Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Block, Geoffrey (large ebook reader .txt) 📖

stage version sustains much of the mystery until the end about the connections between Madame Giry and the Phantom, the film soon lets us know by silent visual clues that Madame understands what is happening. Later in the film, when Madame Giry explains to Raoul about the Phantom’s early history, Schumacher assists her tale with vivid cinematic flashbacks. Film viewers learn from Giry and see the documentation, not only that the Phantom was deformed from birth but that he was abused and battered before lashing back by garroting his father with the Punjab lasso. Finally, film viewers see Giry smuggling the future Phantom safely into the opera house where he would establish a refuge for the rest of his life.

The film takes advantage of other opportunities to add clarity and remove mystery. Raoul is now identified in the first scene as a Count during the rehearsal instead of as a mysterious aristocrat who recognizes Christine from his box at a performance. Raoul does not notice Christine at the rehearsal, but she notices him and informs Meg (and film viewers) that he was a childhood sweetheart. When Christine travels by coach to the cemetery to visit her father’s tomb, stage audiences might rightfully wonder how the Phantom found her there. Film viewers watch the Phantom as he overhears Christine tell a drunken stable hand she is going to the cemetery, easily knocks out the intended driver, and takes her there himself.

Madame Giry’s explanation about the Phantom’s origins gives film viewers a more sympathetic understanding of the childhood abuse that eventually created a pathetic murderer, albeit a genius. Not only does the Phantom’s life acquire a context, he is also less loathsome physically than earlier Phantoms. Thus, when Christine unmasks the Phantom during the performance of his opera, viewers see a man with burn-like scars on the upper portion of one side of his face, but nowhere near the disfigurement that shocked film audiences in 1925 when Lon Chaney was revealed for the first time in the Phantom’s lair. Even more than the stage Phantom, the film Phantom of 2004 was a dashing and credible romantic alternative. As Christine observes in the climactic scene, it is the Phantom’s soul, not his face, where “the true distortion lies.”

Lloyd Webber and Schumacher also found an imaginative way to add a new song. Since, as previously noted, musical film adaptations are encouraged to include at least one new song in order to become eligible for an academy award, an early plan was to give the Phantom a new solo song called “No One Would Listen.” When the film’s length became prohibitive and the song was viewed unnecessary (other than perhaps to secure an award nomination), Schumacher and Lloyd Webber took the song away from the Phantom and inserted its melody as underscoring when Raoul places the monkey on his wife’s tomb at the end of the film. Immediately thereafter the song can be heard as the credits roll. The title has been changed to “Learn to Be Lonely” and the lyrics are also new. Since Raoul’s “All I Ask of You” usurped portions of “The Music of the Night” and transformed other parts of this song into something new, it is fitting that the Phantom’s song in its final context and associations with Raoul would retain the melody of a Phantom tune, another example of a contrafactum.40

The film takes various liberties in scene order, such as the placement of the cemetery scene (act II, scene 5) directly after Madame Giry’s story about the Phantom’s origins in scene 2, returning after the cemetery scene to portions of scenes 3 and 4. Another revealing example of Schumacher’s desire to avoid continuity occurs between what was act I, scene 5 (the scene in the Phantom’s lair where he sings “Music of the Night”), and the next morning when Christine unmasks the Phantom while he is playing the organ. After “Music of the Night” in the film, instead of the continuation of the scene between the Phantom and Christine that stage audiences experience, film viewers are shown some leisurely new footage of Meg Giry looking for Christine, her discovery of the mirror (“the mechanics of what seemed at first magic”) and the passageway to the Phantom. The music of “I Have Brought You” grows louder as the shadow lurking ominously behind Meg turns out to be her mother reaching out in the darkness to place a hand on her inquisitive daughter’s shoulder and lead her back to the safety of the dressing room. Only then does the film return to the Phantom’s lair.

The next scene in the film corresponds to scene 7. Joseph Buquet, described at first meeting in the screenplay as a leering “sinister scene shifter in overalls” (a description that helps viewers adjust to his violent death later in the film), is explaining to the ballet girls about the Phantom and his magical lasso to their “horror and delight.” Madame Giry appears and chastises him for this sacrilege. Both Buquet and Giry sing what I am calling the “I remember” motive, the music that becomes Don Juan B, previously unheard on stage since the Prologue. The next morning the monkey music box gently awakens Christine. The first music she sings is the “I remember” motive, which viewers have just heard Buquet and Madame Giry sing several times.41 The next image is the Phantom at his organ, but unlike the stage version, film viewers do not hear him. Is he composing an important theme from his opera (e.g., “Tangled in the Winding Sheets!” or Don Juan C)? Film viewers will never know.

The film adaptations of both My Fair Lady and West Side Story included intermissions during their opening runs in movie theaters (although in neither case did the intermission in the film correspond precisely to the conclusion of act I in its stage counterparts). Had it been the 1950s or 1960s, it would have easily been possible in a musical film adaptation of Phantom to present an intermission