Today, Explained - Phantom ghosts Broadway

Episode Date: April 13, 2023

The chandelier crashes for a final time as Broadway’s longest-running musical, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s extremely ’80s Phantom of the Opera, closes after 35 years and nearly 14,000 performances. Vulture’s Andrea Long Chu assesses its cultural staying power. This episode was produced by Siona Peterous, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Victoria Chamberlin and Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Lot 665, then, ladies and gentlemen. A poster for Vox.com's production of Today Explained. Sold. To Noelle, king of podcasts. Thank you very much. Lot 666, then. A chandelier in pieces. Some of you may recall the strange phenomenon of the Phantom of the Opera.

A musical never fully explained. We are told, ladies and gentlemen, that it ran longer than any other Broadway production. Perhaps we may frighten away the ghost of so many years with a little explanation. Gentlemen? BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with Bet MGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style,

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Shh. Today's plane is about to begin. The Phantom of the Opera is closing. For people who have not had the pleasure or the horror, Andrea Longchu, writer at Vulture, what is this show about? So The Phantom of the Opera is a kind of gothic romance about a beautiful young soprano at a Paris opera house who is being trained by a disembodied voice that she initially believes to be an angel sent by her father. In fact, it turns out to be the titular Phantom of the Opera, who is not a ghost, but is a man who lives in the bowels of the opera house,

who has fallen in love with her, and who goes to extraordinary and often violent lengths to try and install her as the new star of the opera house. Your days at the opera popular are numbered. Christine Daae will be singing on your behalf tonight. Be prepared for a great misfortune should you attempt to take her place. So she has on the one hand the love of this terrifying

but beautifully voiced musical genius, and on the one hand the love of this terrifying but beautifully voiced musical genius, and on the other hand, the love of a childhood friend, upstanding aristocratic lover. And so it is about the way this love triangle works out. Only then can you belong to me? You describe it as a gothic romance, and I remember that there was definitely, there was a vibe in this play. There was an atmosphere, is what I should say. What is the atmosphere of Phantom? Oh, I mean, it absolutely is a bodice ripper.

Lavish gold sets and huge draperies and Christine's performance when she goes with the Phantom to his lair under the opera house, she's dressed in this virginal white dressing gown. And sleep he sighed to me virginal white like dressing gown The whole thing is meant to sort of imply sex without there ever actually being any It has a kind of daytime eroticism to it, if you will. It's supposed to be kind of family friendly and because it has to be,

it's intended to be a major tourist attraction. Inside my mind The other thing I remember, Andrea, hazily, is a chandelier plays a big part. A chandelier in pieces. What is the significance of the chandelier again? The chandelier is one of the most famous parts of Phantom. Some of you may recall the strange affair of the Phantom of the Opera, a mystery never fully explained.

The show begins with the chandelier kind of broken and in pieces on the stage. We're told, ladies and gentlemen, that this is the very chandelier which figures in the famous disaster. It is raised to the ceiling. In this case, not the ceiling of the stage, but actually the ceiling of the Majestic Theatre

on 43rd Street. Gentlemen. And as that happens, the stage is transformed back from the early 1900s to 1881, which is when the actual story is supposed to take place. And the chandelier, which is now all illuminated, has been raised and is over the orchestra's seats. At the end of Act One, the Phantom drops the chandelier and it comes sort of plummeting down. If you're in the orchestra section,

it actually does really kind of look like it's going to hit you, and then it swings back onto the stage. It is an incredibly famous moment in the history of Broadway, history of musical theater. It is arguably the best part of the show. Like the chandelier itself, the show just sort of drops off in quality.

The play debuts in London in 1986, comes to Broadway in 1988. And what is the initial reaction from audiences, from critics? There was something like $17 million or more in advance ticket sales because of how successful it had already been on the West End. But Andrew Lloyd Webber had already had hits, so by the time Phantom comes in 1988, Cats has already been up for several years, was already a major, major hit.

There's no question, Phantom of the Opera, which opens officially next week on Broadway, is the entertainment event of the year. So there's a massive amount of advanced press for this thing. And people loved it. I mean, audiences loved it. Critics had never been good to Andrew Lloyd Webber through most of his career. The British liked him more, tended to give him higher marks than critics in New York. In New York, it was received at best in a kind of mixed way. So for instance, John Simon's review for New York Magazine back in 1988, the quote is something like,

it's not that Andrew Lloyd Webber lacks an ear for melodies so much as that he has too much of an ear for other people's melodies. Ooh, ooh. Why didn't critics take Andrew Lloyd Webber seriously? I'm looking at the list of things that he is responsible for here. Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar, Cats, what was the deal? The first is that he tended to be writing an imitation either of styles or of very specific artists. So like Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat was the first musical of his that was ever produced. Like Pharaoh is like an Elvis impersonator, essentially.

So it's that song that the Pharaoh sings is just a straight up kind of Elvis pastiche. You know, Jesus Christ Superstar is a rock opera. Evita was sort of borrowing from quote unquote Latin American song styles. So he didn't seem to have very original musical ideas. He also tended to actually just take, or at least that's what it seemed like. So Don't Cry For Me Argentina from Evita seems to be scored to the Bach's Preludency Major

from the well-tempered Clavier. Memory from Cats, very famous song. Donald Trump's favorite song. Memory, turn your face to the moonlight. Sounds a lot like... Here's a little song that was recorded by Larry Clinton and his orchestra many, many moons ago. Midnight, not a sound from the pavement. his orchestra many, many moons ago. I don't think it occurred to him that there was something wrong

with taking other people's music. I mean, this is me speculating, but I think for him, if it sounded good, it sounded good. The second thing is that he was a very poor writer of dramatic music. His characters tended to just kind of stand there and tell you about themselves. Rarely was music used to actually advance character, advance plot. So it is this tragic lament about something no one knows. The cat just comes on and she's like, you know, disheveled and grimy and just kind of sad. I remember the time I knew And she sings this kind of sad song.

One gets the sense that he was sort of taking a shortcut, right? Instead of creating a dramatic situation that would be moving by dint of its emotional force, he's just going straight for the emotion. I think I saw Phantom somewhere around 2014, 2015, and I thought, I don't get it. This doesn't make any sense. This is not interesting. You have written, Curveball, that this play was perfect for the time of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. In short, perfect for the time in which it first appeared. Tell me what you mean by that. Well, I should say, first of all, that this is something that was not lost on critics at the time. You know, Frank Rich writing for the New York Times said that Phantom was sort of appropriate for our own gilded age.

Mr. Lloyd Webber's aesthetic has never been more baldly stated than in this show, which favors the decorative trappings of art over the troublesome substance of culture and finds more eroticism in rococo opulence and conspicuous consumption than in love or sex. It had a nice, refreshing, you know, nostalgia for the days before feminism. So there was something just sort of all too fitting about having that kind of story for the era in which Margaret Thatcher had cut funding for the arts, had lowered taxes on the rich, for which Andrew Lloyd Webber himself was very thankful. He was friendly with her at a dinner party with Maggie Thatcher. She once asked

him sort of jokingly to write her some music like the music he'd written for Evita. You know, he had no qualms about making money, about commercial success. He, you know, Lloyd Webber once said in an interview, he felt like the point of writing music should be to write it for as many people as possible. So he was sort of a populist. He was a maximalist. He was an entrepreneur. That was, I think, really appealing. British drama critic Michael Billington wrote that in the 80s under Andrew Lloyd Webber, the musical became, quote, Thatcherism in action. It is no accident that Thatcher sees Dunn-Lloyd Webber as a symbol of what theater

should be. He embodied everything of which she approved. It seemed apt that the musical should become the dominant form of the 1980s since it represented Thatcherism in action. What it celebrated was the triumph of individualism and profitability. Can you hear echoes of Phantom in shows that we see today? It was a huge part of turning Broadway into a tourist attraction. Commercialization that started in the 80s and the 90s, you know, Disney would come in and clean up Times Square. You haven't heard, Broadway is shining with a new mega hit, the stage version of The Lion King. It moved musical theater closer to a kind of concert style approach, which has to do with, you know, hummability, has to do with a focus on melody as opposed to harmonic complexity. You look at a show like Hamilton.

Alexander Hamilton. My name is Alexander Hamilton. That's sort of the smash hit of the millennium, really, and is having its own effect on musical theater now. It's sung through almost in its entirety, which was a feature of Andrew Lloyd Webber's shows in the 80s. There's very little in the way of dramatic development outside of the way that the music is supposed to make us feel. There is suffering too terrible to name So when the music gets sad, we're supposed to feel sad. When the music is happy, we're supposed to feel happy. We get back to politics.

Please, yo. Regardless of what's actually happening on the level of, you know, quote-unquote, plot, like listening to an album on its feet, than it is like going to see a play where they also sing. So Phantom appears on Broadway in 88. What has happened to the show since? The whole reason I wrote this piece is because I and a group of friends took our friend who was having a birthday to Phantom because we were like, I think like a lot of people, it's closing. It'll be sort of a lark. It won't be good, but it'll be fun. We were correct

on the first count. It was not good and it was not fun. If we're talking about the current production that is up right now, there is, you know, all of this dead airtime, no one is jumping on their lines when they have lines. The tempos are slowed down from what you would expect to make it a little easier for everyone. It's, you know, it's not just that it's dated, though, of course, it, you know, it really, really is. It's kind of lifeless. The current phantom is trying, but it's kind of lifeless. The current Phantom is trying,

but is not sort of overcoming the material in the way that the Phantom has to in order for it to be interesting. You know, the Phantom has to be incredibly charismatic. We have to believe that it's possible to be taken in by this man. You want it to be, you want it to have a kind of cult status or something. You want it to be so bad that it's good. In fact, it's just so bad. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put

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It's Today Explained. We're back with writer Andrea Long Chu. Andrea, how was news that The Phantom of the Opera would close released to the public? So fall 2022, they announced that Phantom was finally closing after 35 years. We have some shocking news tonight from the theater district. The Phantom of the Opera, Broadway's longest running show, just announced it will close within months. They said it was going to close on February 18th, 2023. The cause was that it kind of hadn't bounced back enough after lockdown. It's crazy that you're still feeling the effects of what that shutdown did to Broadway. You know,

we're still feeling that just have the staple of New York of Broadway closed down. Of course, once news got out that it was closing, everyone wanted to, you know, attend the wake, as it were. People have been stopping by the box office all day trying to score tickets to the final show, but they'll have to wait just a little bit longer. And so ticket sales have actually been doing very, very well. And they extended the run into April. I am thrilled I have more time to go. The past couple of weeks have been some of its most profitable weeks in the history of the show. But that is, you know, that is precisely because it is closing. I guess the thing that I'm quite curious about is there are always going to be people in the middle of the country for whom it is exciting to come and see a Broadway show. This is like the

ur-Broadway show for the rest of us, right? It's a people's show thing, is how I think of Phantom of the Opera. People still exist all across the country who are not like cool downtown New Yorkers. Did something shift in society that made this show less appealing to the people who would have stood up and applauded it 20 years ago, 30 years ago? You know, in thinking a lot about Phantom, I have also had to consider this thing that you're kind of trying, you know, not to say too loudly, which is like, is it for, you know, plebs, basically? was that it tried to give you a way to understand music and musical theater. You know, it sat in an opera house. And it was, in a way, a form of music appreciation.

The Phantom is always talking about music, always talking about how you should listen to music, how you should let music kind of overtake you. Slowly, gently, night unfurls its splendor. music kind of overtake you. I don't want to say good, but like many savvy pieces of art or entertainment, it was educating you in how to appreciate it, even as you were watching it. Turn your face away from the garish light of day. You know, has there been a social shift? I don't know.

That is, in a sense, sort of above my pay grade. But I think it's possible it's no longer kind of as unique as it was. Now, right now, what you can also do, if you're one of these semi-imaginary Middle America types, now you can see any one of a number of karaoke musicals, jukebox musicals, like Mamma Mia. And now there's going to be a Britney Spears one, there's a Michael Jackson one, right? The proliferation of jukebox musicals, that is part of the world that Phantom created. And it may have been the first mega blockbuster or among the first mega blockbusters, but it doesn't mean, or does it? Does it mean the end of them?

Do audiences want something different? Oh, no, no. I mean, audiences want something different in the sense that tastes do change, right? Like, has the Broadway musical gotten less commercial? Absolutely not. I mean, just absolutely not. The difference is now what audiences want or what producers think audiences want is, on the one hand, the kind of in-concert experience.

On the other hand, a kind of naive political messaging, you know? So a great example of this is Six, which is also a British musical. It's about the six wives of Henry VIII. Divorced. Beheaded. Died. It is not a mega musical. In fact, the scale is much, much smaller.

The whole thing is meant to be sort of intimate and more self-reflexive. Are you ready? New York, here we go! But ultimately, what the show is, each of the wives goes through and says, talks about, you know, their story, and they do it in specific pastiches of like,

this is the Beyonce song, this is the Adele song, this is the Ariana Grande song. In between, they kind of banter on stage and say vaguely feminist things. And that is the whole show. And it's a one act. It has the grace and compassion to be one act. I mean, it's fine. I can tell you it's a one act. It has the grace and compassion to be one act. I mean,

it's fine. I can tell you it's a hell of a lot better than Phantom. And so, you know, it's a much more modest endeavor, but it's taking some of the most important parts of that formula and then adding a kind of smug, vaguely liberal politic just to kind of justify itself and to meet audience tastes, right? I mean, one of the things about the British mega musical in the 80s, which includes things like Cats and Phantom and also Les Mis, is that they were kind of global exports from the UK, you know, and it's still the case. I don't know the number off the top of my head, but the fact that Phantom is closing on Broadway doesn't change the fact that Phantom

remains in performance all over the world. And we'll probably stay that way for a long time. What did it do for Andrew Lloyd Webber? What became of him? Oh, what became of him? He had already become so much. Before Phantom happened, he was massively wealthy.

This was a man who had more money than he knew what to do with, basically, other than trying to keep it out of the government's hands. You know, he has had a number of shows since Phantom, and none has achieved the success of Phantom. He struggled to bring something new to the Broadway that he himself had kind of, you know, created. But he's also been, like, you know, very fine. It's not like he's been suffering.

That was writer Andrea Long Chu. Phantom of the Opera closes this weekend. Today's show was produced by Siona Petros and it was edited and edited and edited by Matthew Collette. Fact-checking was a team effort led by Laura Bullard, so was engineering. It was led by Paul Robert Mouncey with an assist from Patrick Boyd. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. De fleste frykter deg Fra første blik