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.