A quick disclaimer before I launch into what will probably read like a bit of a grumble or small rant:  Love Never Dies was not an awful performance.  I generally dislike musicals as I find myself frequently wanting to scream out “Just stop bloody singing and say it!” but that doesn’t mean I hate them and I have a certain fondness for Phantom of the Opera at least.  The performers themselves did a fantastic job with the material given (with the exception of a ten year old boy who might have been a volunteer from the audience or somebody on the crew’s nephew) and despite the fact that the story, setup and most of the songs weren’t very good did not stop me from enjoying my evening.  This could possibly be because of my general disposition for anything shown at the theatre generally being “good until bored to tears” that saved it for me, or it could have been the one or two redeeming moments after the interval, or it could have been the fact that I’d heard it was awful going in and was thus very happy that I wasn’t going to have to grit my teeth and say to people afterwards that I enjoyed it when I didn’t.  I am as of writing this, not gritting my teeth, so I am therefore perfectly happy.

Love Never Dies takes off “ten long years” after the events in the Phantom of the Opera.  Don’t worry if you can’t remember that fact as you will be reminded of it several times throughout the performance in all mediums, including dialogue, song and spinning-newspaper-headline forms.  We have well and truly left the Paris opera theatre burned to the ground and are shown that a couple of the key players from Paris have relocated to Coney Island in America to set up a sideshow under the name of “Phantasma”.  Oh, and the sideshow is owned by the Opera Ghost himself, the Phantom.  We are told that Madame Giry and her daughter Meg helped him set it up and that he’s been running it for “ten long years” and that he has been unable to really write anything for “ten long years” because he has been apart from Christine for “ten long years”.  The plot comes along when Christine and husband Raul with tone-deaf son turn up “ten long years” after the opera house in Paris burned down and are reunited with the Phantom who essentially kidnaps them as they get off the boat.  From there unravels a paper thin plot resulting in a brain dead reveal and a slightly rushed ending.

I will reiterate.  It is not good, but it is not devoid of any enjoyment.  I just want to state again that I didn’t hate this.  This is not a post born out of hate.

On the off chance that anyone reading this considers anything else I say to be spoilers, I will put the rest behind the jump.

The main problem I had with Love Never Dies evaded me for some time.  There was something that wasn’t quite right about it and I just could not put my finger on it until some throwaway scene midway in the second act.  At first I thought it might be the shift of tone from the high culture opera theatre of Paris to the trashy carnival of Coney Island, but the shift in tone could have been made to work and a shift in tone isn’t always a bad idea.  If nothing else it helps to distance itself from the original piece in case the “ten long years” thing isn’t enough.  Then I wondered if it was the way that they turned the characters inside out.  I thought that yes, that was a problem and yes, that was bothering me, but no, it wasn’t what was causing this to make my brain twitch a little.  Finally I wondered if it was just the potential-audience-participating ten year old and his karaoke-like off-key involvement, but I thought that no, that couldn’t be causing this much damage.

Then it finally hit me in this one throw away scene.  I’ll outline it briefly and see if you can spot what’s wrong:  Christine is in her dressing room and has just finished having a little chat with her husband who leaves through the dressing room door.  The Phantom then appears from inside the dressing room (In any other situation, discovering your dressing room mirror is one way and opens out into a secret passage way is a creepy thing to discover.  In the Phantom of the Opera it was a wondrous fantastical romantic reveal) and makes demands as he does and then leaves through the front door of the dressing room as a stage hand is poking his head round the door to inform Christine that she needs to get a move on.

It took me a while for it to hit me, but there is something wrong there.  Actually, there are two things wrong.  First of all, the Phantom leaves out of the front door.  Second, he leaves at the same time somebody else is in the doorway.  And the other person, the stage hand, the runner, doesn’t react to him at all.  Now unless I’ve completely missed the point and the Phantom was meant to be a figment of Christine’s imagination in that scene, this means that the stage hand saw the Phantom, the old Opera Ghost, and did not care.

This is the problem:  The Phantom is no longer hidden.  He is no longer a myth.  He is no longer “Him”.  He is the boss.  If anything, he is Mr. Phantom to these guys.  That’s where the whole thing breaks.  Without the intrigue, the darkness, the manipulation behind the scenes, the mystery and the grand romantic candle-lit canal with attached cave dungeon, the Phantom is just another overly possessive, domineering bastard who just happens to be wearing a funny mask.  He’s not even the most unusual looking thing at the carnival either:  He has three lieutenants who seem to be doing…something at his bidding who look rather eye catching and extraordinary, one being thick stocky and tattooed, one being scrawny in a top hat dressed like the Tally Man in Batman and one being…a…woman…but she’s dressed funny all the same.

I’ll say this again.  The Phantom is now no longer the Opera Ghost.  He is a man wearing a quarter mask.  It’s arguable that he can even technically be considered disfigured seeing as he can very easily pass as normal human and pose as a barman to jump out at poor character derailed Raul and make some deal in song that seems to talk about the devil pinching his bottom although maybe I wasn’t completely following the lyrics.

So we have the main draw of the Phantom of the Opera, the mysterious “Opera Ghost” reduced to “the creepy guy that runs the faire”, but that’s not the only problem, just the most significant.  Probably the most obvious problem is the characters being turned inside out, and yes I suppose you could argue that “ten long years” is a long time and people change, but the most significant oddity is actually scheduled immediately after the Phantom of the Opera.

For those not familiar and not afraid of spoiling the end, at the end of Phantom of the Opera, Christine sort-of betrays the Opera Ghost who goes into an understandable rage, kidnapping Christine and then threatening to kill her fiance and childhood sweetheart, Raul, unless Christine agrees to stay with the Phantom forever.  Out of love for Raul, she agrees to sacrifice her happiness for his life, but the Phantom redeems himself by letting them both go and to live their lives together instead.  In the film they rather hilariously and obnoxiously rub salt in the wounds by singing a song about how much they love each other as they leave the caverns on one of the Phantom’s gondolas, to which I’m surprised the Phantom didn’t change his mind and angrily chase them down.  He would after all be a faster boatman after all the years of practise.

Back in Love Never Dies, we are told that after the Paris opera house burnt down, Christine went back and found the Phantom and stayed with him for the night.  The definition of staying for the night they are using in this case is the type that includes the possibility of children being created.  After learning that, just guess where that ten year old boy came from, bearing in mind that Love Never Dies is set “ten long years” after the Phantom of the Opera.  Didn’t see that one coming at all.

This is probably the most wall-banging reveal.  Christine views the Phantom as an “Angel of Music”, which are probably the three most annoyingly repeated words in the Phantom of the Opera, especially when they insist on pronouncing “music” with a very pronounced “mew”, sent by her father to watch over her.  She sees the Phantom as a father-like nurturing figure as opposed to a romantic interest.  Ok, so there’s a certain amount of enthrallment that he inspires in her and there is a certain libido stirring evident there, but it’s largely an exploration of more Freudian ideas of romance, or at least that’s how we’re encouraged to view it.  To have her undo the climactic choice made at the end of the Phantom of the Opera is nonsensical and unbelievably cheap.

On the subject of the Phantom being the father of the “ten long years” old child, the way he finds out is by observing the child’s un-natural musical affinity.  This supernatural affinity for music apparently is shown by singing off key and playing a few notes on the piano.  I shall have to ask my dad if he ever had a stint as an Opera Ghost of some description, because by the logic of Love Never Dies, it would make sense as I could play the piano and sing off key as well.  I actually think they make a compelling point that the boy is the son of Raul after all.  I know I keep coming back to the “ten long years” old and the off key singing, but it really hurt.  I know there are a million boys the same age that would have jumped at the opportunity to have played that part and would have done it better and that is why I strongly suspect he had been told to sing off key on purpose.   All credit to him, he was spot on for every single one of his cues, and the actual acting part of his job was done perfectly.  It was just the singing that was flat.  Maybe it was to make the audience go “aww” and not make them feel less significant than an in-tune ten year old.

So we’ve got Christine insulting the audience with the revelation that actually she loved the Phantom all along and not Raul and that she ran away from Raul at the end of the Phantom of the Opera, found the Phantom, got pregnant, then ran back to Raul, got married, dinner shower went to bed.  Fine.  We can maybe get past that.  We then have to accept that upon receiving this absolute gift and the realisation of all of his greatest dreams come true, the Opera Ghost gets up very early in the morning and leaves Christine because he is too hideous for her.  You might think that shows his nobility and redeeming honour, but really, if that was the case, I really think he would have needed to do the running away a little bit earlier.  Fine.  We can possibly excuse that as a lapse in judgement resulting in shame that led him to run off.  We then have to accept that he gets scooped up by the Giry’s, carted off to America whereupon he sets up a carnival attraction and never looks back for “ten long years”.  Maybe.  But it is a bit of a stretch.  I can sort of appreciate the carnival thing.  There’s an idea of coming back to something from his past, as he started life as a freak show in a circus, and forging a future out of it and twisting it to sort his own ends, maybe almost accepting who he is but not letting it keep him down, but nothing is really done with it and the carnival of wonderful automatons and mystery are talked about and more accurately sung about but never really seen much less used.  I think I could point Andrew Lloyd Webber in the direction of a few jugglers that could probably give him a few very different ideas about how he could have done Coney Island, and some of the ideas might not be too dark for the west end.

Finally on the character front, we have Raul, who has been transformed into an alcoholic debt ridden gambler who has no time for his wife, Christine.  Maybe ten years can change someone and maybe the message is “He’s a white knight at first, but you wait!  As soon as you marry him, he’ll turn!  He’ll change!  They’re all the same!” but I don’t think so.  I think they just forgot what he was meant to be.  I initially thought that he wasn’t Raul and Christine had accidentally married someone we hadn’t met before after Raul had died between productions, but no, I was wrong.  Not much else to say on Raul, other than he has become powerless, pathetic and detestable.

I could also talk about Meg Giry and how her character is derailed, but she didn’t really have much of a character to begin with so maybe she escapes.  It doesn’t really make sense that her mother is trying to make her be noticed by the Phantom, but never mind.  Good job the bitterness she felt towards Christine for taking the limelight after “ten long years” never became a major plot point and…oh never mind.  Spoiler:  <  She shoots Christine >

The final sin that the thing indulges in is a simple one.  It is trying to be something it is not.  This theatre production is trying to be a film.  They have moving images projecting onto a gauss curtain at certain points that include a ship travelling to Coney Island, spinning headlines informing things like “Paris Opera House Burnt Down!  Masked Fugitive Dead!” followed by “Coney Island Breaks Records!  Is Great Carnival!  The Plot Now Lives Here!” and everyone’s favourite red lines across a map to show where people are travelling too.  They also have the occasional rotating camera establishing shot to show us the outside of the scene that we’re about to see, which comes across as akin to a cheap superhero cartoon that’s zooming in to the abandoned theme park that the villain is using as a hide out.  They did use the projection incredibly well near the beginning by augmenting the live action when they were moving in to Coney Island for the first time, but beyond that, it never really found another use.

I can deal with the different setting.  I can deal with a different tone.  I liked the idea of the carnival atmosphere, even though they never really made it feel like it was teeming with life and it felt more like a ghost town (or “Phantom town”…hey, maybe that was the point!).  Also, the different tone didn’t hit home with me because the tone they picked was a stupid soap opera Christmas special plot full of paternity disputes and unscheduled murder.  I suppose the main problem, besides all the other main problems that I’ve talked about, is that after “ten long years”, the Phantom is just a boring, creepy, un-ambitious, less sinister and significantly less mysterious counterpart to his younger self.

Andrew Lloyd Webber has said that he sees Love Never Dies as a standalone piece that just happens to have the same four main characters as the Phantom of the Opera.  That is, quite frankly, rubbish.  We are constantly given reminders by being repeatedly told that “ten long years” have passed since the Phantom of the Opera, by previous events constantly being mentioned and even by throwing in a little bit of the music from the Phantom of the Opera.  All in all, it just leaves you with the vague longing to see the Phantom of the Opera just to remind yourself if it was actually any good in the first place.  I don’t know, maybe that’s just exceptionally clever marketing.

After reading around a little, I gather that the whole thing was substantially rewritten from its original release.  I dread to think what it was like before but it has at least got a few redeeming features, it currently has a fantastic cast and I will say it again, I Did Not Hate It.  It just wasn’t very good.  Still enjoyed it, still had a fantastic evening with it, and still managed to write nearly three thousand words about it which is normally a sign that it has done something to my brain at least.

I will leave it with one final interesting fact that chills the blood:  When Andrew Lloyd Webber first sat down to write Love Never Dies, he wanted to set it at the turn of the twentieth century and the Phantom was going to own one of the first penthouses in Manhattan.   All in all, it could have been a hell of a lot worse.

Additional Notes:

Fun fact:  Second post I’ve written in recent history that has used the word “gondola”.

My boss refers to this as “Paint Never Dries”, apparently a nick-name the production acquired after its initial run before the rewrite.  I don’t know why but I find that hilarious.

If you’ve made it this far, congratulations!  You have just read a semi-coherent rant about musical theatre, which if it’s any consolation I had no idea I would write this evening!