‘The Phantom of the Opera’: Thinking of a Spectacle Fondly

With “The Phantom of the Opera” set to play its final performance on Sunday — yes, it’s actually happening — Broadway’s longest-running show, a spectacle in residence at the Majestic Theater since 1988, still resonates with fans. The closing date was delayed by eight weeks after a surge in ticket sales.

Joshua Barone, the assistant classical music and dance editor and a contributing classical music critic, was joined by the critics Alexis Soloski and Elisabeth Vincentelli in a discussion about the show’s legacy. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.

ALEXIS SOLOSKI I first saw “Phantom” in Los Angeles, at the Ahmanson Theater, sometime in the late ’80s during its first North American tour. My friends and I were obsessed. We wore the T-shirts, we wore out the cassettes, we watched every Michael Crawford movie. (He also did the “Phantom” tour.) When you’re a preteen girl just on the cusp of sexuality and sexuality seems a little scary, the idea of being in thrall to some powerful man is awfully compelling. That this genius is also a murderer with some very strong incel vibes didn’t occur to me till a lot later. It remains a foundational text for me — as a critic, as a woman — but one I’m wildly ambivalent about. I love it. I love the big feelings. I can sing (badly) every tortured line. But it’s rape apology with a fog machine.

ELISABETH VINCENTELLI The first and only time I saw the show was on Broadway in May 2011. I had not paid much attention to it before but loved it so much that I seriously questioned my entire life before that: Why had it taken me so long, considering that the show checks a lot of my taste boxes — bombast, over-the-top melodrama, histrionics? What’s especially surprising about my late discovery is that I had actually read the 1910 novel it’s based on, by the French pulp-fiction auteur Gaston Leroux.

JOSHUA BARONE I didn’t see “Phantom” until a high school trip to New York in the mid-2000s. By then, I had read the Leroux novel, heard the cast albums and seen the 2004 Joel Schumacher film adaptation. Unfortunately, I fell asleep at the show; I was tired from a long day of sightseeing. The spectacle didn’t quite reach me at the rear mezzanine, and I was asleep by the end of “The Music of the Night.” But I’ve since gone several times — with, for better or worse, increasing affection for it.

SOLOSKI That’s the thing, right? It’s in terrible taste — histrionics all the way down — but it works.

BARONE It works, I’d say, better than most shows of terrible taste and histrionics from its time. There is, for all its historical specificity — those synths! — timelessness in its subject matter and score. It’s solidly middlebrow, and that’s a large part of its appeal. Your best bet, should you find yourself in the audience, is to just sit back and surrender to it.

SOLOSKI But that’s what the Phantom wants, Josh! Fight it!

VINCENTELLI I was headbanging in my seat when I saw it. I distinctly remember cackling at the insanity of it all. I love when art throws any regard for logic, taste, story to the window and goes for broke. I was also stunned by the way the score integrates rock and electronics in a way that still feels bracing. The rock energy is indisputable.

SOLOSKI It does have an undeniable pull. When I hear that synthesizer launch into that descending scale, I still get literal chills.

VINCENTELLI Roger Waters of Pink Floyd thought Lloyd Webber had stolen from the 1971 Pink Floyd song “Echoes” and then dissed him in “It’s a Miracle”: “We cower in our shelters with our hands over our ears/Lloyd-Webber’s awful stuff runs for years and years and years.” I live for feuds like this.

SOLOSKI That’s where the music lives, right? In some unholy space between prog rock and grand opera.

BARONE That’s one of the reasons we get chills. “Phantom” is often derided as a product of the big-hair, Neo-Gilded Age days of Cameron Mackintosh’s Broadway, but I think it’s just as much an artifact of 1980s postmodernism. You hear Puccini’s lush orchestration and lyricism — literally, in the case of “The Music of the Night” quoting “La Fanciulla del West” — but also rock-pop, 18th-century opera buffa and what is clearly stylized melodrama.

SOLOSKI And some really dumb ballads. “Think of Me.” Ugh.

VINCENTELLI Lloyd Webber had approached Tom Stoppard and Jim Steinman as potential collaborators for “Phantom.” That says a lot. (I still want to see that show!)

BARONE And don’t forget that Alan Jay Lerner, before he died, was on as the lyricist! Imagine that show — perhaps one in which the ballads wouldn’t have been as banal (“Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again,” yikes) as they are as written by Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe.

SOLOSKI For me, the most perverse element is that Lloyd Webber began this show “because I was trying to write a major romantic story, and I had been trying to do that ever since I started my career. Then with the Phantom, it was there!” Let’s be clear: This. Is. Not. Romance. Even in the initial Times review, Frank Rich wrote that “Music of the Night” “proves as much a rape as a seduction.”

BARONE One of the many dramaturgical question marks that hang over this show. But, strangely, that perversity is kind of what makes it an inheritor of the theatrical traditions it tries to emulate. And only because it is indebted to opera does it get away with as much as it does. Other composers — including him — have tried to copy the gothic romanticism of “Phantom,” but few have come close to his success. Opera is a medium that thrives in extremity, and Lloyd Webber follows that to a logical, undeniably entertaining degree. He found a cousin in “Sunset Boulevard,” in which he adopted a lavish Golden Age Hollywood sound in the score. But “The Woman in White”? The dead-on-arrival “Phantom” sequel “Love Never Dies”?

VINCENTELLI Common wisdom has it that the show was trounced by critics when it opened, just like most mega-musicals are assumed to have been pilloried. But that’s not the case: Most of those shows have had at least mixed reviews, and most have earned tons of Tony Awards — regardless of what one thinks of the Tonys as critical arbiters, they do suggest a level of institutional and industry support. “Phantom” won seven Tonys, including best musical.

SOLOSKI I think Rich was extremely fair-minded, acknowledging the deficits, and yet daring you not to enjoy it.

BARONE Another favorite line from that review is, “If you don’t leave the theater humming the songs, you’ve got a hearing disability.”

VINCENTELLI There was a really fascinating article in The Times in 1988 where people from the classical-music world weighed in on “Phantom.” William Bolcom, Frederica von Stade and Beverly Sills liked it a lot; Ned Rorem, not so much.

BARONE Ned Rorem was witty as always, but I do think that to dismiss this music is to risk a kind of affected snobbery. It’s like saying Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky are too sentimental; in some ways that’s true, and you don’t see the same level of craft in their music as with some of their peers, but at the same time it has staying power simply because it continues to move audiences.

SOLOSKI We’ve concentrated mostly on the music, but a lot of the power of “Phantom” is its visual splendor. I remember when we first saw it my mother sniffed that the Los Angeles audience applauded the set changes and chattered through the arias, but honestly, Maria Björnson’s sets and costumes are spectacular. Several of them were on display at the Museum of Broadway and the intricacy of the stitching and beading was glorious. I challenge anyone to watch “Masquerade” and not wallow in its excess.

VINCENTELLI And at least they are genuinely exciting. I’ve seen people applaud massive, opulently appointed living-room sets at Manhattan Theater Club productions, and my reaction is “Oh, so we clap at Crate & Barrel showrooms now?” In his memoir, “Unmasked,” Lloyd Webber talks about how the sets actually are less grand than most people remember them. They are just very smartly designed.

BARONE I was struck by this the last time I saw the show. The gilded proscenium masks — sorry to use that word — the fact that most of the scenic design is made from curtains. Draping black ones, ornately patterned ones with tassels, but curtains nevertheless.

SOLOSKI Should we talk about the chandelier?

BARONE Lot 666.

SOLOSKI It falls … slowly, but it is definitive of the mega-musicals of this period, the “Miss Saigon” helicopter, the “Les Miz” revolve, the absolute commitment to spectacle. Spectacle gets a bad rap, but I wish more shows had the commitments and the budgets to deliver extravaganzas like these.

BARONE I wish I had seen the 95-minute Las Vegas version of the show, in which the chandelier reportedly crashed much more quickly, and reassembled itself as if by magic during the overture.

SOLOSKI But is “Phantom” even “Phantom” in compressed and streamlined form?

VINCENTELLI You can watch Ken Russell’s 1986 video for the title number, which is one of my favorite musical-theater curios. Another great thing about Lloyd Webber and “Phantom”: promoting a show not just with a single, but with an outlandish video by one of the most idiosyncratic directors ever! That’s something American musicals can learn from. I’m surprised more don’t do it.

BARONE Alexis, apropos of budget, one thing I will miss most about “Phantom” is its nearly 30-piece orchestra and the arrangements, reminiscent of Broadway’s golden age, similar to what we’re hearing now in the revival of “Sweeney Todd.” The number of instruments does make a difference, and as so many new shows open with 10-piece ensembles, “Phantom” has been a holdout of a go-for-broke aesthetic in the pit as well.

SOLOSKI If we’ve largely moved away from robust orchestras and luscious visual excess, what legacy has “Phantom” left us with?

BARONE I mentioned “Sunset Boulevard” earlier, and that’s another Andrew Lloyd Webber show that is practically designed to break the bank. It wasn’t sustainable in the ’90s and only worked most recently on Broadway as a limited run, more or less in concert, with a star in Glenn Close coming back as Norma Desmond. Then fast-forward to the 2000s, when “The Woman in White” had a small orchestra and a set of mainly projections, as if it were a touring production.

SOLOSKI Does that mean its time has come and gone? Are there any ripple effects on the Broadway of 2023? When I think too much about its substance, I honestly feel sick. (Know what I love? Women with agency. Women who aren’t roofied by music.) And yet I’m sorry to see it go. It felt so inextricable from the Broadway ecosystem.

BARONE The book could not be staged as-is now, just as much of opera makes you cringe the closer you look. In the current season, I see an inheritor of “Phantom” in the eager-to-please excess of “Some Like It Hot,” but I think a more accurate comparison would be the “Sweeney” revival, whose throwback to the Hal Prince Universe is being treated as the novelty it is today.

SOLOSKI I see just a touch of it in the “Harry Potter” show.

VINCENTELLI The “Phantom” legacy is most visible in business terms, with a generation of blockbusters that run for years, decades even. Stylistically and musically, it remains sui generis (some may thank the lord for that). The current “Sweeney Todd” revival has luscious orchestrations but the staging and most of the performances are so timid. To me it looks musty and lacks the gusto required by Grand Guignol. You can’t ever accuse “Phantom” of lacking gusto. In terms of legacy, it’s interesting to note that the big rival for Best Musical in 1988 was “Into the Woods,” which has proved to be another kind of enduring blockbuster — and one that gets a lot more respect (even if some of it feels undeserved to me).

BARONE I agree that “Phantom” is an anomaly, even among ’80s spectacles. (Even among Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals?) A couple of years ago I saw “Phantom” at the Finnish National Opera in Helsinki. It was a production from 2015 and, I think, an indicator of what the show’s future could be. Here was a staging completely divorced from the original Hal Prince direction or Gillian Lynne choreography. In fact, it was almost entirely abstracted; the set of “Don Juan Triumphant” was a 20-foot-tall corset frame. It was performed with a full orchestra and operatic voices, and I — along with the sold-out house — adored it.

“Phantom” is similar to Puccini not only in its music, but also in its specificity; you can’t really stretch Puccini, conceptually, and with “Phantom,” you have to either go big or go home. So maybe, decades from now, the best way to see it will be at a comic opera company — some place where it’s not forced into a commercial run, and where it can be given the resources for the grandeur it demands.

VINCENTELLI That, and a reopening at New World Stages next year.

SOLOSKI I guess we’ll close our eyes and surrender to our darkest dreams sometime then.