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

frame are part of a larger attempt to make some of the more mysterious plot elements clear to a film audience who may not have seen the stage version many times. For example, the film adds a short conversation between Christine and Meg before they sing “Angel of Music,” including flashbacks of Meg’s mother bringing Christine to the opera house after her famous violinist father died and promised that an Angel of Music would appear to guide her. The conversation also lessens Christine’s gullibility and clarifies her emotional connection to the disembodied teacher sent by the spirit of her beloved father.

40. In an interesting touch, the singer over the credits is Minnie Driver, who plays the temperamental Italian prima donna Carlotta Giudicelli, whose voice in the film is dubbed by an operatic professional Margaret Preece.

41. Sternfeld calls this motive the “story motif” due to its usual association with various kinds of narration or exposition, but in his own program listing of musical material Lloyd Webber offers the title “I Remember” for act I, scene 6 (Sternfeld, The Megamusical, 247–50 and 385).

42. Enchanted Evenings, 1st ed., 191–93,

43. Ibid., 375n29.

44. This is the theme Sternfeld labeled “the story motif” (Sternfeld, The Megamusical, 245–46).

45. See Example 5.7 in Sternfeld for the simple rhythmic variation on the “I have brought you” motive in the “Little Lotte” music (Ibid., 251–52).

46. In “The Making of The Phantom of the Opera,” the documentary that accompanies the DVD release of the 2004 Phantom film, viewers learn that Lloyd Webber wanted “All I Ask of You” to capture the quality of “Some Enchanted Evening” from South Pacific, a musical long regarded as one of his earliest and most lasting favorites. While the pitches and harmonic underpinning are distinct, the rhythm that opens “All I Ask of You” does bear an intriguing resemblance to the opening rhythm of its Rodgers and Hammerstein predecessor. Snelson includes a musical example of a connection between the second major phrase of “All I Ask of You” and a phrase sung by Minnie, also in La fanciulla del West (Snelson, Andrew Lloyd Webber, 180). Grant, who offers Jerome Moross as “the least credited source from whom Andrew Lloyd Webber steals tunes” states that “‘All I Ask of You” from Phantom of the Opera is arguably a direct steal from Moross’s great 1958 film score, The Big Country (Grant, The Rise and Fall, 107).

47. Snelson, Andrew Lloyd Webber, 97–98.

48. Ibid., 98.

49. See Snelson’s thoughtful accompanying discussion of the melody he labels “Twisted” (Example 4.3) and its meaning (Ibid., 91–92 and 231n8).

50. Since the cast recording omits the intervening dialogue, listeners hear Christine’s rendition less perceptibly meld into Carolotta’s, and the contrast in performance styles is far less extreme.

51. Snelson, Andrew Lloyd Webber, 210.

52. Ibid.

53. Even Lloyd Webber’s financial losses are more colossal than those of Sondheim. Compared to $25 million, the $665,000 that Follies lost seems puny in comparison, even when considering rising costs in the twenty-three years that separated the openings of Follies and Sunset Boulevard.

54. New York, 747 performances and London, 243 performances. See note 2 for a comparison between New York and London runs for other Lloyd Webber shows.

55. Michael Riedel, “A Really Wine Time: “Phantom Sequel Is Unmasked at UK Bash,” New York Post, July 16, 2008.

56. Sternfeld, The Megamusical, 75. For what it’s worth, the reason Lloyd Webber named his gelding Frank Rich is not because Rich’s reviews in the New York Times were among these raves.