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Hammerstein... complete?
I think I've actually finished the Hammerstein-story (which I'm really going to have to find a title for).
I came across the New York Times report on the real first night at the new Manhattan Opera, which ironically enough makes it plain that my hypothesis about the Opera House not being ready and the gala having to be postponed would have been entirely historically apt -- it wasn't really ready for the grand opening as it was. However, the idea of Christine going off elsewhere for several months to escape the Phantom threat wouldn't really wash after I'd made such a plot point of the moral imperative to get her there on the night she was due to sing for the Phantom instead, so in the end I just had her rely on his promise to let her and Gustave "go free" (even though in canon and even in this story he obviously didn't keep to that intention for very long; he was trying to trap Raoul by the small hours of the following morning, i.e. rather less than a day later!)
Anyway, I was able to pinch lots of ideas about what the Manhattan Opera and its clientele were actually like from the contemporary reportage. :-)
Having unintentionally made Jos into something of a self-insert, I used that as the conscious basis for a new last scene (sadly I never take any of the moral advice I'm so fond of having my characters dish out to one another...) Although it also works as a parallel to the Phantom's situation -- ironically enough, this backstory was originally intended to give Jos some grounds for sympathising with Raoul! -- and I assume the fans will read it that way.
Of course, this means that the last scene then becomes all about redemption for the Original Character rather than for the canon characters, which makes it absolutely imperative that the readers become interested in him early on; he isn't just the narrator, he becomes a major protagonist. And I'm not sure he does become particularly alive until we get the whole backstory -- is that a clue that I should at least drop hints about it earlier? Ought I also to take up my other idea, to start the story with a quick 'teaser' scene of his coming across Raoul in the bar and then go back to the account of how he got there, a.k.a Jos's Boring and Frustrating Day?
It also presents something of a problem when we switch back to the intended 'epilogue', since Jos has now taken much more of an active significance in that final chapter than I had originally intended (my plan went something like 'reveal Gustave; quickly resolve loose ends of Sally; Christine sings for Phantom'). I obviously can't use Jos as narrator for this section, and never intended to; the parallel is with the end of the 'first act', where I switch to an omniscient third-person narrator to describe events in the bar after Jos has gone. However, I now had to tie this bit of reportage -- heavily influenced by the New York Times -- back into the ending of the Jos-plot, to which it isn't really connected at all. Otherwise it betrays the fact that the ending wandered off somewhere effective but unintentional (and only remotely related to the original musical) and that the Phantom is simply tagged clumsily onto the end of it!
I think the slant I came up with for the last paragraph of both sections works -- and also helps to bring poor old Raoul back in. (In echoes of the original production, the plot requires him to leave the scene about halfway through the last act so that the other characters can keep on emoting frankly behind his back :-p)
For a story that was originally conceived as a Raoul-based idea ("Raoul gets help in persuading Christine not to sing") it seems to have ended up with him as rather peripheral to Jos and even Christine -- who doesn't so much as appear until the second act. Part of the reason for that, I think, is that Christine comes across as a stronger character, certainly by the end; she is the one with the secrets, the knowledge and the decisions, after all.
Raoul doesn't really get a lot of character development in this; he goes from Drunk Self-hating Raoul to Squeakier-than-White Raoul literally overnight, mainly because I'm going for a parallel with the dressing-room scene but setting it in a universe where Raoul never made the bet and so has nothing to conceal. Since he has happily convinced himself that Christine is only obeying the Phantom because Gustave's life is in danger, he doesn't have a lot of conflict to deal with at this point. As a result, we don't really have any reason to suppose that he is going to stay that way -- his insecurities may have magically vanished for the moment, but, in the absence of a catalyst shock like those in All the Rules Rearranged or The Choices of Raoul, the 'cure' seems to have come altogether too easily. Which raises the question in the reader's mind that it's simply because the author wants it to happen, rather than being plausible :-(
(I thought the overnight recovery in "All the Rules Rearranged" was pushing the bounds of credibility, but there's a lot of intervening angst and the fact that we're seeing the final chapter through the oblivious eyes of Gustave to help justify it. This one... well, the best I can do is suggest that Jos is a bit dubious about their future.)
Anyway, I think I've got the requisite fan-pleasing Phantom-sympathy in. (And, to be fair, the requisite tying-up of that portion of the plot -- although that then raises the question of what happens to Jos during all this, since we don't see him again!) The 'omniscient' viewpoint does wander considerably, though, from florid newspaper description to present-day-in-the-past looking back, and then to the inside of the Phantom's mind -- not sure how well this is going to go down after multiple chapters seen strictly via one narrator. Is it going to come across as an obvious PoV error?
I'm also going to need someone to deal with the dialect question (how plausible is Jos's accent? probably not very), which I haven't managed to get so far.
I came across the New York Times report on the real first night at the new Manhattan Opera, which ironically enough makes it plain that my hypothesis about the Opera House not being ready and the gala having to be postponed would have been entirely historically apt -- it wasn't really ready for the grand opening as it was. However, the idea of Christine going off elsewhere for several months to escape the Phantom threat wouldn't really wash after I'd made such a plot point of the moral imperative to get her there on the night she was due to sing for the Phantom instead, so in the end I just had her rely on his promise to let her and Gustave "go free" (even though in canon and even in this story he obviously didn't keep to that intention for very long; he was trying to trap Raoul by the small hours of the following morning, i.e. rather less than a day later!)
Anyway, I was able to pinch lots of ideas about what the Manhattan Opera and its clientele were actually like from the contemporary reportage. :-)
Having unintentionally made Jos into something of a self-insert, I used that as the conscious basis for a new last scene (sadly I never take any of the moral advice I'm so fond of having my characters dish out to one another...) Although it also works as a parallel to the Phantom's situation -- ironically enough, this backstory was originally intended to give Jos some grounds for sympathising with Raoul! -- and I assume the fans will read it that way.
Of course, this means that the last scene then becomes all about redemption for the Original Character rather than for the canon characters, which makes it absolutely imperative that the readers become interested in him early on; he isn't just the narrator, he becomes a major protagonist. And I'm not sure he does become particularly alive until we get the whole backstory -- is that a clue that I should at least drop hints about it earlier? Ought I also to take up my other idea, to start the story with a quick 'teaser' scene of his coming across Raoul in the bar and then go back to the account of how he got there, a.k.a Jos's Boring and Frustrating Day?
It also presents something of a problem when we switch back to the intended 'epilogue', since Jos has now taken much more of an active significance in that final chapter than I had originally intended (my plan went something like 'reveal Gustave; quickly resolve loose ends of Sally; Christine sings for Phantom'). I obviously can't use Jos as narrator for this section, and never intended to; the parallel is with the end of the 'first act', where I switch to an omniscient third-person narrator to describe events in the bar after Jos has gone. However, I now had to tie this bit of reportage -- heavily influenced by the New York Times -- back into the ending of the Jos-plot, to which it isn't really connected at all. Otherwise it betrays the fact that the ending wandered off somewhere effective but unintentional (and only remotely related to the original musical) and that the Phantom is simply tagged clumsily onto the end of it!
I think the slant I came up with for the last paragraph of both sections works -- and also helps to bring poor old Raoul back in. (In echoes of the original production, the plot requires him to leave the scene about halfway through the last act so that the other characters can keep on emoting frankly behind his back :-p)
For a story that was originally conceived as a Raoul-based idea ("Raoul gets help in persuading Christine not to sing") it seems to have ended up with him as rather peripheral to Jos and even Christine -- who doesn't so much as appear until the second act. Part of the reason for that, I think, is that Christine comes across as a stronger character, certainly by the end; she is the one with the secrets, the knowledge and the decisions, after all.
Raoul doesn't really get a lot of character development in this; he goes from Drunk Self-hating Raoul to Squeakier-than-White Raoul literally overnight, mainly because I'm going for a parallel with the dressing-room scene but setting it in a universe where Raoul never made the bet and so has nothing to conceal. Since he has happily convinced himself that Christine is only obeying the Phantom because Gustave's life is in danger, he doesn't have a lot of conflict to deal with at this point. As a result, we don't really have any reason to suppose that he is going to stay that way -- his insecurities may have magically vanished for the moment, but, in the absence of a catalyst shock like those in All the Rules Rearranged or The Choices of Raoul, the 'cure' seems to have come altogether too easily. Which raises the question in the reader's mind that it's simply because the author wants it to happen, rather than being plausible :-(
(I thought the overnight recovery in "All the Rules Rearranged" was pushing the bounds of credibility, but there's a lot of intervening angst and the fact that we're seeing the final chapter through the oblivious eyes of Gustave to help justify it. This one... well, the best I can do is suggest that Jos is a bit dubious about their future.)
Anyway, I think I've got the requisite fan-pleasing Phantom-sympathy in. (And, to be fair, the requisite tying-up of that portion of the plot -- although that then raises the question of what happens to Jos during all this, since we don't see him again!) The 'omniscient' viewpoint does wander considerably, though, from florid newspaper description to present-day-in-the-past looking back, and then to the inside of the Phantom's mind -- not sure how well this is going to go down after multiple chapters seen strictly via one narrator. Is it going to come across as an obvious PoV error?
I'm also going to need someone to deal with the dialect question (how plausible is Jos's accent? probably not very), which I haven't managed to get so far.