewer.

5. During the big climax in the Phantom’s underground lair, Raul finds himself singing with a noose around his neck. Inevitably this raises a snigger. There is an unspoken rule in musicals that singing should not be attempted in certain situations. (I seem to remember a song from Sweeney Todd, during which, the actor self-flagellates). It’s silly.

When it came out the film announced itself with no major stars and as the most expensive independent British film ever made. That, too, was typical of Lloyd Webber: big risk, big money. You can understand why he wanted to maintain control. There is something about the story that resonates with the composer. His curious mix of opera and rock, melody and bombast, sincerity and grandiose melodrama, all found their home in Phantom. There have been echoes in his subsequent musicals: the monstrous Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard; the dangerous relationship between the young girl and the convict in Whistle Down the Wind; and now, finally, he’s written a Phantom sequel, Love Never Dies. I think it’s probably worth the effort; this is a very unique relationship between author and story. Let’s just hope that the film version works out a bit better.

Dancing on the Edge

Lovely piece in The Guardian by Sanjoy Roy - a dance critic, he - taking time out from the high-falutin' stuff to cast an eye on dance in the some of the current West End shows. His conclusions:

"In the end, I realised that you can't judge dance in musicals by the same standards as you would use for ballet or contemporary dance. Far more than in those forms, it is designed to be looked through rather than looked at. Its focus is often elsewhere – a story, a person, a feeling, a song – and to achieve that, it sometimes matters less if a dancer can do a split leap than if she can wiggle a finger well."

This seems to me an eminently sensible conclusion, especially the distinction between "looking through" and "looking at"; dance as a tool for storytelling as opposed to dance for its own sake.

But it does raise an issue regarding performance in musicals. The problem is that doing a split leap is far more impressive than wiggling a finger. With a ballet or contemporary dance piece, even if you don't get what's going on, the sheer athleticism and physical achievement can still be impressive for an audience. It's clear that the abilities of the dancers go way beyond those of the average audience member and so the average audience member is suitably "wowed". So how can that same "wow" factor be achieved in a musical if the dance is less physically demanding (less "wowey", if you will)?

Some thoughts:

One is to have specialist dancers as Sanjoy Roy notes is the case in Dirty Dancing. The dancers don't have to sing; the singers don't have to dance. Each can specialize.

Two is to impress by versatility. Have the performers doing lots of things - acting, singing, dancing, juggling poodles - and doing them well. The World Champion heptathlete, Jessica Ennis, may not be the fastest runner in the world but the fastest runner can't also hurdle, high jump and throw stuff. Musical performers can be impressive all-rounders.

Three is...well, to be honest, I'm not really sure if any of this really matters. Let me digress.

A few years ago I had the good fortune of seeing Tony Bennett performing with a jazz quartet. As wonderful as Mr. Bennett was, the performer I most remember from that concert was the pianist. During one particular song the piano part started off simply enough but gradually became more and more complicated. The improvisations got more and more involved, the synchopation more and more off the beat. I became aware that this top-class pianist was actually struggling with the music. By the end his eyes were focused like a madman and he was concentrating like his life depended on it. He was on the edge of his ability and it was thrilling.

A few years later and I'm listening to a children's Christmas concert. A little girl, maybe only 5 or 6 years old, comes on with a guitar about the same size as her. She's only been learning a few weeks but is desperate to perform "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen". So she plucks out the first line of the melody. It's going well until, ooh, she hits a duff note. The audience shift politely in their seats but the little girl doesn't seem to notice. Her focus is on her fingers and that note. She tries again but can't quite get it right. She bites her tongue and has another go and finally, finally gets the note out. The performance continues in the same vein, only by this time the audience is hooked. Rather than feeling embarassed for her (she isn't embarassed herself), they are actually willing her on, beyond every wrong note and on to the end of the piece. Will she make it? The tension was almost unbearable. She was on the edge of her ability and it was thrilling.

Digress over.

This is a roundabout way of saying that perhaps it is not the level of performance that matters so much as the risk that the performer takes. A performer in a musical may not display the same physical prowess as a specialist dancer (or the vocal gymnastics of an opera singer, for that matter) but they can still be thrilling if we know that they're pushing to the edge of their ability. Like those high-wire acts who, now and then, pretend that they're about to fall off, even when they're not. It's reminding the audience that what they're doing is difficult. And musicals should always be difficult.