Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber by Block, Geoffrey (good story books to read .TXT) 📕

in mismatched texts. Raymond Knapp discusses the implications of the problem: “Especially in its seemingly wanton recycling of music and inadequate attention to text setting, Evita is seen as lacking two perceived strengths of the more traditional Broadway stage: musical variety and an oft-demonstrated capacity for marrying words and music so intimately that neither seems sufficient without the other. According to this ideal, Lloyd Webber’s use of the same music for quite different songs seems fundamentally inadequate.”32 The problem is not the reuse, or even the ubiquitous reuse of the material. The problem is the lack of discrimination in the recycling of melodic material. When used indiscriminately, the opportunities for increased dramatic meanings are squandered. Music can become just an attractive but subsidiary adjunct to the show rather than a conveyor of idiomatic meanings and moods. I will return to the use and reuse of themes in the section “Music and Meaning in The Phantom of the Opera.”

The Phantom of the Opera: The Novel and the Silent Film

The story line of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Hal Prince’s The Phantom of the Opera can be traced to two sources, the classic fairy tale about the Beauty and the Beast and George du Maurier’s novel Trilby from 1894. The novel, in which the musical magician Svengali places the nonmusical ingénue Trilby in a trance during which she attains great operatic success, was a popular novel in both England and America in its day and was soon adapted into a popular play. Between September 1909 and January 1910, Gaston Leroux’s new twist on this story, Le Fantöme de l’Opéra, appeared in serial form (in French); the English translation The Phantom of the Opera followed in 1911. More than seventy years later, three years after the phenomenon of Cats had begun its long-lived London run, Lloyd Webber found a copy of Leroux’s gothic novel in a used book shop. The novel inspired the modern-day musical theater Svengali (Lloyd Webber), inspired by his Trilby and wife at the time (Sarah Brightman), to create a musical version that proved to be a greater phenomenon even than Cats, at least on Broadway, when The Phantom of the Opera opened in London (1986) and New York (1988).

The genesis of Phantom has been told often, and authoritative summaries of the novel and film and television adaptations can be found in George Perry’s The Complete “Phantom of the Opera.” Less explored are the creative choices Lloyd Webber and Prince—in collaboration with the Midas-touched producer of Les Misérables the previous year, Cameron Macintosh (b. 1946)—made in their conversion of Leroux’s novel and the comparably influential 1925 classic silent film directed by Rupert Julian and starring Lon Chaney as the Phantom, Marie Philbin as Christine, and Norman Kerry as Raoul.33 Although the novel provided a broad structure and the film a more focused structure (in addition to providing a visual model for the opera house stage and majestic staircase), the Lloyd Webber-Prince version departed in significant ways from each.

The film had already accomplished some of Prince’s work. Foster Hirsch credits Prince for removing the gruesome details of the Phantom’s medical afflictions and early biography, the back story to Christine’s relationship to her father (it was the father’s prophecy of an angel-to-come that worked on Christine’s susceptibility to the magical charms of the Angel of Music), and the childhood romance between Christine and Raoul.34 All of this material, plus Leroux’s detailed explanation of how the Phantom accomplished his supernatural tricks, had already vanished in the 1925 film. The character of the Persian, the man who knew the true story about Erik, the future Phantom, was retained from the novel but transformed in the film into a suspicious character often seen lurking about the same time film viewers witnessed actions attributed to the Phantom. In the early portions of the film it seemed possible that the Persian and the Phantom were the same. Deeper into the story, viewers learn that the Persian is working on behalf of the police to apprehend the Phantom.

As in the novel, the Persian, who sports an astrakhan hat, is the detective Ledoux (a name that sounds similar and is spelled suspiciously close to the novel’s author Leroux) who tries to help Raoul escape harm in the vast and literally torturous underground of the Paris Opera as they pursue Christine and her abductor, the Phantom. To achieve what is often referred to as the “Abbott shorthand,” in deference to the ability of director George Abbott, Prince’s mentor, to capture the essence of a plot, both forms of the Persian, the Phantom’s former acquaintance in the novel and the private investigator Ledoux from the silent film, entirely disappeared from the musical. To fill in for the absence of the Persian, another mysterious character, Madame Giry, served as a secret liaison between the Phantom and the other principals. No one felt the need to provide an alternative character to replace detective Ledoux.

The Lloyd Webber-Prince scenario added much to the novel and film to enhance the plot and alter its effect. By making the Phantom physically less deformed and musically more brilliant and seductive, he becomes for the first time a serious “romantic alternative” to Raoul.35 Raoul, too, has become a more endearing figure, especially when compared to his depiction in the novel and film as a condescending, controlling character who possesses neither sympathy nor understanding for Christine’s plight nor the heroism to withstand the Phantom’s threats. In the novel and the 1925 silent film, the Phantom’s spell inhibits Christine’s judgment, and her fear of the Phantom causes her to put Raoul at arm’s length. In a significant discrepancy, throughout much of the musical the Phantom is portrayed as a relatively benevolent figure who has entranced Christine into believing he is the Angel of Music as prophesied by Christine’s father. Until “The Point of No Return” toward the end of the evening, audiences would probably not be too shocked if Christine decided to join her Phantom in the depths of the Paris