#Phantom of the opera broadway 2022 movie#

I’ve seen it three times, the two performances on Broadway and one on tour. From my earliest attempts to imitate Michael Crawford’s voice while walking around a grocery store to returning to the well of Phantom lore for articles written for this and other websites, it’s been a driving force in my life.

I haven’t had a significant other who hasn’t traded lines from the musical with me (never in an unhealthy way…). The potential for the revival aside, Phantom really has been part of my DNA since middle school. I’ve got a radically new interpretation of the Opera Ghost, completely separate from the musical, if anyone’s interested. They’re remaking classic monster movies, with varying degrees of success, in Hollywood. And perhaps, in between Broadway productions, someone can put their stamp on Phantom in some other medium.

#Phantom of the opera broadway 2022 movie#

I know there have been incremental changes and improvements over the years, as amateur rights have been released and stagecraft technology has improved, and the movie version has… happened, but there’s nothing like a Broadway revival to unlock the potential of a theatrical piece, as fairly recent revivals of Oklahoma!, Spring Awakening, and La Cage Aux Folles have demonstrated (to say nothing of revivals directed by Ivo van Hove). Maybe it will take decades, and the person destined to bring it back is too young, at the time of this writing, to even know of its existence. Maybe it will pull a Les Mis and pop up three years after closing, in 2026, just in time for the 40th anniversary of the West End production. Now, it will get that chance, to be reconceived and have new life breathed into it in a way replacement casts can’t quite do. But would either of those children-aimed entertainments have done their versions of Phantom if not for the popularity of the musical? Stine’s Goosebumps book series, and PBS’s Wishbone, introduced me to the story. “Ivo van Hove’s Production of The Phantom of the Opera” was not, at the time, one of the possibilities I was considering, but you got goosebumps, right? Speaking of Goosebumps, shortly before I was introduced to the musical in the late-90s, when I was a youthful ten years old, two 90s icons, R. In my piece, I wondered what kind of pared-down revival Phantom could get if it ever closed. Other classic musicals are reimagined and revived on Broadway every fifteen years or so (like its 1988 Tony rival, Into the Woods, currently enjoying its own second reimagining/revival right across the street from Phantom).

One of the first things I wrote for this site was titled “Help Me Remake The Music of the Night.” It was about how, while it’s really cool that a production like Phantom could just keep going and going and going indefinitely, a monumental feat of cultural strength, that kind of accomplishment does stifle it somewhat in terms of its creative life.

In a way, OnStage Blog helped me prepare for this moment back in 2015. And yet, the news that it will close next winter, a few weeks after our birthdays (my 36th, its 35th), is not the devastating blow to my identity that it might have been. It’s a mere accident of timing, but so is everything, and that never stops people from making meaning. I have long joked that the Broadway production of The Phantom of the Opera was Andrew Lloyd Webber and Michael Crawford’s birthday present to me, and though I lived in complete ignorance of it for twelve years, finding out that we do, sort of, share a birthday and are, essentially, the same age, years after I first fell in love with the songs has, in its way, haunted me. That a production could open on Broadway on the eve of my first birthday and hang around long enough for me to become obsessed with it as a teenager, dive into the history and characters in college, and see it twice on Broadway after moving to New York City to pursue the career trajectory it started me on, almost makes one tempted to believe in destiny, but if destiny were a thing, surely there would have been a way forward for Christine and the Phantom. By Aaron Netsky, Guest on Twitter, on Instagram