The Phantom’s big number in Love Never Dies, “Till I hear you Sing”, is one of the best ballads Lloyd Webber has ever written – an absolute corker – but it stays with you because something about the ache within it won’t let go. The middle-eight or “release” of “Look with your heart”, another song from the show, is pure Rodgers it sings and plays like an affectionate homage.īut it’s what I call the emotional memory of these melodies that give them such dramatic potency. His lyric ballads are surely unsurpassed since the heyday of Ivor Novello, Frederick Loewe and Richard Rodgers. In fact I’d go so far as to characterise Lloyd Webber’s work a throwback to a bygone melodic style – more gracious, more opulent. If it was sung in German (as no doubt it will be one day) it could easily be mistaken for Franz Lehar. That song, that melody, typifies Lloyd Webber’s musical personality. The themes that appear there – including the song “Once Upon Another Time” – would be carried forward towards the eventual dénouement.” Then there was the question of how I should handle the moment when Christine and the Phantom first meet again – and there I took the risky strategy of giving the stage to just them for the best part of 15 minutes. Another decision I made quite early on was that the title song – which was something I originally wrote with this piece in mind and which was first sung by Kiri Te Kanawa - was going to be Christine’s big performance number and should be kept pretty much exclusively for that moment. “Once I had the plot it was fairly obvious to me that the first major melodic strand would have to be the Phantom’s song of yearning for Christine. “If you just want ten songs to fit somebody else’s script then I’m not really the composer for that.” To that end his melodies are the dramatic and emotional fabric of his work and in Love Never Dies – undoubtedly one of his best scores – they are intricately woven. He’s not happy if the music isn’t driving the evening. It’s the principal reason why his shows are “through-sung”. Lloyd Webber, Sarah Brightman, who created the role) and as we retire to a quiet room over Rules Restaurant he makes no apologies for being the controlling force behind it. Lloyd Webber’s long-held obsession with this project is matched only by the Phantom’s for Christine (remember it was the second Mrs. And so at the start of Love Never Dies he has sent for his songbird Christine who travels to New York with her rather dull husband Raoul (remember him?) and son Gustave not really knowing but surely suspecting who might be behind an invitation for her to perform at Coney Island’s newest attraction Phantasma. From there he could truly be master of all he surveyed. From subterranean to high-rise living – a nice twist. Lloyd Webber recalls that when Coney Island was first mentioned it was Bjornson who excitedly hit upon the idea that the Phantom could now reside in one of Coney’s skyscraping towers. But establishing Coney Island in the minds and imaginations of audiences for whom it was probably nothing more than the name of some faded fairground was the challenge that eventually gave rise to the show’s dramatic opening.Īnd there’s a rather nice link here between Phantom’s original designer, the late, lamented, Maria Bjornson – whose famous gold proscenium sculptures brought the Paris Opera to Her Majesty’s Theatre – and Bob Crowley who spirits Coney Island’s world-beating rollercoaster from the mists of time and brings the seedy boardwalk to life before our very eyes. As settings for musicals go this one was a no-brainer. It also happened to be the age of Vaudeville. It was somewhere the Phantom, still pining for his one true love Christine Daaé, could fit right in – a decadent playground of freak shows, escapologists, illusionists, and great showmen. It was the mother of amusement parks, the only good reason, said Freud, for making the long trip across the Atlantic. But obviously once Glenn Slater, our lyricist, came on board and the words themselves started flowing then everything began falling into place and the Coney Island setting became more and more dramatically appealing.”Ĭoney Island in 1907 was pretty much the eighth wonder of the world. So who exactly wrote the book? “Well, with a largely through-sung show it’s harder to say because everybody, the whole creative team, are chipping in with ideas.
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