Phantom Reviewing Project: "Love Never Dies"

[igenlode]

*Very* interesting new comment and analysis on "Love Never Dies" as part of the massive Phantom Reviewing Project (an attempt to review all the versions of "The Phantom of the Opera" in existence!): The Phantom Project: Reviews & Research / Love Never Dies by Andrew Lloyd Webber (2010)

Though I would say that, naturally -- since the writer happens to echo most of my own prejudices and reactions, including a general preference for the original soundtrack over the amended one :-p I was going to quote bits, but really there's so much that I agree with, especially the entire analysis of Christine and Raoul's relationship and how the musical's heavy-handed attempts at manipulation completely backfire in this respect :-D

[Edit: having read a few more of these reviews, I'm wondering if the result of being exposed to bad fanfic is always to end up with sympathy for Raoul!]


I'll try to select just a handful of quotes:

• "in the first musical, which was largely from Christine's perspective, she was the heroine of the piece who overcame terrible odds and managed to triumph in spite of being kidnapped and threatened, eventually going to her happy ending. In this musical, things are told mostly from the Phantom's perspective, and not only is he unquestionably the intended hero, Christine is reduced to almost a non-entity in order to accomplish this. It's not a very flattering comparison"
  
• "the only time any character advancement is ever demonstrated in this show is when it's required to explain why the plot demands that characters do things that make no sense whatsoever for their original incarnations."
  
• "Christine and Raoul have one of the most complex and interesting relationships in the show - unintentionally, I suspect, because while there is far more implied backstory and context to their interactions than there is for most other characters, it's presented for the purpose of drawing Raoul as a failed spouse and their marriage as a relationship on the brink of collapse. A great deal of their interaction involves implications and side mentions of context that we don't directly see[...] despite Raoul's obvious self-blaming and withdrawal from what he sees as his failures, the resulting portrait is a convincing one of a family undergoing tough times but still feeling genuine love and desire to help one another."
  
• [Gustave vs Meg] "Raoul's behavior is used as an example of his unworthiness to remain in his family, while the Phantom's will be excused because the person doing the attention-seeking is clearly asking too much."
  
• "characters are 'in the wrong' not when they do things that are objectively wrong but when they oppose or inconvenience the Phantom, who is by virtue of being the protagonist completely exempt from any such moral judgment."
  
• "For a show so invested in giving the Phantom a near-supernatural level of power and control over his environment and employees, he plays the helpless victim card an awful lot."
  
• "Webber's plot assumes that the audience already knows that Christine was clearly in love with the Phantom, more deeply and importantly than she was with Raoul, so that therefore no extra motivation is needed; again, this is revisionism that doesn't match up to the events of the first musical"
  
• "It would have been stronger if she had actually mentioned any of the most important reasons she has to not owe him anything[...] such as the fact that he stalked and kidnapped her and tried to kill her husband and did kill other people, but curiously she only cites his ten-year absence; again, their romance is more important than any pesky plot in either show"
  
• "in the previous show, Christine was able to set the wheels in motion to save herself from the Phantom's menace by confiding in Raoul and getting his help, and it seems only natural that she would do the same here, especially since he is now her husband of ten years and despite their current marital difficulties she has been shown to be ostensibly in love with him."
  
• "The effect is, as in the earlier 'What a Dreadful Town' scene, that a character is struggling with believably complex emotions and evoking both sympathy and condemnation from the audience. While the intent [...]is almost certainly to show him in an unflattering light next to the Phantom and suggest that Christine should never have chosen him, [it] has the side effect of making him the character with the most believable and compelling character growth over the past decade in the entire show. It's a pity that he wasn't explored or developed further."
  
• "the very act of questioning his own substance tells us that he is not truly shallow or empty, but rather still afflicted by the sense of inferiority that makes him question whether or not he's worthy of his family. The obvious comparison the lyrics are trying to draw is with the Phantom, suggesting that Raoul has a pretty facade with nothing worthwhile beneath, while the Phantom has an ugly facade but is filled with important emotional depths, but ironically it is Raoul in this show who has demonstrated emotional depth and growth"
  
• "In asking why Christine loves him and chooses to stay with him, Raoul is the only character who ever acknowledges the years of life and her possible emotional struggles in the intervening time"
  
• " In a sad way, it's interesting that even in a musical that has worked so hard to establish that Christine really wanted to stay with the Phantom and never should have gone with Raoul, the story still feels the need to take that choice away from her this time around; is it because unconsciously the writers still don't "trust her" to make the choice they would prefer[?...] If the Phantom wins, is he going to lock her in the basement if she refuses to stay with him once she finds out what's going on and tries to go home to Raoul? If Raoul wins, is he going to bodily drag her onto a boat and across the Atlantic even if she decides she wants to stay in New York after all?"
  
• "poor Meg still thinks of the Phantom, somehow, as Christine's old Angel of Music; she thinks he will save her from her circumstances if only she believes in him hard enough. But, as Christine discovered to her own severe disappointment and distress, that's never what he's been about; he did those things for Christine out of self-interest"
  
• "since she has no idea Raoul has arbitrarily decided to plan his whole future based around what she does in the next ten minutes, to her there is only one clear choice: perform in order to keep Gustave safe and hope that the Phantom honors his promise to let them leave afterward, and hope to smooth over Raoul's hurt feelings and explain to him what was going on later."
  
• "She sings, thus giving the Phantom the 'victory', but she does so for the majority of the song by singing directly to Raoul, who is standing in the wings, giving us the effect that she is apologizing and telling her husband that she loves him without either breaking her word or endangering her child. " (Ha! So it's not just me who got that impression, then...)
  
• "If love is truly eternal, why isn't her love for Raoul just as important, especially since it endured for many years as opposed to the very short time she spent being romantically involved with the Phantom? [While] Raoul is making some highly questionable choices, Christine has never once given us any indication that she doesn't love him or wants him to be gone. As with the rest of the show, it presumes that the Phantom's love is the most powerful and important bond to be had among the characters, and that Christine will return that love whether she wants to or not, because he's the protagonist and that's how it works."
  
• "Meg is here a recreation of the Phantom himself, a dispossessed and abused person who has resorted to terrorism and kidnapping in order to force people to acknowledge her suffering and provide her some kind of relief"
  
• "Gustave has just been through a great deal of trauma and is only ten years old, yet the audience is supposed to believe that he would prefer to walk away from his father and the still-warm body of his mother who has died mere moments ago in order to go soothe the hurt feelings of the mysterious stranger who completely terrified him a few scenes ago. "