The Phantom Library

Reviewing this musical was a journey even before ever cracking the jewel case. Because of the massive influence of Lloyd Webber's musical version of the Phantom story, which has for many people become the definitive version and is without question the most well-known worldwide, easily overshadowing the book it was based on, Lloyd Webber's decision to release a sequel to the show caused a tropical hurricane in the world of stage shows. Fans of the show were both ecstatic, hoping for more of the original musical's magic, and horrified, wondering what this story could possibly do without invalidating its predecessor. Musical fans in general, even if they weren't big on the first Phantom show, pointed out that sequel musicals invariably bomb and are almost always a terrible idea. Rumors ran rampant. It was a wild time.

It was also 2007, which was right around the time that I started working on the Phantom Project, so the hurricane took me right along with it. It was impossible to turn anywhere on the internet without hearing about it; and while gossip is one thing, the show actually did indeed eventually come out in 2010, after which it exploded all over everything Phantom-related. Since I spend a lot of time trying not to read too many other peoples' opinions about things I'm going to review, so I can be as impartial as possible before I decide to hate something all by myself, I then had to basically instruct my browser to never ever show me anything on the internet with the words "love never dies" in it, which for a long time blacked out almost every Phantom haunt I was frequenting and large swaths of fanfiction and poetry sites. Every person even vaguely related to me in my life also decided simultaneously to buy the darn thing for me, so I had DVDs and CDs sort of stashed around the house, the way someone trying to diet half-heartedly hides truffles and pretends they'll never find them.

I was not entirely successful in spite of these measures; there was just too much shouting about the show to stay totally unspoiled about it, and now, four years later, there were not a lot of surprises for me in terms of the show's plot and style. But I have only just experienced the actual execution (I hadn't even listened to the sample tracks before this, because that is how dedicated I am to science!), so I have many, many things to say that are all my own.

And the first of those things is that it is a confirmed fact that this show was based on Frederick Forsyth's story for his 1999 novel The Phantom of Manhattan, on which he collaborated with Lloyd Webber for a sequel way back in the 90s, and my friends, I hate that book so much. I would have been able to tell that this show is obviously based on the same premise without knowing that, but I would have expected someone on the show's PR team to suppress widespread knowledge of that fact, if only because of how universally hated that book is.

I want y'all to know that I dug out my copy of Forsyth so I could perform deep-text comparative analysis, though, and if that doesn't mean I love you, I don't know what does.

Since Love Never Dies has been through a LOT of rewrites - which, according to Lloyd Webber's statements and press releases, is because it did not do particularly well in its first several runs and critics kicked it in the ass a bunch until it was reworked - it's hard to choose the version of it to review. I'm therefore trying something in this review I've never done before: a dual review, in which I'll talk about two versions of it at once. I'll try not to make it incomprehensible. I'll signpost my mess.

I decided eventually to both listen to the concept recording, which was Lloyd Webber's original vision for the show and features the original London cast that performed it, and watch the DVD release of the much later Melbourne production of the show, which includes all the changes made during edits and allowed me the opportunity to see the story play out visually instead of just guessing from inferences on an audio recording. Also, I mean, I had both already. For science!

Act 1:

The DVD's introduction provides us with some handy informational text here, which gave me a little sigh of fond nostalgia for the title cards in the 1925 Julian/Chaney film. They inform us that the opera house burned down in 1895, apparently because they want to utterly confuse and aggravate me before any actual show has begun. The idea of the opera house burning down is clearly a continuation of the 2004 Schumacher/Butler film version of Lloyd Webber's show, which introduced that as the final disaster of the piece; and while that movie has its own problems and I'm not in love with it taking the place of the earlier stage show for continuity purposes, Lloyd Webber did work on it closely so I can understand the decision.

However, what I don't understand is the timeline, because the same film that is the only place you can find the opera house burning down also has its own floating text dates at the beginning, and it sets the story in 1870. Either the events of the previous musical took two and a half decades to happen, in which case I am impressed by everyone's fortitude in keeping that drama going, or someone has severely mismatched something somewhere. It might be that someone on the team for this show noticed the small but vocal number of folks who pointed out (stridently, in my case) that Paris was in the middle of a war with the Prussians closely followed by an internal uprising at the time and moved to correct the historical problem, but I'm not sure why that resulted in moving the whole shebang to the very twilight years of the century. They have again missed the most likely time period of the original novel's story by a decade, just in the other direction - 1895 is even further away from 1881 than 1870 was. It's also even later than Forsyth's book, which decided on 1893 as the right year for all of these shenanigans based on the fact that electric light would have been available by then.

The show doesn't try to justify its date, so we'll just have to wonder. My guess would be that Lloyd Webber wanted to set it considerably later in order to be able to use Coney Island as the setting for this show; the action begins a decade after the events of the first show, putting it in around 1905 when Coney Island was a famously eccentric vacation destination in New York, but had he stuck with the movie's timeline, it would only be 1880 and most of the major carnival attractions and parks would still be years away from being built.

ANYWAY. The text also informs us that only the Phantom's mask was found after the disaster of the previous musical, which is also a clear reference to the 2004 film, in which one of the last shots shows us Meg Giry entering the Phantom's lair with a mob of angry theatre personnel and discovering his discarded mask.

Prologue:

This piece is included only on the concept recording, and had been cut by the time the Australian production was filmed to come live on my Phantom DVD Wall of Fame (or Shame, as the case may often be). It involves Madame Giry returning to the site of Love Never Dies' events to reminisce about them years later, similar to opening the previous show with the older versions of the characters years later visiting the site of the opera house's dramatic goings-on. She is joined by Fleck, Gangle, and Squelch, three of the performers from the Phantom's Coney Island shows, who are not particularly pleased to see her and appear to blame her for whatever it was that happened that they haven't told us about yet.

I need to pause and address Fleck, Gangle, and Squelch really quickly, because they read as very problematic to me over the course of this show, and I'm not sure that it succeeds (or even tries) in making them characters rather than caricatures. The three characters are referred to as "freaks" (offensive but period-accurate) several times during the show, both by themselves and others, and are obviously intended to evoke the sideshow performers that were a staple of Coney Island attractions and various other carnival-style shows in the United States at this time, many of whom had illnesses or physical conditions (dwarfism, for example, or hirsutism) that could be exhibited and that made performance preferable to being treated poorly in other areas of employment. All three of them perform - Squelch as a strongman, Gangle as a barker, and Fleck as an aerial gymnast.

These characters are used as a sort of Greek chorus for the show; they are around the action all the time but not actually part of it, and occasionally comment upon what's going on or give the main characters important information to act on. They're not actually really characters in their own right at all, but rather treated as part of the setting, existing to play up the "strangeness" of carnival culture viewed from the mainstream and to act as the Phantom's henchmen, and although they often appear to announce upcoming attractions or mention shows to come, we don't ever actually see them perform much or do anything other than run the occasional errand for the Phantom.

My problem with all of this is that these characters literally aren't treated as people; they have no lines or interaction or development or purpose beyond supporting the Phantom as the main character and providing exotic window-dressing to enhance the setting. The only place in the show where they really had anything interesting to say was here in the prologue, in which Fleck scornfully tells Madame Giry that of course the three of them are still at Coney Island years later - they aren't accepted in mainstream society, so they could hardly have gone anywhere else, making a very pointed remark about the fact that the main characters could simply leave and begin a new life elsewhere after the musical's events, but the trio was stuck dealing with the fallout when they did. It's a nice moment that reminds Giry that she has privileges that the people who work at these shows often don't, and that her actions (and everyone else's) have consequences.

However, that's the only moment these characters get, and it was cut for the actual production of the show, leaving them in limbo as mere decorations rather than getting to be people. Considering that this is a show about the Phantom, who represents the people that society has rejected often for reasons they can't control, and that it implies that he's here among them because like them he isn't accepted by society at large due to its prejudices, you would think that it would do better with not reducing characters dealing with the same issues to stereotypes and assuming they're just part of the weirdness around them instead of people with motivations and feelings of their own. There are occasional lines throughout the text that mention the unfairness of a society that rejects the Phantom based on his appearance, but they are never applied to anyone else, and the show as a whole skates blithely on by without ever addressing the same issues in a setting where they're much more widespread and far from confined to the single main character.

In other words, the show unconsciously does to these secondary characters, who represent people who have been historically treated very badly by society at large, what it is always complaining about people doing to the Phantom himself, which is both ironic and severely undercuts any moral about not being dicks to those with differences from yourself that might have been trying to struggle its way toward the surface.

The prologue itself is largely creepy, but in a good way - Giry's obviously sad and guilty about something while Fleck, Squelch, and Gangle are clearly resentful of her, all of which sets up that there's something bad about to go down in this show without giving us any clues about what it might be. Another reason I wish some of this prologue's content could have made it to the show is that it does a very good job of setting up a mysterious feel for the story ahead of time, especially when it places the obvious sadness and fear of the characters alongside the light-hearted Coney-Island-style fun and allows their dissonance to make the listener feel uneasy as well. The show in its final form has a serious problem with trying to be mysterious and menacing and totally failing because of lack of context, and this would have been helped by some of the prologue's foreshadowing elements being kept.

Madame Giry here mentions the Phantom "disappearing with the child", which is an obvious connection to the end of Forsyth's novel in which the Phantom and his son vanished and took on new names in order to influence American business. She also mentions a "fire that consumed everything", apparently in reference to what happened to the Coney Island theatre that the Phantom owns for most of this show, which makes me think that our masked friend really needs to learn a different way to make a dramatic exit. One with less burning.

'Til I Hear You Sing/The Aerie:

This song is basically the opener for the Australian stage production (and all current productions of the show, as far as I can tell), in spite of the fact that it appears considerably later on the concept album. It's your standard "I wish" song, in which the tried-and-true formula of "here's a main character, and here's their motivation" is played out to bring the audience up to speed; the Phantom sings about how much he misses Christine and wants to hear her sing again and intends to make that happen, while moping about in his room (presumably the aforementioned Aerie, although the staging didn't give me as much of a feeling of grandeur and lofty heights as I would have liked).

There's a lot going on here, because Lloyd Webber dives directly into the Phantom's mental processes and assumes the rest of us are already wetsuited and ready to follow, and as a result there's a good chance that audiences are not nearly as invested in this song as the material intends. Because this is a sequel, it's assumed that the audience already knows who this character is and what he's talking about, but there's such a complete lack of context that it's totally inaccessible to anyone who hasn't already seen Llord Webber's first show, and even for those who have, it's a little like being thrown bodily into a cold swimming pool rather than taking a minute to test the waters with toes and feet. We are given no background on who the Phantom is, what his motivations or origins might be, or how he personally made his journey to be here - and even if we assume we already know all that from the last show, this character is ten years in the future from that one and in a vastly different place and situation. We have no idea what he's like now, what he's been doing (except in the most broad general strokes of "building a theatre and rides"), how he might have changed or grown as a result of the last show's events or anything that's happened since, or anything else that might tell us who he is, and furthermore we won't get those things at any point in the show.

Essentially, it assumes not only that the audience already knows exactly who this character is and what he's about, but also that there has been literally no change whatsoever in his life or personality over the past decade, and that we should pick up exactly where we left off. This makes it extremely hard to identify with him closely, because we literally don't even know who he is - and aside for his obvious fixation on Christine and later her son Gustave, we won't ever know anything more about him. He's an empty vehicle for histrionic romantic feelings, and has lost any shreds of complexity or mystery the character might once have had.

A lot of this show - most of it, in fact - feels like the composer and characters screaming FEEL DAMN YOU FEEL, YOU WILL FEEL SO MANY FEELINGS at the audience, but since we are given no context or characterization to back those feels up, they're fleeting at best and totally impossible to dredge up at worst.

All of this, unfortunately, means that I just can't like this Phantom enough to forgive him for the synthesizers and electric guitars that begin running unnecessarily amok under his singing here. Lloyd Webber seems to be shooting for a rock opera rather than the more classical style of his previous show, but he fails badly to reconcile and blend the two different styles in a way that allows them to enhance one another or avoid giving the audience whiplash, resulting in a confusing and choppy bounce effect from one style to the other, and a general feeling of irritation whenever the rock elements, which seem much more pasted-on than the other way around, intrude on an otherwise pretty nice piece of music. Also, as I pointed out when I reviewed the 2004 film (and it was true then and that was six YEARS before this came out), Lloyd Webber's taste in rock music seems to have grounded in the early 1980s, resulting in synth abuse and 80s-style riffs that are unpalatably dated for modern audiences, especially when they match neither the time period of the show's setting nor the one in which people are watching it.

It is a notable difference that at the very beginning of the show the Phantom refers to our leading lady as "my Christine", and will repeat that phrase pretty much incessantly until the end. In fact, it was such a major difference that it jerked me out of the show completely for a minute there; the Phantom of the original musical never once referred to her as "his Christine" (although he did say some nastily possessive things about her voice and career), and this character has within a few lines of the opening bars let us know that he is both completely different from his previous incarnation and that the end of that musical has been totally forgotten. We were seeing some of this trend already in the 2004 film - in that, his line "You will sing for me!" was changed to "You belong to me!", so it's clear that Lloyd Webber has been slowly altering the Phantom to become more possessive as time goes by.

The final turning point of the previous musical happened when, after the Phantom kidnapped Christine and threaten to murder her fiancé if she didn't marry him instead, she showed him compassion and selflessness, forcing him to realize that what he was doing was not an act of love, and therefore motivating him to let both her and Raoul go in order to be happy together. He realized that she didn't belong to him and that assuming that she did or trying to force her behavior was wrong, and his reversion here tells us up front at the door that Lloyd Webber has completely disregarded the redemption the character achieved at the end of the first show. Of course, that's going to become painfully obvious as the plot progresses, but I wasn't expecting it to be so... bald? Noticeable? Romanticized while being terrible?

It also lets us know within a few lines of the beginning of the show that the Phantom feels possessiveness for Christine and considers her "his", and unfortunately the rest of the plot will follow up on that by making her a possession in contention rather than a person with choices.

The lyrics to this song are mostly concerned with the idea that the Phantom's musical composition talents have become inaccessible to him; without Christine, he is no longer creative enough to produce anything new or important. This is interesting as an inverted form of the idea from the original novel and first musical that Christine's voice (or at least its emotional capacity in performance) was created by the Phantom or in some way emanated from him, and that without him she would not have been able to achieve true greatness; here, it's the Phantom who can't achieve musical success without Christine's voice to inspire him, casting her in the role of muse that he himself originally inhabited.

As part of his complaints about his inability to compose without Christine, the Phantom delivers some offhanded scorn when it comes to his current projects and surroundings that feels both unwarranted and unattractive, and which will become a theme throughout the entire show. The idea that the carnival atmosphere of Coney Island, and by extension all of its shows and attractions and everyone who performs in them, is "lesser" or "unworthy" is often repeated, as here when the Phantom laments that he's wasted his time on "smoke and noise" rather than creating true art. This is extremely dissonant with the show's attempts to make Coney Island a safe haven for the Phantom, whose deformity makes him more at home among people with similar challenges than among the rest of humanity, and to represent him as being in love with its quirky beauty; it says these things, but at the same time continually implies that the Coney Island environment and its performers are not really worthy of consideration or importance, and are inferior in some way when compared with the grand opera background that Erik came from. Such snootiness doesn't seem appropriate from a character who has spent his whole life being discriminated against in the same way, and the fact that it feels unconscious and is repeated as a continuing motif makes me think that it's the biases of the composer and writers that are bleeding through into the words and actions of the characters.

This song sets up what is obviously a vastly different tenor (ha) of storytelling than in the previous show. In the first musical, the action was largely carried by Christine, and occasionally others including Raoul and the managers; its story treated the Phantom as the frightening unknown and in spite of his status as one of the main characters seldom dipped into his internal thoughts or demonstrated his feelings except through his actions toward others. It effectively allowed the audience to see him as the dangerous outsider that all the other characters saw him as, but allowed him to become sympathetic as his actions and revelations of his character revealed that he was multi-dimensional and not fully villanous in spite of his behavior. Love Never Dies, on the other hand, treats the Phantom as the focal point character, and tells the story from his point of view, looking at everyone else as the intruders into his world and telling us about his emotional state to the point of oversaturation. This isn't a terrible idea, since it gives us the interesting contrast of the "other side of the story" convention, but because of the Phantom's total lack of characterization or growth, he's not enough of a person for us to become invested in. He yells a lot, and stomps around, and cries, but I don't know who he is, and without knowing who he is, I can't care about him very much.

It's also notable that in the first musical, which was largely from Christine's perspective, she was the heroine of the piece who overcame terrible odds and managed to triumph in spite of being kidnapped and threatened, eventually going to her happy ending. In this musical, things are told mostly from the Phantom's perspective, and not only is he unquestionably the intended hero, Christine is reduced to almost a non-entity in order to accomplish this. It's not a very flattering comparison - when looking through her eyes, the audience saw the Phantom as a flawed and dangerous but sympathetic and compelling man. When looking through his eyes, all the audience gets to see Christine as in this show is a thing to be coveted.

It's way obvious by this point that this is a romantic drama, and that all overtones of the first stage show's suspense and mystery elements are gone. Weirdly, it doesn't seem to be that obvious to Lloyd Webber, though; the Phantom in particular frequently behaves as if he's still a figure of unplumbed mystery and dangerous exoticism, when really he's a dude who has been telling us about his feelings for fifty straight minutes and no one is in the slightest mystified or awed by him.

Ben Lewis, however, is fabulous in this role, so hats off to him (although man, he does do some crazy eyes - it's like he resents the mask covering them up and is trying to pop them through its eyeholes). Ramin Karimloo on the concept album is also an excellent singer, but I found that he sounded less suited to the role - his more emotional tendency of growling and howling worked for the rock numbers better than Lewis' more restrained performance, but unfortunately those are not exactly the highlights of the show for me.

The Coney Island Waltz:

This is actually the second track on the concept recording, and occurs during the framing device of Madame Giry and Fleck discussing events long gone; in the current stage show, it's part of the action, and is here to set the scene after the Phantom's big number and give the audience a window into Coney Island's workings and flavor as a setting.

We start out with a musical callback to the "Stranger than You Dreamt It" theme from the previous musical, which begins a trend of reuse of musical phrases from the old show, repurposed for inclusion here. Honestly, I can't tell if this is a good idea or not, although of course the music in the first show is undeniably gorgeous and iconically popular, so there's no problem with the music itself not holding up. Rather, I'm not sure it adds to anything; sure, we enjoyed the use of repeated motifs during the previous show because it was based on opera and that's a common and time-honored operatic convention, but what exactly is it doing for us here? Reminding us that this is related to the first show? Believe me, man, we know that one. Trying to tie the music of the previous show to this one? Why do we need that, when it's not really enhancing things or changing the music all that much? The only times I was really pleased to see the device was when it was a theme that was actually reworked to fit into the new musical's scheme - for example, by changing it from major to minor mode or otherwise weaving it into the current compositional setup, so that it was recognizable but still part of something new.

Honestly, it feels like Lloyd Webber wanted to continually remind the audience that this show is a continuation of the previous one, in effect trading on the first show's popularity to carry the second one, and not only does that not work, it robs us of getting to enjoy any new music that could have been there instead. It might even have worked if it had just been a few phrases sprinkled into the show once in a while, but it's done far too often and in too prolonged a fashion to succeed.

It's now 1905 in the stage show (only one year off from the Forsyth novel's date of 1906), although we have some more prelude to get through still on the cast recording, a year that was during the height of Coney Island's popularity and booming growth period in New York. This is the first place we'll see Fleck, Squelch, and Gangle in the current version of the show since there was no prologue for them to appear in previously, and I'm forcefully reminded of Mr. and Mrs. Midnight from the 1995 Danova production of the story on ice, in which very similar characters were used as sidekicks for the Phantom and appeared as weird, mysterious people whose motivations or origins were never explained. And I mean forcefully. As in I'm kind of wondering how much ice-skating action Lloyd Webber was enjoying kind of forcefully.

I am very glad that I chose to watch the Melbourne stage version of the show here, though, because the sets and costumes are gorgeous and evocative, and I would have been seriously missing out if I had only listened to the concept recording. They are surreal and colorful, often much darker and more suggestive of hypnotism and sleight of hand than I might otherwise have expected, and do an excellent job of both representing Coney Island's unique brand of entertainment and mystery and suggesting the dangerous depths of the Phantom's presence and potential violence. The designs also contain myriad callbacks to the previous show, including a giant monkey with cymbals referencing the Phantom's music box and some suspiciously familiar-looking lady robots, but these I am not upset about; they are fun shout-outs to the last musical without being intrusive, and suggest a sense of humor in the Phantom that I wish we could have seen more of.

The show/park/theatre/whatever we're not going to explain it very much that the Phantom owns is called "Phantasma", and he is referred to by the pseudonym "Mister Y" throughout the show. Apparently he is also the Phantom of Puntown.

While we jump straight into the old-timey performance of this piece in the stage show, the concept recording has some sumptuous orchestral versions of its theme that I really enjoyed.

That's the Place That You Ruined, You Fool!:

This is another piece that is only on the concept recording, and it takes place still in the prelude before the events of the musical unfold, with Fleck blaming Madame Giry for whatever disaster is still going to befall everyone later in the show. It's here that she most strongly discusses Coney Island as once being a sort of haven for her that has now been destroyed, and again her lines here would have gone a long way toward helping her be a more fleshed-out and important character had they been kept in.

The piece is nice enough, but it's just expositional recitative, nothing particularly interesting. The only notable thing about it is that Madame Giry, in both the stage show and the concept album, is still sporting an intensely thick French accent, which is most likely a follow-up of Miranda Richardson's accent in the 2004 film. While this made very little sense in that movie's context, since all the characters including her were speaking French anyway, in this show she is most likely speaking English to primarily American conversational partners, so having an accent - particularly a heavy one to contrast her from the younger and more adaptable Meg - is no longer outside the realm of possibility.

Heaven by the Sea:

This concept-recording-only piece is in the general style of the Coney Island-inspired pieces of the musical, meant to give us a portrait of American vacationers of the time period and the vision of Coney Island that they would have been familiar with. The happiness and excitement of the attraction-goers actually makes the Phantom, who they frequently praise or speculate about as the creator of all this fun, seem more redeemed and relatable; he has brought a lot of people a lot of joy, and this song tells us that in their own words, which is a million times more useful than hearing him say it. (Well, and also he doesn't say it. He feels like he wasted his time, remember.)

It's also a very helpful establishing piece because it mentions that the Phantom has constructed and owns, among other things, a midway, promenade, games, fountains, museum, and various other attractions that let us know it's really more likely that he owns an entire amusement park to compete with other famous Coney Island parks such as Steeplechase or Luna. Since without these mentions I had no earthly idea what the Phantom actually owned or had built in the stage show, it's an important piece of information, both because it prevents the audience from being confused and because it establishes him as a major power in this area, not just one of many smaller show-runners.

The singers mention that his work "must've cost him millions", which is both another lost foreshadowing to some later financially-motivated problems for other characters, and probably a relic left over from Forsyth's novel, in which the Phantom's jerkitude was equalled only by his piles of tear-stained money.

Only for You:

The trio of Coney Island performers introduce Meg Giry here, and we learn that she is the lead performer in the Phantom's dancing girl acts. There are a lot of questions to be asked about this, not least why she and her mother are even here. If we're following the events established in the previous show (or possibly more accurately the 2004 film version of it), why on earth are they hanging out with the Phantom? By the end of that movie, even Madame Giry, who had rescued him when he was a child and protected him for years, had realized that he was out of control and intentionally told Raoul and the authorities how to find him, something that she was pretty justified in doing considering that he was kidnapping and murdering people left and right. Why on earth would she do that, and then turn around and run away with him? Why would he let her after she had done that? Why would Meg and her mother decide to move to the Americas to dance in the sideshow instead of seeking another ballet? It's a mystery this musical refuses to answer; like many other sequels, it wants the original cast of characters together for no particularly good reason, so it's going to do that regardless of whether or not it makes any sense.

Meg's character has undergone a truly radical transformation from the first musical to this one - odd, when you consider that literally no one else besides herself and Raoul has changed at all. It's not coincidence that the two of them will become the "villains" of the piece, or that the only time any character advancement is ever demonstrated in this show is when it's required to explain why the plot demands that characters do things that make no sense whatsoever for their original incarnations. Meg, who was in the previous stage show and movie versions an innocent if curious young woman who was mostly around to be Christine's best friend and to breathlessly repeat stories about the Phantom while practicing to become a ballerina, has here become a frank-talking and visibly depressed sideshow performer.

Not that new Meg is really bad - actually, she's a lot more interesting than old Meg. It's just a pity that she was only developed in order to antagonize the Phantom and make her into yet another tragic female figure, which is the only kind of female figure allowed in this musical. By the end of it, of the four female characters we meet, one's dead, one's suicidal, one has lost everything she's worked for for the past decade, and one is left to deal with the aftermath of all this bullshit alone and unsupported, all of which are states that are inflicted upon them, directly or indirectly, by the male characters who actually control the plot. Bad stuff happens to the dudes, too, but with the exception of Raoul they are also rewarded with good stuff, something we can't say for these ladies; and almost all the bad stuff that happens to the male characters is a result of their own choices, not something someone else does to them.

The fact that the other characters frequently mention Mister Y but that he never appears parallel the whispered legends of the Phantom among the performers of the previous show's opera house, but here he's the positive and spine-tinglingly mysterious master of the show, not a figure of fear or menace. Like many of the things in the Coney Island shows, he's a play-acted version of a danger, not a real one.

The concept album's version of this number ("Only for Him, Only For You") is substantially different; instead of being sung by the trio as they introduce her, it's sung first by Meg, who uses it to give us some insight into her motivations and character, things we sorely need from her (so, as usual, it's a pity they were cut because the Meg in the final version of the show is sort of a big confusing question mark that does things without a lot of clear cause). Summer Strallen's voice is strong, frank and enjoyable, and while Sharon Millerchip, who plays her in the Australian production, has a lovely voice as well, it's a little more delicate and wistful, and Strallen's more powerful tones help Meg's character shine a little bit more.

Another very important bit of foreshadowing and character-building comes here when Madame Giry mentions a "Mr. Thompson", an admirer that wants to meet Meg. We don't ever meet him, but he's there to hint at Meg's relationships with men and to help give some background to her eventual meltdown over it, and again it sucks that it is no longer present in the final version of the show, leaving her big reveal at the end coming substantially more out of left field than is digestable by the audience.

The contrast between the soaring musical themes that represent the story's tragedy and grandeur and the rinky-dink musical tunes of the Coney Island shows works pretty well, but I wish there had been more interweaving of the two, especially since it worked so well in the "Coney Island Waltz" version on the recording.

Ten Long Years:

Madame Giry's big number has arrived... and oh boy, so has she. In a plot dump that justifies a lot of recitative but unfortunately doesn't prevent the lyrics from being clunky and ungraceful, she informs us that Christine is coming to New York after being invited by Oscar Hammerstein to sing at the opening of his Manhattan Opera House; this is directly borrowed from Forsyth's novel, right down to Hammerstein's offstage involvement.

The previous show's repeated motif of the Phantom (and very occasionally Raoul) calling Christine's name in a series of descending notes is used here for Meg and Madame Giry to talk about her; like other places where music is recycled from the last show, I'm not sure it's justifying its existence, especially since it was largely used in that show for ghostly effect, and there's none of that going on here.

Giry's here to answer my questions about what the two of them are doing hanging out on Coney Island, but unfortunately not to any degree of satisfaction. According to her continuing infodump for the benefit of an audience who really has no clue what the hell is going on, she and Meg rescued the Phantom from the mob after outing him to them, and then smuggled him across the ocean and worked and slaved to help him set up a new empire here, leading to them feeling very proprietary about his success and cranky that he isn't respecting them more. While being cranky about the Phantom's general inability to respect anyone is legitimate in this show, Giry also bewilderingly directs a lot of her anger at Christine, ranting that it wasn't Christine who helped him when he was in trouble and Christine wasn't faithful, and straight-up saying that Christine "betrayed" him.

Leaving aside the general grossness of saying that anyone "betrayed" a guy when you really mean that they decided to call the police on him after he started stalking and murdering people - because really? - this again doesn't jibe with Giry's behavior in the previous musical. While she was definitely against the plot to trap the Phantom - in the stage show because she was afraid it would just piss him off, and in the movie version possibly because the added motherly background made her concerned for his welfare as well - she intentionally gave away his position to Raoul in order to make sure that Christine could be rescued and taken away from him, which I can only assume she did because she realized that he had become a dangerous motherfucker who needed to be stopped. She directly and willingly collaborated in making sure Christine could escape the Phantom's custody and go be with the person she loved, so what exactly is her beef with the fact that that actually happened? Is this some weird underhanded antagonism where she helped Christine not because she wanted to aid her struggle but because she wanted to set up a "betrayal" in order to make herself and Meg better choices for investment on the Phantom's part? That would be truly bizarre and twisted, but I literally can't come up with any other explanation for her total 180 on the situation.

Seriously, Madame, your past-life self as Miranda Richardson would be having none of this. Also, the lyrics have her say that she and Meg "idolize" the Phantom, which seems hyperbolic at best, not to mention questionable in terms of sense. I hesitate to say that the writers of the show simply wanted him idolized because that's what they're doing themselves... but apparently I just did.

Like me, Meg is mostly just confused by her mother's angry shouting in this song, and doesn't seem inclined to participate in it much; unlike Giry, who takes the news of Christine's imminent arrival in the States as a dire event that will threaten their security as... I don't even know, the Phantom's favorite minions?, she is dreamily excited to get to see her friend of so many years ago and wistful about the good times they once had.

Man, how long is Madame Giry going to complain about Christine and how she's an evil assbutt for leaving the Phantom? She's now complaining about how Christine chose "beauty and youth over genius and art". Yeah, that's totally what I remember happening. She clearly had no good reason whatsoever not to want to stick around with her kidnapper other than that she was a shallow and selfish jerk who just wanted to bang the hot guy.

Also, I have news for you, fictitious Giry and the dudes who wrote her dialogue: fuck all y'all. Even if Christine did decide she just wanted to bang the hot guy, that was her decision to make. She didn't owe anyone her allegiance or love or physical presence unless she wanted to give it, because that is how free will works. Writers really need to stop implying that women (especially in the Phantom story where this problem is freaking rampant in derivative works) don't get to make choices and instead somehow "owe" their love to whomever is the "best man" because they're just prizes for male achievement or suffering, and that if they don't do what they're "supposed" to do they're heartless and deserve righteous scorn. Unfortunately, this problem is going to be ongoing throughout this musical; La Giry may be the first character to imply that Christine is a reward for a man's happiness who isn't entitled to decide what she wants on her own, but she's going to be joined by most of the other principal characters soon enough.

Madame Giry, along with Meg and the trio of performers, refer to the Phantom as "the Master" pretty frequently (insert your own sinister Doctor Who reference!). This is a pretty clear change in his power over them from the first show, in which they were occasional accomplices but certainly didn't work for him directly, and is even odder when contrasted with the 2004 film's backstory, which made Madame Giry his surrogate mother figure.

At the end of this song, we can see the Phantom lurking in the rafters, from whence he hears Madame Giry's ranting about Christine and thus learns that she's coming to town and gets excited. I found it somewhat amusing that he owns this place and employs all kinds of performers that look a lot more strange by society's standards at this time than he does (we'll be seeing them later), but still feels the need to hide in his own goddamn building. In other versions of the Phantom, I could maybe ascribe this to his lifelong ostracization making him uncomfortable presuming to be around other people even in his own territory, but this Phantom has hardly any of those psychological vulnerabilities left, and after his iron grip of terror over the opera house in the last show and rampaging cojones in this one, I expected him to be less timid. Part of the charm of Coney Island, for him, is assumedly the fact that it's a neverending carnival and masquerade atmosphere; just as in the masquerade ball of various versions of the story, he is able to move around there without anyone knowing that he doesn't "belong". Honestly, I think that the staging here is just relying on the general mythology of the Phantom as a lurker rather than putting thought into why that would be.

Giry Confronts the Phantom:

Okay, so this is the concept album's version of the previous number, and it is WAY cooler and does a much better job of getting the plot across to everyone. For one thing, it takes place between the Giry's and the Phantom himself; rather than the final form of the show, in which the women discuss the issue among themselves and the Phantom simply overhears them, in this one they confront him head-on and directly converse with him. It's a much more dynamic and interesting choice, especially since this Phantom has no particular mysterious barrier between them and himself anymore, and allows both ladies to become more active and important as characters as well as giving us more insight into the relationship between all three people.

To begin with, Meg, who in the final show only begs her mother for information about whether or not the Phantom was watching her numbers after the fact and daydreams on her own about whether or not he might have noticed her, in this piece directly appeals to him, seeking his approval and interacting with him instead of hoping he'll look at her from afar. It makes her attachment to him much more real and immediate since we can see it in action, and further makes his curt dismissal of her when she does it an example of the painful relationship dynamic between them.

Madame Giry's savage curtailment of her daughter's attempts to get the Phantom to talk to her paints a fairly ugly picture of her, but it's hard to tell if it's her also running over Meg's wants and needs, or if she's attempting to protect her daughter from any further fixation on a guy who is clearly not returning her affection. Either way, Madame Giry also directly confronts the Phantom (who in this version already discovered that Christine was on her way, rather than being accidentally clued in by overhearing them talking about it) about Christine's impending arrival, making her a much stronger and more solidly angry character than the one that in the final show has been reduced to passive-aggressive whining backstage instead of ever talking to him about it. She reads as much more of a layered character - while her motivations for getting here and staying here are still pretty much a mystery, she makes her feelings that she's given too much and is too angry to step back from the situation known, and directly calls on the Phantom to acknowledge her and Meg's contributions to his success rather than passively hoping he'll do so on his own.

What is she pissed off about, exactly? Well, as far as I can tell, she and Meg have been instrumental in helping him build his Coney Island empire, although they're vague about what exactly they did (apparently they helped "grease wheels" and spread publicity, and there's heavy implication that they gave him the financial help he needed to get started), and she's concerned that he won't be paying them back or acknowledging that they built this park as much as he did. She's afraid - quite rightly so, unfortunately - that when Christine reappears in his life he'll immediately stop paying attention to anyone or anything else and probably give her the entire place on a platter if he thinks she'd like it, and she doesn't want herself and Meg to get shafted after a decade of work supporting him.

This is all pretty reasonable of her, although her apparent need to blame Christine for existing instead of the Phantom for being a dick to them is not. And be a dick he does - he snaps at them that he promised to repay them at some point (letting us know that he hasn't yet) and that they need to leave him alone, making him sound like an irritable gambling debtor dealing with a justifiably upset family. Madame Giry and Meg basically function as his family in this musical, so the dynamics of their interaction here feel more real and give everyone more dimension than the flat, inexplicable master/disgruntled servants thing going on in the final cut of the show.

It's mentioned here that the Phantom was originally exhibited as an attraction in the Coney Island shows before managing to become the owner and proprietor of some of them; this not only lets us know that he was apparently in extremely destitute condition when he arrived here, but also that his story has literally been reset to the beginning of the previous story's (in the 2004 film version, anyway). Once again, he has been mocked and dehumanized for the entertainment of others, and once again he has been rescued by Madame Giry who gives him the resources and opportunities to make himself a power in his environment.

Oh, lord, there's a bit of a "Til I Hear You Sing" reprise here, but it's spoiled by way too much synthesized bass. This is not a successful experiment.

The Phantom himself rounds the piece out by being totally oblivious of his own previous characterization; he acknowledges that Christine left him by her own choice, but then turns right around and says he's just going to somehow "fix" that. So her own choice be damned, apparently. This character exists in a vacuum uninhabited by any knowledge whatsoever of the previous show it's the sequel to, in which he realized that forcing Christine's choices was not in fact a good way to show his love; he's right back where he started, just in a new setting.

Christine Disembarks:

In this particular scene, the de Chagnys arrive in New York and are immediately mobbed by reporters, another convention mostly borrowed from Forsyth's work. Raoul is characterized from the moment he gets off the boat as snobbish, elitist, and overly combative with the reporters, but the lyrics' attempts to do this are spotty; for example, while his line when he corrects a reporter who calls Christine by her old last name - "Her name is de Chagny!" is meant to make him sound like an overly possessive asshole, it is actually perfectly accurate, since surnames do not include retention of maiden names at this time except in specific nobility cases that don't apply to Christine, and is something worth correcting someone about. I'm also not sure why exactly all the reporters insist on calling her Daaé anyway; she's never been to the States before so she's hardly a celebrity over here, she hasn't been using her maiden name in a decade, and no one ever mentions the events of the previous show so even the implausible idea that they know her name from those long-ago stories doesn't quite fly. I can't come up with a single good reason that they would be doing that, except perhaps that Lloyd Webber didn't want her being called Christine de Chagny the entire show because that would keep reminding the audience of her relationship with Raoul, which he is out to undermine as thoroughly as possible.

Also, apparently either everyone from France is 100% fluent in American English, or all American reporters are 100% fluent in French. No one ever acknowledges the fact that these characters don't natively speak the same language.

The de Chagnys appear to be far more famous in the Americas than I would have suspected, judging from the fact that the reporters are not only all in a tizzy over Christine's arrival (not too much of a stretch, since she is apparently a famous singer and she's connected to Hammerstein who is something of an eccentric celebrity at this time) but also all privy to the fact that Raoul is apparently severely in debt thanks to having a gambling problem (much more of a stretch, both in it happening and in it becoming public enough knowledge for random American journalists to know about it). This is the first sally in this show's somewhat bewildering campaign to utterly decimate the characterization of Raoul that was established in the first Lloyd Webber musical; although I can't complain that at least he does show signs of having changed or evolved as a character over time (albeit into a jerk) when apparently no one else except for Meg has done the same, it's nevertheless a transparent device used to suggest to the audience that Christine's choice to leave with him was incorrect and that her relationship with the Phantom is far more important and valuable by painting Raoul as a drunken gambler who mistreats his family.

This is also where we are first introduced to Gustave de Chagny, Christine's son, who is a dead ringer for Forsyth's Pierre de Chagny, with whom he shares the majority of his scenes and background. Gustave (most likely named after Christine's father, who was called Gustave in the 2004 film and played by Karimloo in a cameo role) is in Lloyd Webber's musical a little younger, looking somewhere around nine or ten years old as opposed to Pierre's twelve, and more starry-eyed and excited about being on Coney Island than his predecessor was, but other than that very little attempt has been made to distinguish him as a new character.

A car drives up at this point, prompting much consternation and awe among the reporters, who remark on this "carriage with no horses" and then ecstatically laud Mister Y for pulling off yet another feat of mysterious magic. Unfortunately, thanks to the decision to set this show in 1905, this makes no sense; automobiles have existed for decades and are beginning to explode into the private domain in the United States at this time. People, especially journalists, know what they are.

Because he has clearly learned absolutely nothing from how disastrously things went the last time he tried this tactic, the Phantom then proceeds to kidnap the entire de Chagny family by sending Fleck, Squelch, and Gangle in the car to pretend to be from Hammerstein and take them off to be installed at Phantasma instead of the accommodations they were actually supposed to be destined for. While Forsyth's novel was able to pull this off a little better thanks to the fact that it was actually the Phantom himself who had invited Christine (although she didn't know it) and therefore ended up hosting her and her family, Lloyd Webber's decision to take that invitation out of his hands means that it's something of a plot hole that no one ever notices that Christine doesn't make it to the people who were expecting her, and no outcry is ever heard over the fact that she's apparently gone missing and the Manhattan Opera House is without its much-publicized inaugural act. Incidentally, the concept recording appears to be working with an earlier draft of the script in which it's implied that the Phantom did have a hand in bringing Christine to the Americas, most obviously because she already has the score for "Love Never Dies" and knows she'll be singing it, so this may be yet another part of the plot dropped in the transition to the show's final form, leaving it less coherent.

The Phantom sings several of his lines from the previous show's "Angel of Music" here, with no attempt made whatsoever to weave them into the current musical's pieces; they're purely there to inform us that he's returned completely to his role in that show. Another unfortunate consequence of doing this so much is the fact that sometimes the first musical's pieces make the second one's look bad; especially when contrasted with the forgettable incidental and recitative music in this scene, "Angel of Music's" slightly ominous beauty only serves to remind the audience that they could be watching that show instead of this one.

On the concept recording version of this, a throwaway line by a reporter tells us that the ship Christine has arrived upon is called The Persephone, which is an excellent moment of symbolic intent that I wish had been carried over. It seems clear that the intent here is to contrast Christine with the Greek mythological figure of Persephone, goddess of springtime and life, and to suggest that, like that goddess' descent into the underworld every winter to keep company with her death god husband Hades, Christine's return to the Phantom's orbit is both inescapable and darkly romantic.