All for the love of a phantom (original) (raw)

By Raymond Gill

May 21, 2011 — 12.00am

ONE of the biggest theatrical gambles of recent times will take place at the Regent Theatre next Saturday night when the Australian production of Andrew Lloyd Webber's sequel to his greatest hit, The Phantom of the Opera, premieres.

At stake is not just the $9 million invested in the show Love Never Dies starring two relative unknowns with Ben Lewis as the Phantom and Anne O'Byrne as Christine. This production's six-month Melbourne season, a transfer to other cities, and an Asian tour is all but assured.

Gabriela Tylesova and Simon Phillips on the set of 'Love Never Dies'.Credit: Rebecca Hallas

The gamble is whether this Australian reworking of the show that opened in London to a chorus of complaints about its ''slowness'' and ''sobriety'' last March will win its creators' and the audience's approval enough to risk sending this version to Broadway. If New York, that most important but fickle theatre market in the world, takes to it, there is no end to the riches it might bring to its creative team.

After all, Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera cemented the British composer's reputation and fortune. That show still runs on the West End after 25 years, on Broadway after 23 years and is estimated to have earned more than US5billion(US5 billion (US5billion(A4.7 billion) at the box office, making it the most financially successful stage show in history.

Come next Sunday morning the ever-expanding cyber-universe devoted to musical theatre in general, and The Phantom of the Opera and Love Never Dies in particular, will begin blogging, Facebooking, tweeting and re-tweeting its reactions to Love Never Dies.

Their comments - for good or ill - will be based on the first reactions of a fraction of the 1800 guests at the premiere who will be rubbing shoulders with Lloyd Webber and a raft of overseas producers and theatre owners flying in to see whether this substantially changed Australian version has the legs to deliver ''boffo'' box office back home.

The increasing influence of blogging Phantom fans, whose passion can spill into obsession, was keenly felt last year even before the sequel opened on the West End. A ferocious internet hate campaign began in Canada with the ''Phans'' demanding the story of the disfigured phantom of the Paris Opera House and his captive love, Christine Daae, remain untouched. ''PHANTOM needs NO sequel and its legacy should not be tarnished by the absurd and unwanted creation that is LOVE NEVER DIES,'' wrote one typically adamant blogger.

''I think the majority of the noise about Love Never Dies wasn't literary. They didn't care that Andrew was creating a sequel to the original story (the 1910 French novel by Gaston Leroux). They just loved his musical so much they didn't want a sequel,'' says Simon Phillips, the director who was appointed by Lloyd Webber to reconceive an Australian production after the composer dismissed the original West End creative team.

When the sequel did open in London last year (the masked Phantom is now holed up under New York's Coney Island amusement park) the bloggers really let loose. They damned the show's slow storytelling, its lack of dazzle (there are no falling chandeliers) and gave it a nickname it can't shake: ''Paint Never Dries.''

The traditional media were marginally nicer. The London newspaper reviews ranged from two to five stars, with the most enthusiasm reserved for Lloyd Webber's lush, dramatic music. But The New York Times swept into London and seriously dented any plans to remount it on Broadway. ''Its breathless solemnity pervades the show's every aspect,'' pronounced its chief critic.

Phillips, whose day job is the artistic director of the Melbourne Theatre Company, saw that production in previews in March 2010 when he was in London with his production of Priscilla Queen of the Desert - the Musical. He says he is an admirer of the original director, the multi-Tony Award-winning Jack O'Brien, and he loved Lloyd Webber's ''beautiful score''. But he too thought the show had its longueurs and there were some ''stylistic mistakes'' in its use of many film projections of sunny Coney Island.

''It broke the whole atmosphere of the Phantom entombed in the underbelly of Coney Island,'' Phillips says.

As it happened, Lloyd Webber had a similar view, but it took the head of the Australian arm of Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Group, Tim McFarlane, to suggest completely reconceiving the show for Australia with a local creative team.

''It was a big thing to propose it to do it here, but I thought it was a fabulous score and one of his best ever and it would be a terrible shame to not go further,'' says McFarlane.

In July last year McFarlane emailed Phillips ''out of the blue''. They had known each other from their days in Adelaide's theatre scene in the '90s but had not worked together. He asked Phillips to fly with him to London for 24 hours to see the show again and then have lunch with Lloyd Webber at his castle in Hampshire.

The three men were served lunch by Lloyd Webber's personal chef, who had selected the produce, which was all either grown or caught from the 1600-hectare estate (Lloyd Webber owns most of Watership Down). After lunch they wandered around the carp-filled lake and the elaborate gardens discussing how to reimagine the show and rejig its storyline, which included moving songs around and dropping a long prologue. ''I think he was hopeful that in a new incarnation he could give the show the life he felt it deserves,'' says Phillips, who had only briefly met Lloyd Webber once before and who knew the composer had never seen one of his own shows.

''Oh no, he hadn't seen Priscilla, nor would I expect him to because it's the opposite of the work he does,'' Phillips says of his raucous musical that is now a simultaneous box-office hit on the West End and Broadway.

Phillips says McFarlane suggested him to Lloyd Webber because he is ''the go-to guy'' in Australia. ''There's only a few people in this country who have the experience of shows of this scale,'' Phillips says.

The director is seriously underselling himself, having proved in his decade at the MTC that he can deliver the darkest Shakespearean tragedy and the lightest of musicals with a walloping theatrical punch. And then there is the small feat of landing Priscilla in the world's two toughest theatre towns.

By October last year, Lloyd Webber was so excited by Phillips's ideas of creating a ''night-infused'' Coney Island, and by his choice of a dramatic new scenic design by Sydney designer Gabriela Tylesova, new choreography by Graeme Murphy, and new lighting by Nick Schlieper, that he ditched his plan B to bring in yet another North American team for a Broadway version. He decided instead to back the Australian production the whole way. (An American cast, however, would be employed for any Broadway production.)

This is also the first time that the Australian arm of the Really Useful Group has had a chance to build a show from the ground up, rather than import a ready-to-go Lloyd Webber for the Australian and Asian market as it has done for the past 18 years.

McFarlane says that vote of confidence in the Australian team repeats the experience of 1972 when Lloyd Webber was disappointed with the premiere of Jesus Christ Superstar and used Sydney director Jim Sharman to reconceive the show for the West End. Sharman's became the definitive version.

Love Never Dies adds to Australia's growing reputation as a place to develop high-profile shows far from the bright lights of the West End and Broadway. Across town Dr Zhivago is having its out-of-town tryout at Her Majesty's before producers take it back to the US or London.

Next year Simon Phillips will develop another big musical - the stage version of An Officer and a Gentleman, with hopes for success in the northern hemisphere.

Right now the creative team says it is thinking only about delivering Love Never Dies for its Australian audience - even those mad ''Phans'' who might feel the plunging chandelier in ''Phantom 1'' was the greatest moment in commercial musical history. ''No there isn't a chandelier moment in Love Never Dies,'' says McFarlane.

''But there is one eye-popping scene after scene. It's a stunning and dramatic score that has all the hallmarks of Andrew Lloyd Webber and more, but it combines that with a dramatic story told and revealed by an Australian team and I'm really proud of that.''

Love Never Dies opens at the Regent Theatre on May 28.

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