*** phantom of the opera.
phantom of the opera and sherlock holmes have much in common; by which i mean the pop cultural phenomenon of phantom and what the characters represent far eclipses the actual original media. phantom isn't about necessarily picking one version of the story but embracing all the little variations and nuances in its different depictions over the years. every version of phantom has something different it wants to say, something different it wants to examine.
as an ex-theatre kid of course i like phantom. of course my first exposure to phantom of the opera was through andrew lloyd webber's stage adaptation; my mom was and is apparently a huge fan of the musical, although when i tried to reconnect with her over it a few years ago she acted like she had 0 interest in it, so idk what was up with that but that is kind of par for the course with my family. anyway, i've seen phantom twice in person. once as a tiny child--the only thing i really remember is the chandelier dropping--and the trip i took the other day.
but enough set-up; this is just an indulgent post to talk about the different versions of phantom and, more importantly, the ones i especially like.
i'm not a "phan" (not that phan. sorry dan & phil this isn't about you) so there's a lot of versions i have yet to engage with, notably susan key's book phantom which i am hoping to read soon but i keep saying "i want to read that soon" and then don't so we'll see when that happens. anyway, phantom megafans are sure to read this and be annoyed i left certain adaptations out. sorry. i want to watch and read more phantom material, but there's so much of it. i want to highlight this really impressive youtube channel, phantom retrospective 2.0 who has spent lots of time curating and collecting different phantom material for a while now.
not to be that bitch but my favorite adaptation of phantom is the original book, phantom of the opera by gaston leroux. i think this is because it is so similar to detective fiction. the romance is of course still there but i like how the book focuses in on erik's (the phantom's true name, for those who don't know) theatricalness and how he creates and curates the illusion of the phantom over the years. there's a real fantastical element to the book, one that invites the reader to retroactively buy into the illusion of the phantom, but then because the book is also a retrospective after erik's death on what happened in the opera house, it takes a lot of time to deconstruct the tricks he employed to terrorize everyone. i think his cattiness and pettiness are really funny here, but more importantly the book also invites you to be awed by his ability to manipulate and distort the entire space to his wishes, that even though he might not actually be a metaphysical being in actuality, his genius withstands through all else, effectively elevating his personhood to the realm of the phantom. and it doesn't necessarily do this at the expense of erik's villainy, which is something a lot of later adaptations explore obviously, since he is one of the most famous disabled villains in fiction and it necessitates engaging with ableist tropes and obviously not in a great way all the time.
the other thing i especially like about the book is what a loser raoul is and how depressed christine is. christine is sort of resigned to her fate as an expy for the ghost despite her love for raoul, but she's kind of like, "well yeah i do like him [raoul] but i might be dead by the end of the year, maybe because i killed myself, or maybe because the phantom's decided to kill me by then" and raoul's reaction is kind of like "christine, no! only old people die! i love you!" and christine can't help but be like "he loves me... :) maybe i'll be ok... but wait...i'll probably be dead in 2 months..." she spends a lot of her time looking extremely tired and trying to avoid talking about the phantom with raoul, who is so overwhelmed by the jealousy of "you're talking to other men?" that he keeps nagging her about it, and she's so in love with him that she can't help but drop breadcrumbs of information to assure him that she is not cheating on him but that she's not going to talk about it more, thank you very much, and no that mirror is not a trick door. anyway i just think it's funny and way more endearing than any other versions of these characters.
the most popular version of phantom is of course the stage play and most people's introduction to poto as a whole. i still like it; the mastery of the score is amazing. i don't like the characters as much, but the story webber wanted to tell is obviously pretty different, so, whatever. he was too busy seeing himself in erik to write it any other way. it's been ages since i've seen the 2004 movie and i remember finding it pretty bad but i liked the opulence of its setting growing up, and it was the easiest way to engage with my #1 theatre not-like-other-girls fantasy of being the secret best performer in the entire building who is so spellbinding and so good at her art that a secret genius does everything he can to employ keeping her at her side for art's sake and also #love. so i watched it if i could catch it on TV because my mom didn't like the adaptation (for good reason) and so we never rented the DVD from the library. so it was a TV movie for me.
as all theatre kids do, i got into les miserables later in life. i read the book (somehow) in like two weeks--well, skimmed it, to be quite frank: i was reading it to get the extra context of and about the beloved les amis also dubbed "the barricade boys" by tumblr fans. enter, enjolras (my favorite). enter, ramin karimloo. enter, ramin karimloo's portrayal of erik. (maybe i will talk about les mis some other time)
the royal albert hall concert adaptation of the stage musical is probably the easiest way people can engage with it. it's very good. i haven't seen enough 'slime tutorials' (iykyk) of phantom to definitively have a favorite portrayal of him in the stage performance, but ramin is obviously great. i like his enjolras less purely because i find his voice and general portrayal of enjolras to be too 'macho' (his valjean however is great) and his vibrato and commanding presence works really well for how erik controls the space. his presence is domineering and overwhelming; the power of his voice demands all to turn and listen to him.
phantom of the paradise is one of my favorite adaptations of poto. i don't think i stopped smiling once the first time i watched it. de palma is a legend. it's having a resurgence in popularity, which is really cool to see, because it deserves the attention. the music is really fun and goofy and the cinematography is innovative, its editing extremely fresh and fun to watch. the costuming is legendary and its take on the famous phantom mask has broken free of genre convention and gone on to be recycled in femto from berserk's design. winslow has to be literally plugged into synthesizers to be able to speak again, something any tech maximalist will enjoy the aesthetic imagery of. a bunch of girls in bikinis get unceremoniously blown up on a cardboard car on stage. there's a glam rock guy named beef. it's just awesome. the focus here is less on the characters and more on the poltical implications of a disabled man who can only engage with his art by hiding in a building dedicated to pursuing that kind of art because he cannot show his face in public for one reason or another. phantom of the paradise is about the music industry at large and the faustian contract of selling your soul to produce good art, and winslow-as-erik is first and foremoest a victim. he still does lots of questionable things, but he's a guy who has been forced by the system to have to reclaim his art from the paradise (the movie's opera house) in dire ways, because anything kinder results in him getting seriously hurt or chased or arrested or something.
my other favorite portrayal of erik is the 1990 2-part BBC miniseries's erik. the 1990 BBC miniseries is...well, interesting. i loved part 1 but not because it's good but because charles dance, who plays erik, is playing this guy the funniest way imaginable. i find erik a sympathetic villain but i've never been someone who has ever found myself thinking 'christine should have stayed with erik.' this erik though? he's awesome. this erik is your gay best friend. part 2 of the miniseries isn't as fun, it gets too bogged down in taking itself too seriously and in seeing the plot of phantom all the way through--but part 1 is a mustwatch (for free on phantom retrospective's channel btw). in the first 5 min or so he hears carlotta, the opera primadonna, singing, and says bitchily: "my god. this place really is haunted." it's so awesome. instead of tutoring christine through the walls he just hangs out with her for real and she just kind of ditches him the moment she gets the lead role; thus devastating him to the point that he watches her through the window at her first afterparty. he's like the gay bestie who was assured by the bookworm protagonist of a 00s teen drama "i won't go to prom, we'll hang out and watch movies," only to get ditched in the eleventh hour. he takes her on a taxidermy picnic in part 2 made from old opera props and asks her: "do you like my straw hat?" serving mary poppins realness with his fit. it's so funny. he captures the drama and pettiness of the original while making erik just straight up likeable.
the 1925 phantom movie isn't my favorite ever, largely in part because i'm just not a silent film buff, but it gets points for being the adaptation i've seen that best retains the atmosphere of the original book, and of course the practical effects are super cool, especially considering this movie is 101 years old now. a local orchestra made a score for it, which is how i watched it, but apparently switchblade symphony composed a score for it, so i'll have to check that out. there's a lot of different soundtrack options actually, which is pretty cool that it's such a popular choice for a musical project.
i wish more of the adaptations would make the choice to retain the character of the daroga, who gets cut or his character reconsolidated into others like madame giry in the musical, even though i feel his presence adds a significant amount to the book as he is more or less the only person who knows that erik is and was a person before he came to the opera house, and the only one whom erik considers a friend. the daroga has a deep respect and a deep fear for erik for his genius and artistic prowess and his capacity for cruelty, which humanizes erik and continues to demystify the lingering presence of the phantom while also making his seemingly mystical antics even more difficult to puzzle out and anticipate before leroux explains how erik managed to achieve them.
--in true umineko fan fashion i want to draw a beatrice-erik shannon-christine battler-raoul poster or fake playbill styled fanart...
the stage play last night was beautiful. i'm less attached to the musical versions of the characters the more time i spend with other adaptations, but wow, the music. phantom is so popular every theatre kid i knew and know had/has dreams of being in it, but given it's got opera elements in it, it is far too complex and demanding for summer camp theatre or high schoolers to do (ignoring the fact that it was on broadway for so long and thus could not be adapted by schools in the meantime anyways). this gives phantom another layer of prestige few other musicals accomplish. so getting to see it physically makes it extra special. the choreography was so much fun but the thing i found most enchanting was the physicality of the stage. the bridge that they take below the opera was on some sort of pivoting mechanism that rotated, giving the appearance of them descending as they simply walked back and forth on the bridge. candle lights on the floor moved in V shapes against the fog on the floor as the phantom pushed himself and christine across the river. there was a false back built into a chair erik slumped in lazily that he could disappear into. i don't have much to say about the personal actor interpretations of the characters but i find the musical variants of them all kind of boring now so all i can really say is "wow they all sounded amazing and had such beautiful voices." i will say raoul was played slightly more dandy-ish and not as a macho prince charming like, which i appreciated, but musical-raoul is just not as interesting to me as his book counterpart. we were too far away for me to be able to offer any particular insight about the costuming, but as far as i could tell all the outfits were really beautiful, and erik's mask for his masque of the red death costume was amazing. it must have been hard to make that huge skull.
--also a special shoutout to the bartender who gave us free popcorn and a free water bottle that otherwise would have cost us $7 (wtf) because he liked our outfits. naturally, i was wearing a shiro mp, in homage to christine's beautiful white dress.