Despite Everything...
...I watched the Melbourne production of "Love Never Dies" last night and I have to say I was impressed. I still have my reservations (to put it mildly) about the plot as a whole and the need for a sequel to "Phantom of the Opera" in the first place, but the experience was an enjoyable one.
The staging was excellent and dramatic, and the new scene order makes far more sense than the London original. Starting with "Till I hear you sing once more" was a bold move - revealing the Phantom as the curtain rises but this works - it establishes the mood of obsession and desperation from the first moment. In the original run there was more a sense of the story wandering along aimlessly until halfway through the first act. And I have to say that Ben Lewis really does the part justice. He has real presence and menace which is required in the role, and his voice is excellent which should of course be a given but is not necessarily *cough Gerik cough*. It's clear also that reorganising some of the dialogue in the first act has been done to restore a bit more gravitas to the Phantom.... we no longer have Madame Giry scolding him with backstory while he wheedles and hedges. Now the exposition-dump is a conversation between Madame Giry and Meg which leaves the Phantom happily untouched.
The sets were superb, dramatic and imposing and the atmosphere created was disturbing, luxurious and unearthly. During "Beauty Underneath" the directorial team took the excellent decision to distract attention away from the still execrable lyrics and purpose of the song with some amazing spectacle of the denizens and freaks of Coney Island - there was a real sense that the Phantom and Gustave were walking through an underworld of outcasts and that the Phantom was introducing his son and heir to the realm he would one day inherit. Gustave is still a lousy plot device by the way, but he was very well portrayed and worked well in the context of the performance, much respect to the child actor.
Some numbers still seemed pointless and unfulfilling (Raoul's "Why does she love me?" should have been a post on an emo-blog, and deleted in shame after seeing it published, rather than a song) but in general the show hung together a lot better. The addition of little stings and snippets of material from the original musical helped tie the two shows together and evoke the emotions from the original story that sought to bolster those that were falteringly evoked in the sequel.
The end was still fucking atrocious though, but the cast gave it their all. Nutmeg drags Gustave off to vaguely threaten to drown him by standing on a pier, then does nothing about it but shout at the Phantom a bit and point a gun at her own head... which leads to the worst bit of crisis negotiation in the world as Genius!Erik reassures Meg she's lovely and not to worry that she's not as good as Christine. The two psychos then struggle for the gun unconvincingly and Christine is shot by the world's least effective bullet. Exeunt the Girys stage left while Christine shows that if she's learned ANYTHING by being an Opera singer it's that people in operas don't die until the end of the musical number. She spares the time to comfort her traumatised ten year old son by saying "yes dear mommy's dying now, but don't run to get your father who you have known all your life, look at this scary man in the mask here who terrified you earlier, he's your real dad, I hope you're okay with that." If nothing else this coupled with Erik's negotiation skills with Meg shows that Erik and Christine really were suited for each other as they both exhibit galaxy-class lack of empathy. Gustave runs off to find Raoul anyway, and somehow manages this despite his having left the island in a carriage earlier that day. Meanwhile mortally wounded Christine carries on singing a bit and then does the "goes slightly stiff and closes her eyes" routine that passes for death in musical theatre. Gustave and Raoul enter, Erik lets Raoul snog the corpse for a bit while he and Gustave go off to the end of the pier and Gustave strokes Erik's unseen deformity with the back of his hand. Mummy's dead but all is well with the world.
Bah.
You see it's so easy to snark at this - I really enjoyed the show as a whole - as a spectacle and a piece of theatre it was splendid, but it is a landscape best seen from the peak of a nearby hill. The minute you get up close you see the broken glass in the bullrushes and the dog crap on the edge of the picnic area. I would still recommend seeing it - honestly - the performances were superb in the main and can touch the observer emotionally. Two Phantom moments in particular sent shivers through me - Christine's declaration in "Beneath a Moonless Sky" of 'and I loved you.. yes I loved you..' was met with a noticeable but very genuine whole-body flinch from Erik as she said those forbidden words explicitly for the first time, and later at the end of "Beauty Underneath" when Christine confirms his suspicions that 'you left me with a son', Lewis displays a sudden horrified agony of despair in the Phantom as he realises the enormity of what that means. When he turns a few seconds later and on hands and knees begs Christine that Gustave 'must never ever know' it is a moment of redemptive power that almost equals his renunciation of Christine at the end of the original show.
This is getting too wordy. I suppose I must end where I began:
The plot does not bear close scrutiny, nor do the characters
The show, spectacle and music provide an excellent experience.
The staging was excellent and dramatic, and the new scene order makes far more sense than the London original. Starting with "Till I hear you sing once more" was a bold move - revealing the Phantom as the curtain rises but this works - it establishes the mood of obsession and desperation from the first moment. In the original run there was more a sense of the story wandering along aimlessly until halfway through the first act. And I have to say that Ben Lewis really does the part justice. He has real presence and menace which is required in the role, and his voice is excellent which should of course be a given but is not necessarily *cough Gerik cough*. It's clear also that reorganising some of the dialogue in the first act has been done to restore a bit more gravitas to the Phantom.... we no longer have Madame Giry scolding him with backstory while he wheedles and hedges. Now the exposition-dump is a conversation between Madame Giry and Meg which leaves the Phantom happily untouched.
The sets were superb, dramatic and imposing and the atmosphere created was disturbing, luxurious and unearthly. During "Beauty Underneath" the directorial team took the excellent decision to distract attention away from the still execrable lyrics and purpose of the song with some amazing spectacle of the denizens and freaks of Coney Island - there was a real sense that the Phantom and Gustave were walking through an underworld of outcasts and that the Phantom was introducing his son and heir to the realm he would one day inherit. Gustave is still a lousy plot device by the way, but he was very well portrayed and worked well in the context of the performance, much respect to the child actor.
Some numbers still seemed pointless and unfulfilling (Raoul's "Why does she love me?" should have been a post on an emo-blog, and deleted in shame after seeing it published, rather than a song) but in general the show hung together a lot better. The addition of little stings and snippets of material from the original musical helped tie the two shows together and evoke the emotions from the original story that sought to bolster those that were falteringly evoked in the sequel.
The end was still fucking atrocious though, but the cast gave it their all. Nutmeg drags Gustave off to vaguely threaten to drown him by standing on a pier, then does nothing about it but shout at the Phantom a bit and point a gun at her own head... which leads to the worst bit of crisis negotiation in the world as Genius!Erik reassures Meg she's lovely and not to worry that she's not as good as Christine. The two psychos then struggle for the gun unconvincingly and Christine is shot by the world's least effective bullet. Exeunt the Girys stage left while Christine shows that if she's learned ANYTHING by being an Opera singer it's that people in operas don't die until the end of the musical number. She spares the time to comfort her traumatised ten year old son by saying "yes dear mommy's dying now, but don't run to get your father who you have known all your life, look at this scary man in the mask here who terrified you earlier, he's your real dad, I hope you're okay with that." If nothing else this coupled with Erik's negotiation skills with Meg shows that Erik and Christine really were suited for each other as they both exhibit galaxy-class lack of empathy. Gustave runs off to find Raoul anyway, and somehow manages this despite his having left the island in a carriage earlier that day. Meanwhile mortally wounded Christine carries on singing a bit and then does the "goes slightly stiff and closes her eyes" routine that passes for death in musical theatre. Gustave and Raoul enter, Erik lets Raoul snog the corpse for a bit while he and Gustave go off to the end of the pier and Gustave strokes Erik's unseen deformity with the back of his hand. Mummy's dead but all is well with the world.
Bah.
You see it's so easy to snark at this - I really enjoyed the show as a whole - as a spectacle and a piece of theatre it was splendid, but it is a landscape best seen from the peak of a nearby hill. The minute you get up close you see the broken glass in the bullrushes and the dog crap on the edge of the picnic area. I would still recommend seeing it - honestly - the performances were superb in the main and can touch the observer emotionally. Two Phantom moments in particular sent shivers through me - Christine's declaration in "Beneath a Moonless Sky" of 'and I loved you.. yes I loved you..' was met with a noticeable but very genuine whole-body flinch from Erik as she said those forbidden words explicitly for the first time, and later at the end of "Beauty Underneath" when Christine confirms his suspicions that 'you left me with a son', Lewis displays a sudden horrified agony of despair in the Phantom as he realises the enormity of what that means. When he turns a few seconds later and on hands and knees begs Christine that Gustave 'must never ever know' it is a moment of redemptive power that almost equals his renunciation of Christine at the end of the original show.
This is getting too wordy. I suppose I must end where I began:
The plot does not bear close scrutiny, nor do the characters
The show, spectacle and music provide an excellent experience.