The show premiered on January 26, 1988, and here’s the kicker, I was in the audience at that opening performance
Illustration/Uday Mohite
The Phantom of the Opera finally closed on Broadway, after 35 years and 14,000 record-breaking shows.
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For over three decades, the epic musical, about a masked composer who falls in love with a young singer, was as much a New York tourist attraction, as the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building.
The show premiered on January 26, 1988, and here’s the kicker, I was in the audience at that opening performance.
I’m a huge Tim Rice-Andrew Lloyd Webber fan—the clever sardonic sense of humour in Tim Rice’s lyrics, dove-tailing with Sir Andrew’s catchy compositions gave Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita their grim irony. But when the duo split up, gone was the edgy storytelling, what remained was the epic sweep and the Phantom of the Opera promised to take audiences on a huge subterranean journey.
On a freezing Manhattan evening, I took my chances at the Majesty Theatre box office.
“I have a single ticket for tonight,” the huge Aretha Franklin doppelganger ticket agent, sing-songed to me.
“Is it a decent seat?”
“It’s restricted viewing, honey.”
“How restricted is ‘restricted viewing’?”
“The seat has a pillar in front of it”
“Will I get a discount?”
“No sugar… take or leave it…”
As it turns out the seat was terrible, my sight blocked partly by the aforementioned pillar, and partly by the Phantom’s mask. But even a hundred rows back, the show was spectacular, we were transported into underground dungeons as the Phantom, actually rowed a boat on stage through, “water”, the production values, were indeed mind boggling.
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Munching on a post-show pastrami sandwich, I ruminated on the spectacle I’d seen. Sure it was lavish, sure it was a love story, sure it had lyrical songs, even a lighting chandelier crashing midway through the show, but at its core it was uplifting enough? Would audiences lap it up? As it happens all my doubts were assuaged, as the show beat all records, won every conceivable award. “Music of the Night”, “All I Ask of You” and the title track, became part of musical folklore.
But that’s not the moral of my tale, dear reader.
When “Hamilton” opened in 2015, it re-wrote the rule book of the modern musical.
Lin Manuel Miranda’s hip-hip history show, game-changed the genre—its sung-and-rapped through music and lyrics, and its tagline, “America then as told by America now” were unprecedented. It asked the hard question, “Does a young audience want escapist fare from the theatre?” I saw Phantom of the Opera again in 2012, and it had “aged” badly—up against the fresher, cooler Hamilton, Phantom’s “oldish” approach, with chunks of dialogue bridging two songs, hadn’t stood the test of time.
I’d say, Hamilton re-positioned all other musicals—would teenagers find Phantom, hackneyed and out of sync with today’s realities—and yet Lin Manuel Miranda’s obscure tale about an 18th century founding father of America, would at first seem unlikely to have sell out shows. Yet Hamilton has at its heart, the story of “immigrants”, the US’s hottest debate. The pandemic closed down Broadway for 18 months. Yet on re-opening, Hamilton hasn’t suffered an iota in ticket sales. Its hip-hop style appealing to younger audiences, no lavish sets, no chorography, but it had at its core some modern thoughts, as its lead characters sing, “History has its eyes on you”, and ‘How lucky it is born to be alive right now” and Alexander Hamilton singing “I’m not giving away my shot!”—these were ambitious calling cards for Gen X and millenials
Where does Phantom fit into a post-pandemic world?
The Spotify gen of millennials weaned on the Marvel Universe, don’t need crashing chandeliers to marvel at.
As audiences get younger, the Phantom has been unable to rebound from COVID-19 and other cultural shifts. Younger audiences will pick the relevant over the radiant, choose substance over spectacle.
Sadly, Phantom perhaps lost itself in the Hamilton tsunami.
Still 35 years is a hell of a life lived… even if underground.
Rahul daCunha is an adman, theatre director/playwright, photographer and traveller. Reach him at rahul.dacunha@mid-day.com
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