I don't expect to like Joel Schumacher's adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's "The Phantom of the Opera." I do find it kind of odd, though, that the Times' A.O. Scott writes an entire review that finds the greatest fault to be Webber's score.
I usually really like Scott but gutting something that became part of the pop culture subconscious in the mid-eighties seems silly. I'm by no means a Webber fan and find his bombast as distasteful as Scott. However that's the known element in this adaptation and hardly seems worthy of so much critical scorn twenty-five years on.
Posted by mikewolf at December 24, 2004 08:07 AMI think this Phantom movie is going to be horrible, like _Glitter_ horrible.
But I hope your Christmas is great! Merry merry!
Posted by: amy on December 25, 2004 12:01 AMComment spam, begone!
The NPR review said Phantom was absolutely excruciating, and also pointed at Webber as the chief villain. After all these years of bloated praise for the show, I was glad to hear someone protest that the book - the actual original Phantom of the Opera - is so much better than the adaptation that the viewing public needs help, at this point, rediscovering the man behind the curtain. As it were.
I've never seen the Webber version. In a bit of random irony, it was just entrenching in America when I was applying to the mainstage at college with a non-musical adaptation of Phantom, which would have taken much of its body from the tunnels and rooftops of the Opéra, as intended by Gaston Leroux. My project was turned down.
Pity: I was going to start the show with a shadow play/film. I wanted to film the mainstage bare, with show characters onstage, and then project the film back onto the mainstage for our opening. Which did pose some tech problems, but would have been awesome.
Posted by: Linus on December 25, 2004 11:35 AMI was invited to a movie yesterday. It was only after I got in the car that I was told we were going to see PotO. Had I known in advance ...
It was dreadful. I've never seen the play but my friends said that there were extra songs added to the movie. So that's what bloated it to nearly 2 1/2 hours.
At least I got a little nap during it.
Afterwards, Chinatown was a lot of fun.
Posted by: Dennis on December 26, 2004 05:44 PMA number of years ago I was shopping in a music store and they were playing some horrible, bombastic music in the store. It was so bad I kept noticing it. Later I learned it was the then-new Phantom of the Opera soundtrack by Andrew Lloyd Weber. So my thinking that the music to PotH is total crap all these years comes legitimately, or at least I like to think so. What was Rowan Atkinson's line about it...something about Andrew Lloyd Weber rewriting Puccini's greatest hits...?
Posted by: on December 27, 2004 08:16 AM