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"Love Never Dies"
I have to admit that I was very sceptical about Andrew Lloyd Webber's announced plans for a new "Phantom of the Opera" musical when I first heard about it, and was mildly disappointed but not at all surprised when the show, after eventually struggling to the stage, garnered poor reviews and failed to become a hit. But I was curious enough about it to pick up a discarded "Daily Mail" cover CD featuring songs from both "The Phantom of the Opera" and "Love Never Dies": and to my delight I found that the 'new' songs were actually extremely good. The score is very recognisably Lloyd Webber without yielding to the temptation to descend into pastiche: this is new music, not a re-hash of past success, yet for the first time in a dozen years or more it's melody worth listening to -- tunes you catch yourself humming out of context.
I soon found myself actively considering looking for a full recording rather than the half-dozen highlights included on the disc, and all the criticisms (numbers sounded like Tin Pan Alley showtunes rather than doom-laden European opera, dialogue was sung-though rather than spoken, unacceptably tragic ending, too much Raoul and Phantom and not enough Christine) seemed perfectly acceptable and possily even selling-points from my point of view. Unfortunately, then I came across the plot.
From the songs I'd heard I assumed I'd already gathered the gist of it (it later turned out that I'd massively misattributed the singers in one of them...) I'd been somewhat shocked, but the developments weren't such that I couldn't logically swallow. What I then discovered via the Internet and couldn't take was the plot's blithe assumption, supposed to be shared by the audience, that Christine Daaé had apparently have been pining after the Phantom from the first, and that she is constrained only by convention from taking her child and going off with her true soulmate.
It occurred to me afterwards to wonder just why I would find such a development unacceptable; on the face of it, this ought to appeal to me tremendously. If I am instinctively on the (narratively hopeless) side of Louis Chamalis in "Barbary Coast", Handsome Williams in "Way of the Strong" or Alexander Sebastian in "Notorious", then why wouldn't I be campaigning here for the 'villain' to get the girl? Why am I not at once on the side of the tortured dark character who hates the world that has always hated him? Is it just a question of precedence -- my very strong feeling that first loyalties ought ultimately to be kept to? (Because from that point of view, the Phantom arguably 'saw' Christine first -- it was only he who recognised her potential -- and he has a legitimate complaint that she is his 'creation' being stolen from him by some Johnny-come-lately who would never have laid eyes on her otherwise.)
I think my instinctive recoil from the concept is two-part: firstly that part of the poignancy which the Phantom does hold for me is that he fits the trope of the morally compromised character (like Tracy Belmanoir in "The Black Moth" or the unhappy Comte de Brencourt in D.K.Broster's "The Yellow Poppy") whose obsessive love for a woman he cannot hope to win could either save or damn him. She may come to feel pity for him in place of hate; she may extend tenderness towards the wounds he fiercely tries to conceal from her. But she does not, cannot love him, because she is unswerving in her prior love for somebody else: and while killing off this rival is an obvious quick-fix temptation, love simply doesn't work like that. The fact that for all her kind heart the lady doesn't return his feelings is what makes the situation tragic -- undermine that, and you undermine its effectiveness.
And secondly -- in this particular case rather than the general -- there isn't any indication, ever, that the girl Christine loves the human being behind the Phantom, or even considers him until the very end in the light of a fallible human being rather than a power or threat. There is no suggestion of it in the source material, either book or silent film (to which Lloyd Webber's Phantom is, at least visually, heavily indebted), and I didn't get any sign of it from the musical.
The result of which is that constructing a plot on the casual assumption that Christine has been in love with the Phantom all along comes across as wishful fanboy revisionism -- doubly disconcerting when the fanfic author in this case is, well... the author!
I can credit an unhappy, self-destructive Raoul at odds with Christine; in fact, since my 'freebie' CD gives neither singer nor character-credits for any of the six tracks included, I had assumed from the vocal differences and the context of the lyrics that "Once Upon Another Time" was actually a duet between Christine and Raoul! I can easily credit a kind-hearted Christine who goes back on the night before their wedding to learn whether the Phantom truly sacrificed his life to let the young lovers escape, and strangely enough, I can credit a Christine who slept with the Phantom under those circumstances; what I can't conceive of is one who has spent the years since in love with him.
I suppose there is a sort of unwritten rule about sequels: you can set up a situation to re-open a question that had seemed closed (often, the love of a woman). You can fight the same conflicts over again in a different context, with different weapons deployed. You can, in other words, have your cake and eat it.
But what invariably seems to happen is that the question, in the end, resolves to the same answer: the past can be reinvoked, but it cannot be changed. I've fretted against this on encountering it elsewhere -- why can we not have a happy ending the second time round? Why must the same flawed characters make the same mistakes? Well, now we know; because if you actually try to pull it off, it feels like cheating.
Narrativium -- and everything we know about the characters -- predicts that this particular crisis resolves in a strengthened, healed marriage and the doomed outsider either redeemed (and/or dead) or cast back into the outer darkness anew to bewail his fate. But while narrativium can be flouted (one reviewer proposes credibly that the show would have been improved by having the Phantom murder Raoul in the second act, rather than just hand-waving the latter out of the story!), characterisation can't.
There's a perfectly plausible set-up to be had here. The freak-show is the ideal habitat for the Phantom finally to come out of hiding; you can credibly build up a plot culminating, again, in a choice between Christine's neglectful husband and her obsessive maestro (shades of "The Red Shoes"). You can even (see again "The Red Shoes") kill off the heroine in the last act. But apparently what you can't do -- according to my outraged subconscious -- is change Christine's ultimate choice.
Skipping off to play Happy Families with the Phantom of the Opera is not any sane woman's decision; and certainly not hers.
I soon found myself actively considering looking for a full recording rather than the half-dozen highlights included on the disc, and all the criticisms (numbers sounded like Tin Pan Alley showtunes rather than doom-laden European opera, dialogue was sung-though rather than spoken, unacceptably tragic ending, too much Raoul and Phantom and not enough Christine) seemed perfectly acceptable and possily even selling-points from my point of view. Unfortunately, then I came across the plot.
From the songs I'd heard I assumed I'd already gathered the gist of it (it later turned out that I'd massively misattributed the singers in one of them...) I'd been somewhat shocked, but the developments weren't such that I couldn't logically swallow. What I then discovered via the Internet and couldn't take was the plot's blithe assumption, supposed to be shared by the audience, that Christine Daaé had apparently have been pining after the Phantom from the first, and that she is constrained only by convention from taking her child and going off with her true soulmate.
It occurred to me afterwards to wonder just why I would find such a development unacceptable; on the face of it, this ought to appeal to me tremendously. If I am instinctively on the (narratively hopeless) side of Louis Chamalis in "Barbary Coast", Handsome Williams in "Way of the Strong" or Alexander Sebastian in "Notorious", then why wouldn't I be campaigning here for the 'villain' to get the girl? Why am I not at once on the side of the tortured dark character who hates the world that has always hated him? Is it just a question of precedence -- my very strong feeling that first loyalties ought ultimately to be kept to? (Because from that point of view, the Phantom arguably 'saw' Christine first -- it was only he who recognised her potential -- and he has a legitimate complaint that she is his 'creation' being stolen from him by some Johnny-come-lately who would never have laid eyes on her otherwise.)
I think my instinctive recoil from the concept is two-part: firstly that part of the poignancy which the Phantom does hold for me is that he fits the trope of the morally compromised character (like Tracy Belmanoir in "The Black Moth" or the unhappy Comte de Brencourt in D.K.Broster's "The Yellow Poppy") whose obsessive love for a woman he cannot hope to win could either save or damn him. She may come to feel pity for him in place of hate; she may extend tenderness towards the wounds he fiercely tries to conceal from her. But she does not, cannot love him, because she is unswerving in her prior love for somebody else: and while killing off this rival is an obvious quick-fix temptation, love simply doesn't work like that. The fact that for all her kind heart the lady doesn't return his feelings is what makes the situation tragic -- undermine that, and you undermine its effectiveness.
And secondly -- in this particular case rather than the general -- there isn't any indication, ever, that the girl Christine loves the human being behind the Phantom, or even considers him until the very end in the light of a fallible human being rather than a power or threat. There is no suggestion of it in the source material, either book or silent film (to which Lloyd Webber's Phantom is, at least visually, heavily indebted), and I didn't get any sign of it from the musical.
The result of which is that constructing a plot on the casual assumption that Christine has been in love with the Phantom all along comes across as wishful fanboy revisionism -- doubly disconcerting when the fanfic author in this case is, well... the author!
I can credit an unhappy, self-destructive Raoul at odds with Christine; in fact, since my 'freebie' CD gives neither singer nor character-credits for any of the six tracks included, I had assumed from the vocal differences and the context of the lyrics that "Once Upon Another Time" was actually a duet between Christine and Raoul! I can easily credit a kind-hearted Christine who goes back on the night before their wedding to learn whether the Phantom truly sacrificed his life to let the young lovers escape, and strangely enough, I can credit a Christine who slept with the Phantom under those circumstances; what I can't conceive of is one who has spent the years since in love with him.
I suppose there is a sort of unwritten rule about sequels: you can set up a situation to re-open a question that had seemed closed (often, the love of a woman). You can fight the same conflicts over again in a different context, with different weapons deployed. You can, in other words, have your cake and eat it.
But what invariably seems to happen is that the question, in the end, resolves to the same answer: the past can be reinvoked, but it cannot be changed. I've fretted against this on encountering it elsewhere -- why can we not have a happy ending the second time round? Why must the same flawed characters make the same mistakes? Well, now we know; because if you actually try to pull it off, it feels like cheating.
Narrativium -- and everything we know about the characters -- predicts that this particular crisis resolves in a strengthened, healed marriage and the doomed outsider either redeemed (and/or dead) or cast back into the outer darkness anew to bewail his fate. But while narrativium can be flouted (one reviewer proposes credibly that the show would have been improved by having the Phantom murder Raoul in the second act, rather than just hand-waving the latter out of the story!), characterisation can't.
There's a perfectly plausible set-up to be had here. The freak-show is the ideal habitat for the Phantom finally to come out of hiding; you can credibly build up a plot culminating, again, in a choice between Christine's neglectful husband and her obsessive maestro (shades of "The Red Shoes"). You can even (see again "The Red Shoes") kill off the heroine in the last act. But apparently what you can't do -- according to my outraged subconscious -- is change Christine's ultimate choice.
Skipping off to play Happy Families with the Phantom of the Opera is not any sane woman's decision; and certainly not hers.