A ghost is by nature one who yearns for what he cannot have. He may, like Hamlet’s father’s ghost, seek redress for wrongs done to him in life, or, like Marley’s ghost and the ghost of old Anchises, he may hope to affect the future. Depending on the moral order of whatever work he haunts, he may be prophet, justicer, or figure of reproach. But he wants something done in the world he left behind, which is why he keeps coming back to it and rattling his chains. And because he is dead he has to get someone else to achieve his purpose.
The character played by Claude Rains in the 1943 remake of “The Phantom of the Opera”—who is dead in only a figurative sense—is the avenging sort of ghost. A mild-mannered middle-aged violinist, he plays with the Paris Opera, is courteous and self-effacing, and generous to a fault: for years, he has paid anonymously for music lessons for a pretty young singer he scarcely knows. Having been unceremoniously fired from the orchestra (a palsy has begun to affect his playing), and falling under the mistaken impression that someone is trying to steal a concerto he has composed, he accidentally murders the clerk in a music publisher’s office and gets acid thrown in his face. Hideously maimed, he takes to the sewers of Paris, and the rest is history.
The kindly, respectable violinist whose crazed love is but the inward expression of a deformity thrust upon him by a cruel and unjust world is a Hollywood invention. The character in Gaston Leroux’s 1911 novel “The Phantom of the Opera” is born deformed. An outcast and autodidact (he has picked up the arts of ventriloquism and legerdemain, travelling around a lot with carnival freak shows, son of an architect (whence, presumably, his grasp of building design and flair for home decoration), Leroux’s “opera ghost” is a fairly benign and well-behaved poltergeist, who wreaks havoc only when something gets his dander up. He treats the keeper of the boxes well—requests a footstool of her every evening and leaves a tip when he departs—and asks no more of the opera management than to be allowed to extort large sums of money from them and to keep Box Five for his private use. A master teacher and musician, he coaches Christine himself, writes beautiful music, and enchants her with the beauty of his voice.
It is this character that Lon Chaney played in the 1925 silent movie based on Leroux’s novel, and the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical follows the Chaney version in going back to the original. The show, which opened last week at Broadway’s Majestic Theatre, arrived in the midst of so much fuss and fanfare that the question of how good it is seems beside the point. Certainly it is good fun—if you’re not bothered by the prospect of a completely nonverbal musical that contains not one glimmer of an idea. This is, after all, the age of the mindless, nonverbal musical—a form of which Andrew Lloyd Webber is the chief exponent. The kind of musical theatre he has come to stand for is one in which every aspect of production is subjugated to a notion of spectacle. It seeks to impress an audience with financial rather than creative prowess—with a demonstration of how much money can be put onstage. Central to this sort of theatre is the concept of doing something difficult or unusual—turning a Broadway theatre into a junk yard or a roller rink, writing a Broadway musical with no dance in the first half and no song in the second—without regard for whether the feat is worth doing. It is a matter of small importance to the audience that the actors in these shows look nothing like cats or trains, that the wordless portion of the separatist musical has no good dancing and the dance-less portion no good song. Achievement here lies not in style or ingenuity or even in the gimmick concept, but in the idea of extravagance itself.
“The Phantom of the Opera” is probably Lloyd Webber’s most tasteful musical to date: nothing in it really assaults the intelligence or the sensibilities—though it does reek a little of elegance. The music is essentially pop-schlock: for the easily moved, there are melancholy, sentimental tunes that cloy even as they become familiar, and for the semi-enlightened there are easy parodies—less funny and less apt than the dance parodies choreographed by Gillian Lynne. (It’s an index of Lloyd Webber’s skill as a composer that we can’t tell how good his protagonist’s opera, “Don Juan Triumphant,” is supposed to be.) The lyrics, by Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe, make no impression whatever, and the book, by Stilgoe and Lloyd Weber, is similarly negligible. It relegates the action of the play to the status of a flashback, situating us at an auction years after the events we are about to see have taken place. But we never come back to the present, so we never find out why the opera furnishings are being sold off—or what Raoul, the French nobleman played by Steve Barton, is doing at the auction, alone and nostalgic. (Has Christine died? Taken the veil? Run off with another monster?)
A good deal of the publicity surrounding “The Phantom of the Opera” focused on Lloyd Webber’s insistence that his wife, Sarah Brightman, be permitted to perform the role of Christine Daaé. (Equity rules required that an American actress be cast in the part, and the composer held the theater community hostage in much the same way that the Phantom holds the opera management hostage in order to further his protégé’s career.) Miss Brightman has a pretty voice, to be sure, albeit one that seems to be heavily reliant on body-miking; similarly, though Michael Crawford is affecting as the phantom—whispering low, sighing windily, and quietly appropriating the hero’s anthem, one can’t help wondering where he and his pathos would be without amplification.
In fact, the real star of the show is neither Miss Brightman nor Mr. Crawford but the visual design, by Maria Björnson. If “Phantom” is the sort of show where drama and passion are lodged in the ability of things to rise from the stage or be lowered from the flies—and the music seems to soar only when something onstage is soaring with it—it must be said that drama and passion truly do lurk in the way beautiful things are paraded before you all evening. Among the images that stay with you are the restoration of the opera house to its former glory, through a suggestion of canted booms and brocade; a night view of Paris from the opera roof; and a magical journey across a Stygian lake seemingly lit by hundreds of tapers.
Granted that everything notable at the Majestic is the work of hydraulic and electronic devices, so diverting are the effects—and so deftly carried out by Hal Prince, the director—that it isn’t until the show’s penultimate moments, when we see actors climbing down a well of grillwork in the darkness, that we realize we’re actually seeing people doing something difficult for the first time all evening. The only snag in the directorial fabric comes from some of the Americans in the company—Leila Martin, as the sinister ballet mistress, and Elisa Heinsohn, as her daughter—whose performance styles fail to fit in with the ensemble. And except for Steve Barton, who makes a rather pallid Raoul, the secondary roles are all felicitously cast; Judy Kaye is unstintingly funny as the long-suffering diva, and Cris Groenendaal and Nicholas Wyman excel as the opera’s venal managers.
Lloyd Webber’s “Phantom of the Opera” is only half ghost story, of course. The other half is backstage musical, and he turns Christine into an archetypal backstage musical heroine, the girl with Real Talent. But the Christine of Leroux’s novel does not always sing well. Her art has deteriorated since her father’s death, and she needs the Phantom to instruct and inspire her. She gradually comes to fear the monster, but she pities him more, and her worst fear is that her “Angel of Music” will leave her.
Halfway between pity and terror lies fascination. It’s easy to see what the phantom meant to Leroux: his heroine’s growing fear of the monster was only the natural revulsion a nice girl had to manifest toward her own desire and ambition. But what is the “opera ghost” to Andrew Lloyd Webber? Why should his be the ultimate expression of this particular story? One reason is simply that none of the previous versions are very good. The silent film, with its histrionic acting (outmoded even in 1925), is surprisingly dull, and the 1943 version replaced the diluted the sexual/horror content of the story with social comedy. If Leroux’s story has enabled Lloyd Webber to transcend himself, it may be because novelist and composer are men of the same ilk. Like Lloyd Webber, Leroux was something of a gimmick auteur. A tabloid journalist who had given up a career as a sensationalist crime reporter, he wrote novels that sent the readership of the newspapers in which they were serialized scurrying around Paris in search of buried treasure. The initial appeal of “The Phantom of the Opera”—its gimmick—lay in the fact that it presented itself as a work of journalism, a piecing together of events that had actually taken place. Leroux’s tale of a vicomte’s love for a high-brow chanteuse relies for its potency on the multiplicity of archetypal images it draws on: Pandora, Proserpina, “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” “Trilby,” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” But all of them have been better expressed before and since. (Even the image of the sewer-dwelling outcast was more indelibly imprinted on the popular imagination by Carol Reed’s “The Third Man.”) What makes Leroux’s “Phantom of the Opera” a mere potboiler rather than a great one is that, unlike the best ghost stories of the previous century, it never transcends its subject or form.
It is, however, the perfect vehicle for Andrew Lloyd Webber. His “Phantom” is all about self-pity, self-loathing, and self-aggrandizement. His “opera ghost”—the only one in all the adaptations of Leroux’s novel who is spared a violent end and allowed to disappear peaceably—seems emblematic more of unrequited aspiration than of unrequited love. He wants to be something he is not, just as Lloyd Webber wants to be a serious composer. Good opera is beyond Lloyd Webber to produce; even good musical theatre seems to be beyond him. But he does have an uncanny, ghostlike genius for eliciting spectacular results from others—in this case, his designer and director.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, January 8, 1988