Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (80 page)

One of the problematic side effects of the integrated, through-sung mega-musical is the potential for integration that lacks dramatic meaning.
Evita, Les Misérables
, and
Phantom
are musically integrated in the sense that they use a relatively small repertoire of motives and themes and recycle these melodies continuously, usually with new lyrics (i.e., contrafacta, a term used extensively in Joseph Swain’s chapters on Lloyd Webber and BoublilSchönberg).
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When characters in musicals use each other’s music and when the underscored passages appear without seeming regard for the appropriateness of the appropriation, the increased integration leads to decreased dramatic meaning. The reuse, or overuse, of contrafacta in the work of the composer at hand, according to Swain, “has become a rather careless infatuation with [Lloyd] Webber’s not inconsiderable powers of melody.”
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The reliance on contrafactum also frequently results in mismatched texts. Raymond Knapp discusses the implications of the problem: “Especially in its seemingly wanton recycling of music and inadequate attention to text setting,
Evita
is seen as lacking two perceived strengths of the more traditional Broadway stage: musical variety and an oft-demonstrated capacity for marrying words and music so intimately that neither seems sufficient without the other. According to this ideal, Lloyd Webber’s use of the same music for quite different songs seems fundamentally inadequate.”
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The problem is not the reuse, or even the ubiquitous reuse of the material. The problem is the lack of discrimination in the recycling of melodic material. When used indiscriminately, the opportunities for increased dramatic meanings are squandered. Music can become just an attractive but subsidiary adjunct to the show rather than a conveyor of idiomatic meanings and moods. I will return to the use and reuse of themes in the section “Music and Meaning in
The Phantom of the Opera
.”

The story line of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Hal Prince’s
The Phantom of the Opera
can be traced to two sources, the classic fairy tale about the Beauty and the Beast and George du Maurier’s novel
Trilby
from 1894. The novel, in which the musical magician Svengali places the nonmusical ingénue Trilby in a trance during which she attains great operatic success, was a popular novel in both England and America in its day and was soon adapted into a popular play. Between September 1909 and January 1910, Gaston Leroux’s new twist on this story,
Le Fantöme de l’Opéra
, appeared in serial form (in French); the English translation
The Phantom of the Opera
followed in 1911. More than seventy years later, three years after the phenomenon of
Cats
had begun its long-lived London run, Lloyd Webber found a copy of Leroux’s gothic novel in a used book shop. The novel inspired the modern-day musical theater Svengali (Lloyd Webber), inspired by his Trilby and wife at the time (Sarah Brightman), to create a musical version that proved to be a greater phenomenon even than
Cats
, at least on Broadway, when
The Phantom of the Opera
opened in London (1986) and New York (1988).

The genesis of
Phantom
has been told often, and authoritative summaries of the novel and film and television adaptations can be found in George Perry’s
The Complete “Phantom of the Opera
.” Less explored are the creative choices Lloyd Webber and Prince—in collaboration with the Midas-touched producer of
Les Misérables
the previous year, Cameron Macintosh
(b. 1946)—made in their conversion of Leroux’s novel and the comparably influential 1925 classic silent film directed by Rupert Julian and starring Lon Chaney as the Phantom, Marie Philbin as Christine, and Norman Kerry as Raoul.
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Although the novel provided a broad structure and the film a more focused structure (in addition to providing a visual model for the opera house stage and majestic staircase), the Lloyd Webber-Prince version departed in significant ways from each.

The film had already accomplished some of Prince’s work. Foster Hirsch credits Prince for removing the gruesome details of the Phantom’s medical afflictions and early biography, the back story to Christine’s relationship to her father (it was the father’s prophecy of an angel-to-come that worked on Christine’s susceptibility to the magical charms of the Angel of Music), and the childhood romance between Christine and Raoul.
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All of this material, plus Leroux’s detailed explanation of how the Phantom accomplished his supernatural tricks, had already vanished in the 1925 film. The character of the Persian, the man who knew the true story about Erik, the future Phantom, was retained from the novel but transformed in the film into a suspicious character often seen lurking about the same time film viewers witnessed actions attributed to the Phantom. In the early portions of the film it seemed possible that the Persian and the Phantom were the same. Deeper into the story, viewers learn that the Persian is working on behalf of the police to apprehend the Phantom.

As in the novel, the Persian, who sports an astrakhan hat, is the detective Ledoux (a name that sounds similar and is spelled suspiciously close to the novel’s author Leroux) who tries to help Raoul escape harm in the vast and literally torturous underground of the Paris Opera as they pursue Christine and her abductor, the Phantom. To achieve what is often referred to as the “Abbott shorthand,” in deference to the ability of director George Abbott, Prince’s mentor, to capture the essence of a plot, both forms of the Persian, the Phantom’s former acquaintance in the novel and the private investigator Ledoux from the silent film, entirely disappeared from the musical. To fill in for the absence of the Persian, another mysterious character, Madame Giry, served as a secret liaison between the Phantom and the other principals. No one felt the need to provide an alternative character to replace detective Ledoux.

The Lloyd Webber-Prince scenario added much to the novel and film to enhance the plot and alter its effect. By making the Phantom physically less deformed and musically more brilliant and seductive, he becomes for the first time a serious “romantic alternative” to Raoul.
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Raoul, too, has become a more endearing figure, especially when compared to his depiction in the novel and film as a condescending, controlling character who possesses
neither sympathy nor understanding for Christine’s plight nor the heroism to withstand the Phantom’s threats. In the novel and the 1925 silent film, the Phantom’s spell inhibits Christine’s judgment, and her fear of the Phantom causes her to put Raoul at arm’s length. In a significant discrepancy, throughout much of the musical the Phantom is portrayed as a relatively benevolent figure who has entranced Christine into believing he is the Angel of Music as prophesied by Christine’s father. Until “The Point of No Return” toward the end of the evening, audiences would probably not be too shocked if Christine decided to join her Phantom in the depths of the Paris Opera and leave Raoul behind.

Although film viewers see the Phantom at his organ and know that he is composing
Don Juan Triumphant
, inspired by his love for Christine, it is only in the stage musical that audiences witness and actually hear his triumphant work. As a modernist decades ahead of his time compositionally, the Phantom, when he isn’t serenading Christine with a lyrical lullaby (“Music of the Night”), composes music that tends to be dissonant and even violent. It is filled with whole-tone scales and whole-tone harmonies, sounds that before long would be associated with the real-life French modernist Claude Debussy (with a touch of Vaughan Williams as the basis for a vamp in the title song in a rock style, see
Example 16.1
). Not only does the whole-tone scale pervade the phrase “Those who tangle with Don Juan” (which the traditionally trained and musically limited Piangi cannot master in the rehearsal [act II, scene 4]), but it also appropriately melodically and harmonically underlies the “I have brought you” verse to “Music of the Night” and, less explicably, when the same verse returns at the outset of “All I Ask of You.”
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In the novel and the silent film, all the opera scenes—prior to the time when the opera scenes were granted the gift of sound in 1930—are taken from Charles Gounod’s opera
Faust
, probably the most popular French opera between its premiere in 1859 and the appearance of the novel and silent film of
Phantom
. After the largely spoken Prologue told as a flashback, a framing device absent in both the novel and film, the story of
Phantom
in the musical begins with a rehearsal of
Hannibal
, clearly a parody of the once towering mid-nineteenth-century French composer Giacomo Meyerbeer. Later in the first act, Lloyd Webber offers a second operatic pastiche,
Il Muto
, this time in the late-eighteenth-century Italian style of Antonio Salieri, another largely forgotten composer. At the center of the second act, musical themes of the first act come together in the Phantom’s creation,
Don Juan Triumphant
, which offers the dissonant sound of modernism, including whole-tone scales and harmonies, an appropriate musical language for a precociously avant-garde and vengeful composer.

It took nearly twenty years from its London premiere before the musical film adaptation of
The Phantom of the Opera
arrived in 2004. The film was directed by Joel Schumacher, an American director who came on the scene in the 1980s with
St. Elmo’s Fire
and
The Lost Boys
. In the 1990s he directed two films based on John Grisham novels,
The Client
and
A Time to Kill
, and replaced Tim Burton as the director of choice in the ongoing series of Batman films,
Batman Forever
and
Batman and Robin
. The film version of
Phantom
, which the composer had discussed with Schumacher in the late 1980s, was for the most part faithful in spirit and letter to the stage original. In contrast to Burton’s
Sweeney Todd
, Schumacher’s
Phantom
is also “a movie based on a stage show.”
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At a leisurely 143 minutes it is able to accommodate most of the original stage version, with a few minor (but not inconsequential cuts) and a few moments of cinematic and non-verbal leisure.
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The film, shot in a faded black and white tint, ranges backward in time from 1919 to 1870, the auction omits the Meyerbeer memorabilia auctioned in the stage version, and film viewers are introduced not only to the Vicomte de Chagny, or Raoul (Patrick Wilson), but also to Madame Giry (Miranda Richardson), whom he outbids for the monkey. The original stage version begins in 1905 with a Prologue that takes place at an auction in which items from a distant time are being auctioned off, a poster from the opera
Hannibal
, “a wooden pistol and three human skulls from the 1831 production of
Robert le Diable
by Meyerbeer” (an opera actually composed for the Paris Opéra by the composer, unlike the fictitious Meyerbeer
Hannibal
parody), a papiermáché music box of a monkey in Persian robes clanging cymbals, and a chandelier from the Opéra restored from a shattered state. The auctioneer switches on the chandelier and the scene miraculously shifts to a rehearsal of
Hannibal
at the Opéra Populaire in Paris 1861.

The Phantom of the Opera
, 2004 film. Close-up of Christine Daaé (Emmy Rossum) and The Phantom (Gerard Butler).

The Phantom of the Opera
, 2004 film. Christine Daaé (Rossum) and The Phantom (Butler) performing in The Phantom’s opera
Don Juan Triumphant
.

Prince never returns to the older Vicomte in the stage version to remind audiences that they are watching a flashback, but Schumacher makes several strategic returns to Raoul and the events of 1919 in the film, starting with the scene in act I between Christine Daaé (Emmy Rossum) and the Phantom (Gerard Butler) in the Phantom’s lair (about 47 minutes into the film). The last of these flash-forwards occur at the film’s conclusion when Raoul is wheeled to the cemetery to place the papier-máché monkey on a tomb. The tomb inscription informs us that Raoul and Christine, the future Countess de Chagny (1854–1917), were married after the events of the story, that
she was only sixteen at the time the story takes place—Rossum herself was only seventeen at the time of filming—and died two years before the film begins. Film viewers also learn that history remembers her as a “Beloved Wife and Mother” and not as an opera star. Christine did not have it all. The final image of the film is a withered rose, just like the rose the Phantom gave to Christine after her first performance nearly fifty years earlier. In the stage version the Phantom disappeared at the end and stage audiences never learn whether he was alive or dead in 1905. In contrast, the film lets viewers know that the Phantom still lives (thus preparing for the possibility of a sequel) and that he has by no means forgotten the only woman who was able to love him.
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