I decided eventually to both listen to the concept recording, which was Lloyd Webber's original vision for the show and features the original London cast that performed it, and watch the DVD release of the much later Melbourne production of the show, which includes all the changes made during edits and allowed me the opportunity to see the story play out visually instead of just guessing from inferences on an audio recording.
I'll try not to make it incomprehensible. I'm therefore trying something in this review I've never done before: a dual review, in which I'll talk about two versions of it at once. Since Love Never Dies has been through a LOT of rewrites - which, according to Lloyd Webber's statements and press releases, is because it did not do particularly well in its first several runs and critics kicked it in the ass a bunch until it was reworked - it's hard to choose the version of it to review. I want y'all to know that I dug out my copy of Forsyth so I could perform deep-text comparative analysis, though, and if that doesn't mean I love you, I don't know what does. I would have been able to tell that this show is obviously based on the same premise without knowing that, but I would have expected someone on the show's PR team to suppress widespread knowledge of that fact, if only because of how universally hated that book is. But I have only just experienced the actual execution (I hadn't even listened to the sample tracks before this, because that is how dedicated I am to science!), so I have many, many things to say that are all my own.Īnd the first of those things is that it is a confirmed fact that this show was based on Frederick Forsyth's story for his 1999 novel The Phantom of Manhattan, on which he collaborated with Lloyd Webber for a sequel way back in the 90s, and my friends, I hate that book so much.
I was not entirely successful in spite of these measures there was just too much shouting about the show to stay totally unspoiled about it, and now, four years later, there were not a lot of surprises for me in terms of the show's plot and style. Every person even vaguely related to me in my life also decided simultaneously to buy the darn thing for me, so I had DVDs and CDs sort of stashed around the house, the way someone trying to diet half-heartedly hides truffles and pretends they'll never find them. Since I spend a lot of time trying not to read too many other peoples' opinions about things I'm going to review, so I can be as impartial as possible before I decide to hate something all by myself, I then had to basically instruct my browser to never ever show me anything on the internet with the words "love never dies" in it, which for a long time blacked out almost every Phantom haunt I was frequenting and large swaths of fanfiction and poetry sites. It was impossible to turn anywhere on the internet without hearing about it and while gossip is one thing, the show actually did indeed eventually come out in 2010, after which it exploded all over everything Phantom-related. It was also 2007, which was right around the time that I started working on the Phantom Project, so the hurricane took me right along with it. Musical fans in general, even if they weren't big on the first Phantom show, pointed out that sequel musicals invariably bomb and are almost always a terrible idea. Fans of the show were both ecstatic, hoping for more of the original musical's magic, and horrified, wondering what this story could possibly do without invalidating its predecessor.
Because of the massive influence of Lloyd Webber's musical version of the Phantom story, which has for many people become the definitive version and is without question the most well-known worldwide, easily overshadowing the book it was based on, Lloyd Webber's decision to release a sequel to the show caused a tropical hurricane in the world of stage shows. Reviewing this musical was a journey even before ever cracking the jewel case.
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