I promised a bit more insight into Phantom, once I was actually awake enough to speak properly.
I mostly love every show I see. But the list of shows that I fall in love with to the point of wanting (in some cases very badly) to go back and see them again – as soon as I leave the theatre the first time around, is actually very short. It consists of Mary Poppins, Wicked, Mamma Mia and as of last night – Phantom. I have got to go back and witness that show again from as close to the front as I can humanly manage without actually leaning on the stage. Because from ten rows back it was powerful enough.
I’d heard somewhere that this was the only show that used ALL the traps in Her Majesty’s Theatre – but I’d forgotten about that until today when I heard it again, and before seeing the production I wouldn’t have comprehended the actual meaning of that fact. The stage must be lattice-worked with traps and tracks, because this show …does things. Candles come out of the floor, things disappear without a trace ..and yet somehow it still manages to maintain an odd kind of transparency. You can frequently see well dressed stage hands moving about in the black outs, and yet somehow this doesn’t at all disrupt or disturb the show – it makes it…more real.
And people always remember that the chandelier falls, it’s become part of musical history – but few mention how big that thing is. Or how FAST it drops. I swear, it can’t be more than five feet above the heads of the audience. Plus, while everyone mentions the fall, very few remember to mention that it also RISES. It reassembles itself on the stage and flies *up* to the ceiling. I wept, unashamedly, when that occurred. The Phantom overture is one of the most iconic and well known ,and in some ways strongest, in popular culture – and even someone like me, who really really doesn’t like Webber, and who balks at anything that’s “overdone” has to admit that those chords have well earned their place in musical theatre history.
Truly, those opening moments were some of the most overwhelming I’ve witnessed inside a theatre.
I realized something else when I was sitting there and those chords started. Something I’d completely forgotten – and that’s how long I’ve wanted to see this show for. It used to scare me, but I always wanted to see it. To understand it. See, in the 90s David Copperfield did a ridiculously cheesy special called the “Secret Of the Phantom Of the Opera”, and at the time I was really disappointed in it, because hey he was a magician and there wasn’t a spot of magic in the show – but it was my first encounter with the Phantom, and I suppose part of me has been curious about him ever since.
But the most important part, is that several times during last night, I had flashes of “I can’t imagine my life without this.”. And I can’t. I don’t have to be good at it, I don’t have to be a star at it, but I can’t LIVE without it. That’s why part of me does belong here, much as I miss home, much as I miss my friends and a lot of the stuff that I left in Canada, part of me belongs here, in the middle of all this. Where it’s actually real, instead of just the odd touring production and too-big-for-their-boots amdram companies. That’s why I suffer through 8 hours of college a day and stay up at all hours trying to learn my speech exercises. Because even if I don’t succeed, even if I never become one of those who can be shaped into the new Christine Daae, but I’ll know I tried…and I…can’t live without it…
To sleep to sleep perchance to dream….
And the Angel of Music sings songs in my head……