Phantom Reviewing Project: Love Never Dies (original) (raw)
August 3rd, 2014
| igenlode |
11:06 am - Phantom Reviewing Project: Love Never DiesAfter four years of self-imposed purdah in order to avoid pre-conceived prejudice, the Phantom Reviewing Project has finally reached "Love Never Dies": The Phantom Project: Reviews & Research / Love Never Dies by Andrew Lloyd Webber (2010).And I have to admit that I get enormous private satisfaction to observe that the reviewer's analysis essentially concurs with everything I've been writing over the past year about Raoul and Christine's relationship in this production: what the show is trying to do versus the impression it actually ends up giving!A nice parallel is drawn between Gustave's attention-seeking behaviour with Raoul and Meg's attempts with the Phantom, for example: but "Raoul's behavior is used as an example of his unworthiness to remain in his family, while the Phantom's will be excused because the person doing the attention-seeking is clearly asking too much." "characters are 'in the wrong' not when they do things that are objectively wrong but when they oppose or inconvenience the Phantom, who is by virtue of being the protagonist completely exempt from any such moral judgment" -- which backfires by making the protagonist a far less complex and sympathetic character than was the intended result.For a musical that is supposedly about the Phantom's woes, it contrives to make Raoul far more interesting, despite earnest attempts to destroy the character: "The obvious comparison [...] is with the Phantom, suggesting that Raoul has a pretty facade with nothing worthwhile beneath, while the Phantom has an ugly facade but is filled with important emotional depths, but ironically it is Raoul in this show who has demonstrated emotional depth and growth" And apparently I'm not the only viewer who was left with the confused impression that Christine was actually attempting to choose Raoul in the revised Australian Version -- which of course makes it a completely different tragedy of misunderstandings!Current Mood:  satisfiedTags: andrew lloyd webber, it's not erik's fault, reviews, sequel |
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(14 comments | Leave a comment)
From: kryss_labryn Date:August 12th, 2014 06:18 am (UTC) (Link) |
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Thanks for sharing that article! I think she did a very good and fair (not to mention in-depth!) review of the piece; it was interesting to read.
I still haven't actually sat down and watched it all the way through, although of course I've heard the songs and seen various small snippets here and there, but the one thing I will absolutely give the Australian version is the fantastic costuming and set design. They did a really spectacular job with it (much, much better than the empty sets the London version had--I suspect that set designer was told of Maria Bjornson's idea of leaving lots of shadows for the audience's imaginations to fill in, but didn't quite comprehend the part where there does need to be some actual set pieces on the stage for the broad strokes of the design, before we can get to work filling in all the little details we can't quite see! Plus Christine's balcony looked like a vagina. I'd like to think it was symbolic of something or other (and considering the first time the Phantom makes physical contact with Christine again he's penetrating her vagina-balcony the same way he's re-penetrating her life, it's probably symbolic of sex), but then again the whole thing's such a mess someone could simply have been failing to imitate the Art Deco aesthetic.
But the Australians did a really good job with the design; I especially like the Phantom's coat (--did the reviewer notice that in the entire piece, he's never actually called "the Phantom," either? I mean, she noticed that neither versions are actually named, not the original and not the sequel, but the sequel doesn't even call him by the title he had in the first one; it's almost like Webber somehow didn't have the rights to the word or something. So bizarre. But I've taken a couple of days to read this and now I don't remember) but he's such a thoroughly despicable and unlikable character in this version that I just get mad that someone cooler isn't wearing it. Ideally in another show.
Now I feel the urge to go and finish off the third act of my own sequel to Webber's sequel, which turns Gustave into a fighter pilot and involves Raoul in a plot to stop Nazi zombies. Man, now I want to go and work on that again; Nazi zombies are SO much better than this crap.
Incidentally, I don't know if you can comment or contact the author--I can't comment, apparently--but she's accidentally inserted a second copy of the entire second act after her ending. Makes it look a lot longer than it is.
| From:igenlode Date:August 15th, 2014 10:40 pm (UTC) (Link) |
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I never saw the West End production while it was around; I was a bit leery of the idea of a sequel in the first place and wrote off the idea with a shrug when the reviews came out. I didn't actually hear the music until a long time later when all the fuss was already over...
It would have been interesting if the reviewer had done an analysis of the impact of all the changes between the original soundtrack and the Australian Version DVD (e.g. the radical rewrite of "Dear Old Friend), but I don't think she realised that there were internal changes to some of the tracks with the same name beyond the re-ordering of the material at the beginning. (See her comments that "The concept recording appears to be working with an earlier draft of the script" containing plot elements that were dropped to the detriment of "the show's final form" -- an ironic conclusion about changes that were made in an attempt to patch some of the plot holes that fans complained about!)
This confusion is a pity, because her analysis of the 'show not tell' contribution of "Heaven By the Sea" (I missed that from the new version) and the differing contexts of "Ten Long Years" is well worth reading. (Most previous reviewers have tended to concur that having the Phantom passive in the background while Madame Giry rants at him was a bad idea and that having Meg more sympathetic to Christine was a good idea, so it's interesting to see someone arguing in favour of the original ordering here!)
She does mention that the Phantom isn't actually called 'Phantom' "in spite of the original promo materials"; she doesn't speculate on why he uses a different pseudonym in this show despite calling his fun-park Phantasma. I suppose he can't very well deal with politicians, builders, etc. under the name of "the Phantom of the Opera" -- and what opera, anyway? -- but perhaps 'Phantasma' is simply nostalgia for the old days, i.e. a private reference that nobody in America is supposed to get.
Nazi zombies? :-D
That sounds a lot more positive(!) than my own head-canon about a sequel-to-my-sequel ("To Ease Your Troubled Mind", which crippled Raoul in WWI as a somewhat extreme form of guilt-therapy), in which Raoul and Gustave end up on opposite sides of the Vichy divide as the old Vicomte gets more conservative and Gustave as a disenchanted political left-winger gravitates to the Communist resistance... (which is one reason I didn't write it; too depressing).
I noticed the repeated second act -- offputting, in a review that's already dauntingly long -- but couldn't find any means of contacting the author either. However, in the intervening period she has apparently noticed the problem, because it's gone :-)
[Edit: well, I thought it had, but apparently it hasn't...]
Edited at 2014-08-15 10:58 pm (UTC)
| From:kryss_labryn Date:August 23rd, 2014 05:33 am (UTC) (Link) |
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Nazi zombies was ridiculously fun to write; I'm doing it as a script for a silent film and perhaps, once I eventually finish it, I'll start shopping it around at film schools, lol. I'd love to see it made. You can read Part One and Part Two on my blog if you like.
You know, I really wish ALW had just done it as a completely original work, but I suspect the promise of more delicious Phantomy moneys was too much to resist, although honestly, the fact that paperbacks of PoM are selling on Amazon starting at a penny should have clued him in.
If he really wanted to do a sequel, or at least returned to more Phantomy stuff, it would have been far, far cooler to do a prequel instead, and maybe seen if he could have teamed up with (or gotten the rights to) Susan Kay for "Phantom," not that I regard it as 100% canon but it's much better than PoM (and goes for far, far more on Amazon, if you can get it at all, lol, which should have told him something about how the phandom regards the two works; instead, he seems to have based his plot on what the majority of post-musical/movie Phantom fics over at ff.net were doing, plot- and character-wise, so far as I can tell). It would have been cool to see a musical version of his origin (ideally from the musical, because "locked in a cage as a child and then moved into
his parents'
a basement isn't really very interesting to base a whole show around--but book!Erik hung out with pirates in India, and had to flee Persia after building a magnificent building there and also being a state executioner--plus he went to Russia, and Hungary--he really had a far more interesting life than poor Gerik, and is a far more tragic figure for having seen so much more of the world, and consequently been rejected by a far larger percentage of humanity. He really gave it the old college try before giving up and taking the opportunity of being a sub-contractor to build the basements to construct a hidden home there.
--Naw, being sold by his mother to gypsies, being displayed in a cage for, gods, one night so far as I can tell, and then hidden away in a basement is far more sexy and interesting. I can totally see why ALW changed that for the movie. --Oh no wait, I can't. ><
[Continued below because I can't shut up lol]
| From:igenlode Date:August 27th, 2014 02:20 pm (UTC) (Link) |
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Unspammed! I wish there was something one could do about the default spam-detection settings: so far as I can make out, the only way to post a link on Livejournal at all is to be the author of the original article. You can't even send them in messages... and the 'false positive' rate seems to be incredibly high. I've only ever once had a genuine spam comment.
I love silent films :-D
(Somebody once did a very clever scenario for a silent-era "Star Wars", complete with introductory cast shots starring appropriate actors ("Fredric March as... Luke Skywalker"), but it was a long time ago and I've never been able to track it down again.)
I do have various thoughts about the Nazi zombies, but I only have 8 minutes left on the library computer, so they will have to wait yet again :-(
My main reaction is: it's slightly worrying how convincing that set-up turns out to be! I thought it was going to be wild spoof, but (with the exception of the whole flesh-eating zombie thing, obviously...) you've done it as a pretty straight story.
I don't remember pirates in India? (or is that Susan Kay? whom I've rather resisted reading because she seems to have been adopted as canon: good fanfic is fine, but cannibalising it for bad fanfic is... worrying)
My puzzled take on Erik's past was actually that it doesn't seem to jibe with his claim to be rejected by the world: it actually looks as if he had a spectacularly successful career after running away to join the circus (apart from choosing the wrong employers for long-term survival) and even managed a normal suburban life before getting bored and disappearing beneath the Opera.
| From:kryss_labryn Date:August 29th, 2014 07:50 am (UTC) (Link) |
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The pirates in India are mentioned in passing in like one line; it's during the Siren scene; the Persian mentions that Erik learned the trick of breathing through a reed from pirates in India. Which is awesome and fantastic and Gerik's backstory is such a missed opportunity!
From "Chapter 21. Interesting and Instructive Vicissitudes of a Persian in the Cellars of the Opera":
"It's the silliest trick you ever saw," he said, "but it's very useful for breathing and singing in the water. I learned it from the Tonkin pirates, who are able to remain hidden for hours in the beds of the rivers."
--And now that I actually look up "Tonkin", I see that it is a region of Viet Nam near Hanoi, and not India after all. Huh. Must have gotten that from an annotated version. Don't think Kay mentions them. Her "Phantom"... well, it came out right when I was like 17 and a HUGE phan and Phantom-mania was everywhere so of course I absolutely devoured it. Um. It has its weaknesses but it's better than LND; also it doesn't try to shit all over Leroux.
Anyways, he was totally hanging out with pirates in Asia.
Also I need to get back to writing Nazi Zombies; Gustave is going to be a huge propaganda success for the Allies as this mysterious, dashing (and highly successful) young pilot; I think I had originally had the Phantom working with dolphin communication in San Diego (because of the aquarium there) and that was somehow going to lead to him being able to stop the zombies with sonics..? That part was utterly ridiculous and I've dropped it completely; it's just that I'm not quite sure what to replace it with. I will have to at least have some kind of meeting with Gustave and Meg's daughter again (she was going to be a love interest) although I don't know if we ever will actually see Meg herself. And of course Raoul is still trying to get to Gustave. But I haven't quite figured out where to go from here, which is why it's been on hiatus for so long.
| From:igenlode Date:September 1st, 2014 01:29 pm (UTC) (Link) |
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Oh yes, the reed trick! I always assumed that it was China too, but (according to my annotated Penguin edition) the De Tham of the footnote was actually a rebel against French rule in Vietnam. Which makes much more sense in the context of a French novel.
Although weirdly the translation you quote appears to have reversed the meaning of the sentence: I've checked back against Leroux, and in the original Erik quite clearly says un truc que j'ai appris aux pirates du Tonkin, a trick that he taught to the Tonkin pirates rather than learning from them! So where did he learn it?
A bit like the shock I got when I happened to notice that in the original text, Erik "s'était exhibé dans les foires" under the name of "The Living Corpse": thus in place of the Evil Gypsies (which I believe originate with Kay? they don't seem to be in the libretto pre-movie) and the abused child in a cage, we have a little boy who ran away from his parents 'to join the circus', as it were, and completed his education while roaming Europe in the more congenial company of the gypsies whom Leroux credits as "la source même de l'art et de la magie". A significantly different story...
So Gustave is going to be a Zorro figure in his black silk mask? ;-) And of course everyone will assume that he must be dashingly handsome underneath... but that's all right, because Charity already knows the truth and loves him anyway (so no Erik-type traumas there...)
| From:kryss_labryn Date:August 29th, 2014 08:31 am (UTC) (Link) |
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BTW that Star Wars one sounds neat; did the ever film it?
Have you seen these two? I love silent films... :D
| From:igenlode Date:September 1st, 2014 03:27 pm (UTC) (Link) |
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So 'Sootie' actually is Sooty; that made me smile...
And I have to say I thought Lt Penelope's costume was an improvement on the original; I never did like Sixties fashions :-p
I think the Star Wars one was a bit more 'straight' than that, as I recall, done in the style of the major studio epics of the 1920s rather than a Méliès/Keystone Kops spoof. I came into silents from the 'live music' end rather than the slapstick -- the first I saw was "Phantom of the Opera" (ironically) on TV, and the second "Flesh and the Devil" at the National Film Theatre with a live accompanist, followed by a BFI festival of British productions: I was a fan of Ivor Novello and Clive Brook long before I ever saw the corresponding Hollywood stars of the era :-)
So I'm not much of a fan of the 'silent comedy' style -- I prefer Keaton and Raymond Griffith to the deliberate disintegration and mayhem of Stan Laurel or Mack Sennett, which is the sort of frenetic action people tend to spoof in this sort of thing :-(
I'm pretty sure the Star Wars scenario was never filmed -- as I said, it was done on the assumption that major studio actors and resources were available rather than being aimed at amateur production, and I think it predated YouTube. But I may be remembering it completely wrong; I did try to find it again within the last few years, but never could.
[Edit: I had a big thing for Lars Hanson at one point ("The Scarlet Letter", "Flesh and the Devil", "The Wind", "The Informer") -- he plays fair, delicate and conflicted to a T. I wonder how he would do as a Leroux-Raoul?
At any rate he couldn't do worse than Norman Kerry... though I believe there were explanatory (if not exculpatory) circumstances for that!]
Edited at 2014-09-01 03:44 pm (UTC)
| From:igenlode Date:August 28th, 2014 07:13 pm (UTC) (Link) |
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Unfortunately I don't think the "Love Never Dies" set-up would have worked much better as a completely original work (save for annoying the diehard fans less), because it would still inherit the same basic protagonist problem. We are presented with Mr.Y as a sympathetic character by authorial fiat rather than being shown any compelling reasons to enlist us on his side -- the show is more or less relying on being able to rest on the laurels of its predecessor and import an audience who already believe in the masked man as a tragic figure unfairly hounded. Without that connection it would surely fare rather worse.
Unless, of course, the requirement to create characters from scratch caused the writers of the book/lyrics to pull their collective finger out and think about the implications of what they were depicting...
I came to the charitable conclusion a while back that the similarities between the LND characters/plot and the movie-fan-fiction probably were coincidental -- the problem being simply that in order to achieve the required aim of pairing off Christine with the Phantom you have to distort the existing characters, not least to present Christine as somehow having been in love with her false angel all along.
Or, as I wrote in my first outraged discovery of the plot a couple of years back, 'Skipping off to play Happy Families with the Phantom of the Opera is not any sane woman's decision; and certainly not hers.'
| From:kryss_labryn Date:August 23rd, 2014 05:33 am (UTC) (Link) |
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[Continued! Also apparently the first part was marked as spam... >.>]
If one wanted to write a sequel where Christine regrets her choice with Raoul, and is seriously tempted to leave him for the Phantom after running into him again, I would have done things differently. I would have kept Raoul sweet and in love with her, and her with him (honestly, how is it any kind of a drama if there's no choice to be made? Even more so in the actual version where THERE'S NO CHOICE TO BE MADE because she literally doesn't even get given the choice to make, grr)--but have her dreadfully miss performing. She maybe keeps her voice in with some private practice, but of course not the hours and hours of daily practice professionalism requires--and as the wife of a Comte (or even a Viscomte) she wouldn't have been socially permitted to perform in public, although she may have sang the occasional song after dinner for small groups of guests. But even then she couldn't really have let loose, because one cannot sit in a small parlour and listen to opera; it's too confined; the acoustics are all wrong; and it's too hard on the ears; too loud for the space. You can't take a voice trained to, unamplified (beyond good acoustics), fill an entire auditorium, and expect it to work well in a parlour.
So she loves her husband and he loves her, but until they hooked up again her entire life had been focussed on being a singer, being a star, and she deeply misses that, although she would probably try to hide that as much as possible from her husband.
My idea at the time (which I've largely forgotten now, partly because I'm getting over my annoyance with ALW because I've largely stopped caring, and partly because it's almost 3 am here--I work a late shift) was that rather than the Coney Island nonsense, he offers her movies and records--a chance to perform again; a chance to be seen and heard not by thousands, but by millions; a chance to be adored again, a star again. And all she has to do is walk away from the dull, boring, bland life she has now, and re-enter a world of lights, of drama, of excitement again...
I think that would be much more interesting. As would zombies, because zombies make everything better. XD
Sorry it took so long to reply, my email's broken.
| From:igenlode Date:August 28th, 2014 08:24 pm (UTC) (Link) |
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Of course in the "Love Never Dies" version Christine apparently has been performing -- and receiving a fee for it -- so one doesn't even get that rationale... (The Phantom isn't billing her as the wife of a Vicomte appearing for one night only on the public stage, which would presumably have been in itself a novelty: she is the Soprano of the Century who is a star in Paris.)
I think Christine might have been able to sing 'privately' in larger spaces than a parlour: we know that she was in demand to perform outside the Opera for individual society engagements even before her famous gala success. Leroux mentions that she sang at the soirée of the Duchess of Zurich, and was booked to lend her talents to a charity concert which she cancelled without giving any reason, subsequently refusing "toute invitation, tout cachet".
Taking up either engagement might have remained an acceptable gesture in a Vicomtesse if done out of goodwill rather than for a fee: I don't know quite how large a hall the Duchess's soirée required, but I imagine (since a public critic was present) that it involved more than a parlour's-worth of people :-)
(I actually attended a 'miniature opera' performance last night, courtesy of Opera Up Close -- La Traviata staged for five singers and three instruments in a room with an audience capacity of 84. It was breathtakingly intimate, and must have been even more so for those in the front row! Probably the one and only time I shall ever experience a tenor-soprano duet taking place literally over the top of my head, with an 'off-stage' Alfredo immediately behind my left ear singing down to Violetta a dozen yards away on stage. The vocal quality was absolutely comparable to any of the classic recordings I've heard, and the subtlety of the acting, at that range, was terrific: all the seats were the best seats in the house!)
I don't suppose you were the AHLiebross who put forward a plot suggestion on the Broadwayworld forum featuring Raoul as a movie mogul? ;-)
My main trouble with that one is that the chronology really doesn't work out: even if you go for ALW's transplantation of the characters ahead in time to 1907, there were no movie stars at that period and the films themselves were little more than novelty gimmicks. Another seven years and Christine might just have made it into features as a billed attraction (though still silent ones of course!)
Christine as an early recording artist makes more sense in the context of canon dating (though if you can have Zeppelins in WWII, you can have anything :-)
But either way, I wonder how immediate the appeal would be compared to live performance: she would be audible to a potential audience of millions, but in practice she would be singing into a horn in a small studio with a cut-down orchestra piled up behind her in an attempt to get them audible. A one-off performance, and then the product to sell, chopped up into bleeding three-minute hunks. There would be no audience reaction: no feedback at all, from her point of view.
There would be fan letters, presumably...
| From:kryss_labryn Date:August 29th, 2014 08:17 am (UTC) (Link) |
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Sorry, my email is being problematic so I'm not getting all the notifications. No, that wasn't me; I always us Kryss online; the only other name I ever use doesn't get used for anything even remotely fandom-related.
If ALW can go from 1883 to 1907 in one ten-year leap, then I have no compunctions whatsoever about using zeppelins in WWII. ;-) Besides, they're easier to put an auto-pilot onto with the tech of the day. And there's some really neat period guidance systems... I find out the neatest things doing research for the most ridiculous projects, lol.
I absolutely agree with you about Christine's career. It's just that, I don't know... Dammit, couldn't they have worked out a better plot? Ideally without Phantom being mentioned at all, heh?
I suspect if the Germans ever put on a version of the Australian one, it might be approaching vaguely bearable, because the Aussies made it look pretty, and the Germans would make the lyrics incomprehensible. "Love Never Dies," and "Til I hear You Sing," and even "Beneath A Moonlit Sky" are very pretty melodies; it's just that the lyrics are stupid and the accompanying plot is awful.
I did a fake "April Fools" newspaper article in 2010 (alas, the server I posted it to is down; when I can access the drive it's on again I'll post it to my Photobucket), in which ALW admitted LND was all a prank, and of course he wasn't going to do anything so awful and would never actually say and mean such awful things about his fans; it was actually a publicity stunt for a new, unrelated musical in production that took place in a circus; it was based on "Might Joe Young," hence the giant gorilla. XD
I think it all would have been so much less awful if ALW didn't identify with his version of the Phantom so much; it's led him to twist the character into a Mary-sue self-insert. Ugh.
| From:igenlode Date:September 1st, 2014 04:11 pm (UTC) (Link) |
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I admit I did get very confused by your scenario because I kept by default picturing it mentally as set in the First World War (all the nurses, uniforms, burned pilots, etc.), being that silent films always, for obvious reasons, are! The Zeppelins just added to the general mental disjunction in tnat direction...
(Do they have to be Nazi zombies? Can't they be some Caligari-style creation from a rogue colonel on the Brocken, or something?)
I feel that a musical about the further adventures of Raoul and Christine minus the Phantom might not have brought in quite the same level of attention :-p
Though as someone on some Web board somewhere once said, it would have been more interesting to have had Raoul/Christine/Phantom teaming up against some external threat in the timeworn 'bickering allies' mode, thus providing a rationale for them to cooperate and hate each other...
I think most people (except the ones who say that everything good ALW does is plagiarised anyway) concur that the music in LND is well worth hearing: they just object to the plot... whether it's in terms of "You can't snatch happiness away from poor Erik" or "Character assassination of Raoul and Meg"! If the whole thing were as unmemorable as most of Lloyd Webber's other recent work, no-one would get so worked up about it :-(
I'm afraid you're right about the self-insert distortion. But then given that the fans tend to identify with the Phantom anyway one would have thought they'd be happier with the result.
| From:igenlode Date:August 16th, 2014 10:05 am (UTC) (Link) |
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I worked out how to contact the author (teeny weeny 'contact workspace owner' link in the page border) -- the repeated material really has gone now :-)