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the phantom of the opera is heeeeeere, inside my mind!
After spending the first thirteen and a half years of her life not really noticing or caring what her peers were doing, E is now on a discord with kids from math camp and has suddenly started being quite invested in what her math-camp peers are chatting about. (This works out quite well because as a whole they all seem to be both very nice kids and good discord moderators!) One of these things is that a lot of them, being teenagers, are fans of Phantom of the Opera. This is the first time she has ever been noticeably interested in a musical at all, so it was very exciting to me when she asked to listen to Phantom of the Opera!!
I may have posted this before about Les Mis -- I read an abridged version of Les Miserables one summer where I had literally nothing else to read, and then I became aware of the musical Les Miserables the next year when the mom we did carpool with was listening to it in the car and I started catching words like "Jean Valjean" and "Javert." I asked her about it and she very kindly made me a cassette tape (remember those?) of the musical, and she threw in Phantom of the Opera too, because of course you'd want both! And I loved both those tapes -- I remember that you had to write a letter (and I think enclose a stamped self-addressed envelope and maybe a little money?) and they would send you the libretto -- and I did that for both. (Les Mis only sent you the songs, but Phantom sent the entire libretto.) I have both of those musicals committed to memory in deep corners of my brain, except for some of the very repetitive parts (hello, Masquerade). I then was able to watch both and loved both, but Les Mis was the one I returned to again and again -- I think I've only seen Phantom that once, when I was a teenager -- oh, and I saw the movie which was so forgettable that I'd half forgotten there was a movie -- and I've seen Les Mis... uh, well, more times than that. (Five, maybe? Six? And the movie too, of course, which I thought was less forgettable than Phantom's movie :) )
So we cued up Spotify and listened to a bunch of the songs, and yep, those songs are still burned into my brain. But when E started asking about the storyline, it turned out that there were big gaps of that missing from my memory, because it's the songs I know, not the story! And then I found the 25th anniversary Royal Albert production and was super excited to find out, which I didn't know before, that it was an actual staged production (I was very disappointed by the Les Mis 25th anniversary being a concert version), so we have also watched that!
Some various thoughts:
-For the first 95% of the musical I feel like the Phantom is clearly portrayed as this super-creepy predator who is playing on Christine's feelings for her dead dad, it's actually quite impressive to me how clearly that comes across in the music, the words, the acting, everything (and in the 1980's, too -- although maybe this can just be chalked down to "uh, the 80's were just super-creepy in general"). (Though Michael Crawford helps -- that guy can do seriously-creepy so easily with his voice!) Then, of course, the last 5% makes it into a ~romantic love triangle~ and the Phantom into a woobie who just needs True Love's Kiss to reform, thus inspiring a generation (two generations at this point, I suppose) of Christine/Phantom shippers. (*) (I know this is just following the book, although I think it's done better in the book where Erik actually does just want to be a normal guy who has a white picket fence and all that... but it's been a while since I read the book. That's next on the list!) At least she ends up going with Raoul in the end, who has his flaws but at least is not a both a super-creepy predator and a murderer! (E does very much agree that the Phantom being prone to murdering people is Not Okay. But I suspect she does still find it fascinating, which, okay, I mean, I was a teenager too.)
(*) I was not actually a Christine/Phantom shipper in the sense of writing bad fanfic about them -- even then I understood that the Phantom would make a terrible boyfriend -- but, uh, I might have written bad fanfic about the assassin Murdoc in MacGyver (anyone remember him? No?) and his ill-fated love for Penny Parker which I may have realized subconsciously must have been inspired by Phantom... oh, never mind!
-Spotify was on random and was pulling from both the Broadway recording and the movie recording, and, well, it's not like this is a new insight or anything, but I advised D and E that they could tell the difference because the people on the Broadway recording could actually sing, and didn't sound like teenagers. The movie Phantom sounds like a teenager! And Emmy Rossum is totally unbelievable as an opera singer. It actually bothers me more in Phantom than in Les Mis (although I hated Russell Crowe's singing as Javert as much as anyone) because it's not just the singing, it's also the suspension of disbelief because the entire show is literally about opera singers!!
-Raoul and Christine: Wow, there is some whiplash between "Oh hi, right, we hung out as kids together!" to "So everyone thinks we spent the night together but actually we spent all of thirty seconds reminiscing and then I spent the night with the Phantom" to "now we will declare our love for each other in a passionate love song!" I mean, I guess there was a whole opera that got rehearsed for and performed in the interim, so I guess that was probably a time-cut of a while, but there was absolutely no context or buildup at all to them being suddenly "oh right I love you!"
-I was not even really aware of opera as an art form when I watched it for the first time; all the opera bits are 1000% funnier knowing something about opera, all the operas that ALW is pastiching in Il Muto and Don Juan Triumphant, and opera performance. For example, in the RA production when they do the scene "Seraphimo, away with this pretence!" Christine, playing the pageboy, pulls away her skirt to reveal breeches underneath and is playing the pageboy as very self-satisfied, as indeed he would be. But then when they rerun the scene, she's already pulled away her skirt, and so you can see Christine-the-singer be all confused and off-kilter because she doesn't know what to do there! It's hilarious.
-Carlotta and Piangi in the RA production are both awesome! Carlotta as s a diva, and Piangi as her tenor sidekick -- RA!Carlotta is actually quite good at acting, and RA!Piangi is clearly playing a park-and-bark style tenor who is also Carlotta's chorus boy, it's hilarious.
-Although it's also hilarious that the Phantom's music, in particular his opera, is clearly meant to be avant-garde, with all its chromaticisms and nonstandard chord progressions... and then whenever the Phantom sings anything it's all very simplistically tonal. Not that there's anything wrong with that! Some of my best friends, tunewise speaking, are tonal melodies! Just... every time I laughed about how the Phantom doesn't have the courage of his own musical convictions :)
-I also found this video of Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman doing Music of the Night, and a) woooooow SB's hair and makeup, the 80's were definitely a thing, weren't they! and b) omg I had totally forgotten about the ~dramatic reveal~ of the dummy of Christine in a bridal dress; thankfully the dummy had been taken out of production by the time they did the Royal Albert show. That was also very 80's! I guess this was probably the dummy that ALW envisions in his fanfic that the Phantom later outfitted with robotic parts (see next bullet point).
-then I had to go back and read![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
skygiants ' review of Love Never Dies, which is extremely horrifically hilarious (the horrific part being because of the actual plot of LND)
-but okay I do actually want fic of Firmin and Andre (were they actually ruined? what happened?) and Meg and Mme Giry that is NOT LND
I may have posted this before about Les Mis -- I read an abridged version of Les Miserables one summer where I had literally nothing else to read, and then I became aware of the musical Les Miserables the next year when the mom we did carpool with was listening to it in the car and I started catching words like "Jean Valjean" and "Javert." I asked her about it and she very kindly made me a cassette tape (remember those?) of the musical, and she threw in Phantom of the Opera too, because of course you'd want both! And I loved both those tapes -- I remember that you had to write a letter (and I think enclose a stamped self-addressed envelope and maybe a little money?) and they would send you the libretto -- and I did that for both. (Les Mis only sent you the songs, but Phantom sent the entire libretto.) I have both of those musicals committed to memory in deep corners of my brain, except for some of the very repetitive parts (hello, Masquerade). I then was able to watch both and loved both, but Les Mis was the one I returned to again and again -- I think I've only seen Phantom that once, when I was a teenager -- oh, and I saw the movie which was so forgettable that I'd half forgotten there was a movie -- and I've seen Les Mis... uh, well, more times than that. (Five, maybe? Six? And the movie too, of course, which I thought was less forgettable than Phantom's movie :) )
So we cued up Spotify and listened to a bunch of the songs, and yep, those songs are still burned into my brain. But when E started asking about the storyline, it turned out that there were big gaps of that missing from my memory, because it's the songs I know, not the story! And then I found the 25th anniversary Royal Albert production and was super excited to find out, which I didn't know before, that it was an actual staged production (I was very disappointed by the Les Mis 25th anniversary being a concert version), so we have also watched that!
Some various thoughts:
-For the first 95% of the musical I feel like the Phantom is clearly portrayed as this super-creepy predator who is playing on Christine's feelings for her dead dad, it's actually quite impressive to me how clearly that comes across in the music, the words, the acting, everything (and in the 1980's, too -- although maybe this can just be chalked down to "uh, the 80's were just super-creepy in general"). (Though Michael Crawford helps -- that guy can do seriously-creepy so easily with his voice!) Then, of course, the last 5% makes it into a ~romantic love triangle~ and the Phantom into a woobie who just needs True Love's Kiss to reform, thus inspiring a generation (two generations at this point, I suppose) of Christine/Phantom shippers. (*) (I know this is just following the book, although I think it's done better in the book where Erik actually does just want to be a normal guy who has a white picket fence and all that... but it's been a while since I read the book. That's next on the list!) At least she ends up going with Raoul in the end, who has his flaws but at least is not a both a super-creepy predator and a murderer! (E does very much agree that the Phantom being prone to murdering people is Not Okay. But I suspect she does still find it fascinating, which, okay, I mean, I was a teenager too.)
(*) I was not actually a Christine/Phantom shipper in the sense of writing bad fanfic about them -- even then I understood that the Phantom would make a terrible boyfriend -- but, uh, I might have written bad fanfic about the assassin Murdoc in MacGyver (anyone remember him? No?) and his ill-fated love for Penny Parker which I may have realized subconsciously must have been inspired by Phantom... oh, never mind!
-Spotify was on random and was pulling from both the Broadway recording and the movie recording, and, well, it's not like this is a new insight or anything, but I advised D and E that they could tell the difference because the people on the Broadway recording could actually sing, and didn't sound like teenagers. The movie Phantom sounds like a teenager! And Emmy Rossum is totally unbelievable as an opera singer. It actually bothers me more in Phantom than in Les Mis (although I hated Russell Crowe's singing as Javert as much as anyone) because it's not just the singing, it's also the suspension of disbelief because the entire show is literally about opera singers!!
-Raoul and Christine: Wow, there is some whiplash between "Oh hi, right, we hung out as kids together!" to "So everyone thinks we spent the night together but actually we spent all of thirty seconds reminiscing and then I spent the night with the Phantom" to "now we will declare our love for each other in a passionate love song!" I mean, I guess there was a whole opera that got rehearsed for and performed in the interim, so I guess that was probably a time-cut of a while, but there was absolutely no context or buildup at all to them being suddenly "oh right I love you!"
-I was not even really aware of opera as an art form when I watched it for the first time; all the opera bits are 1000% funnier knowing something about opera, all the operas that ALW is pastiching in Il Muto and Don Juan Triumphant, and opera performance. For example, in the RA production when they do the scene "Seraphimo, away with this pretence!" Christine, playing the pageboy, pulls away her skirt to reveal breeches underneath and is playing the pageboy as very self-satisfied, as indeed he would be. But then when they rerun the scene, she's already pulled away her skirt, and so you can see Christine-the-singer be all confused and off-kilter because she doesn't know what to do there! It's hilarious.
-Carlotta and Piangi in the RA production are both awesome! Carlotta as s a diva, and Piangi as her tenor sidekick -- RA!Carlotta is actually quite good at acting, and RA!Piangi is clearly playing a park-and-bark style tenor who is also Carlotta's chorus boy, it's hilarious.
-Although it's also hilarious that the Phantom's music, in particular his opera, is clearly meant to be avant-garde, with all its chromaticisms and nonstandard chord progressions... and then whenever the Phantom sings anything it's all very simplistically tonal. Not that there's anything wrong with that! Some of my best friends, tunewise speaking, are tonal melodies! Just... every time I laughed about how the Phantom doesn't have the courage of his own musical convictions :)
-I also found this video of Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman doing Music of the Night, and a) woooooow SB's hair and makeup, the 80's were definitely a thing, weren't they! and b) omg I had totally forgotten about the ~dramatic reveal~ of the dummy of Christine in a bridal dress; thankfully the dummy had been taken out of production by the time they did the Royal Albert show. That was also very 80's! I guess this was probably the dummy that ALW envisions in his fanfic that the Phantom later outfitted with robotic parts (see next bullet point).
-then I had to go back and read
skygiants ' review of Love Never Dies, which is extremely horrifically hilarious (the horrific part being because of the actual plot of LND)-but okay I do actually want fic of Firmin and Andre (were they actually ruined? what happened?) and Meg and Mme Giry that is NOT LND
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And, ha, that was my experience with Rent, though I have friends who like it a lot.
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I didn't do conscious shipping, but in retrospect I am sure that fascination with that dynamic worked its way into my psyche...
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The best thing about that was that they also showed ALW's By Jeeves musical and the whole family have been earwormed by Love's Maze ever since.
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okay I do actually want fic of Firmin and Andre (were they actually ruined? what happened?) and Meg and Mme Giry that is NOT LND
Now I do, too.
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I haven't watched Tanz der Vampire and am possibly too old to do so now for the first time? I think I would be totally creeped out by Phantom if I saw it for the first time today...
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(ETA I have probably shared that story too many times! Tired yesterday.) Phantom for people my age was kind of similar to, if smaller in scale than, Harry Potter for (most) US millennials--a shared cultural touchpoint.
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Anyway, I'm still very fond of the Phantom, flaws and all.
For the first 95% of the musical I feel like the Phantom is clearly portrayed as this super-creepy predator who is playing on Christine's feelings for her dead dad, it's actually quite impressive to me how clearly that comes across in the music, the words, the acting, everything (and in the 1980's, too -- although maybe this can just be chalked down to "uh, the 80's were just super-creepy in general"). (Though Michael Crawford helps -- that guy can do seriously-creepy so easily with his voice!) Then, of course, the last 5% makes it into a ~romantic love triangle~ and the Phantom into a woobie who just needs True Love's Kiss to reform
Not really, though? (With the first 95 %, I mean.) His big freak out when Christine unmasks him the first time does include the self loathing and loneliness required for woobieness, and his reaction to having observed Christine and Raoul on the roof just before the interlude is written as a "poor Erik" scene as much as a "antagonist threatens doom for protagonists" scene. Which isn't to say he's not presented as manipulative and using Christine's grief for her father throughout, absolutely he is, but the "woobie" element is there from the start as well along with the "creep".
Have you seen Lindsay Ellis' very entertaining two part video essay, about Phantom before ALW and about the musical and the aftermath?
As for the ghastly movie, yes, while both feature (some) actors who can't sing, the Les Mis movie was better as a movie, plus two of the three leads weren't meant to be singers with incredibly beautiful voices in universe, and Hugh Jackman can actually sing.
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His big freak out when Christine unmasks him the first time does include the self loathing and loneliness required for woobieness, and his reaction to having observed Christine and Raoul on the roof just before the interlude is written as a "poor Erik" scene as much as a "antagonist threatens doom for protagonists" scene.
Oh, yeah, my teenage self, listening to this in the 80's/90's, definitely grabbed on to those as woobiness. But as a rather older adult in 2024, it definitely gave a strong vibe to me of "abusive people are not abusive 100% of the time and always feel they have self-justification for their actions," especially the way that he would use these moments as springboards to, well, threaten doom for the protagonists. But I guess people didn't really understand that so much back then... it's a really compelling portrait, though!
And yes, I still have a lot of Feelings about it, clearly :D
I have not seen those essays, thank you for linking!
The Les Mis movie had the great virtue that it was clearly made by people who cared a lot about the book. (It even had Gavroche's elephant!!) I loved it, while I had all but forgotten that there was a Phantom movie at all (and could not now tell you anything about it except that I did remember the singers weren't great).
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I still really like the songs that have five people singing at once, though! Especially now that I know that he's totally ripping off Mozart :D
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tbh the phantom songs that have lots of people singing don't work nearly as well for me as I want them to; I find them so chaotic that I can't follow what anyone is saying, and just get frustrated. I'm glad they work for you though!
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I think the songs with lots of people singing really have to be sung well -- there were bits of the Royal Albert performance where it just sounded like total cacophony, which I don't think is how it's supposed to be... But I spent way too much time as a kid going through with the libretto and going through all the different voice parts, lol!
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Re: the aftermath, one of the things I had entirely forgotten was that Raoul de Chagny was the new patron of the opera house. I wonder whether he financed Andre and Fermin getting back on their feet after that, or whether he was like "nah, I would rather not have anything to do with any of this any more." (Though with Raoul's character, I would expect... not the latter!)
[personal profile] genarti and I also often frequently quote to each other something we saw in a Norm Lewis interview when he took on the role, in which he discussed preparing to sing the part of the Phantom by asking himself "who is this man, and why is he acting like a giant baby?"
LOLOLOLOL this is fantastic! Now I kinda want to see Norm Lewis playing him...