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Andrew Lloyd Webber created a phenomenal hit. The composer's lush, legerdemainic Phantom of the Opera has played to SRO houses since it opened in London (October 1986) and on Broadway (January 1988), with Michael Crawford as the Phantom and Sarah Brightman as his beloved Christine. The Los Angeles company will conclude a record-breaking four-year run this summer...
...Hill's Phantom of the Opera. First produced in England in 1976, this comic melodrama had a book by Hill and a score by Ian Armit. In 1984 Hill dropped the original music and wrote new lyrics to arias by Gounod, Offenbach, Verdi, Mozart and Donizetti. Lloyd Webber considered producing an embellished version of it, then decided to do his own. Thank heavens. Hill's backstage farce is a kind of Noises Off without the wit, and the cast plays it as hammy gaslight farce -- a penny dreadful that at today's prices plays like a $32.50 dreadful. It alights...
Phantom. Yeston (music and lyrics) and Kopit (book) completed their version in 1985, but when Lloyd Webber announced his Phantom, they found it tough to raise money. Kopit and Lloyd Webber briefly discussed collaborating, but their visions of the Phantom didn't mesh. The Yeston-Kopit version was dead for nearly six years, then miraculously resurrected at Houston's Theater Under the Stars. Yeston's melodies often skim the roiling emotions Lloyd Webber's music swims in, but they are sophisticated show tunes, operatic and operettic by turns. Kopit balances the Phantom-Christine romance with an All About Eve , rivalry...
Connoisseurs of musicals know that the story has limitations. The Phantom can sing only one kind of song to Christine: I-adore-you-and-you-ab hor-me. Poor pastel Raoul can never be much more than a Parisian Freddy Eynsford-Hill. And yet -- in the magnificent Lloyd Webber version, the appealing Yeston-Kopit or even the lame Ken Hill -- the story works. The Phantom and Christine sing ) their volcanic sentiments in a plot as spare and potent as legend...
...these little Phantoms are springing up," says Hill, "purely because of the enormous success of Andrew's show." Yet very few theatergoers attend other Phantoms in the belief they're getting the Lloyd Webber. "People are coming to our show," Kopit says, "not because they can't get tickets to the Webber version, but because of the Phantom story. There is something dreamlike and mythic in the story of an innocent girl and a dark, foreboding, romantic figure who gets her under his power. We can identify both with the girl and with the deformed figure, who is perhaps...