Love Never Dies is Phantom, take two

Simon Plant
From: Herald Sun
May 28, 2011 12:00AM

THE man who wrote Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita and The Phantom of the Opera knows a hit when he sees one.

So, right after he saw the first dress rehearsal in London of his Phantom sequel, Love Never Dies, Lord Lloyd Webber rang his wife, Madeleine Gurdon, and said: "Darling, it's not going to work.

"I'm sorry, we'll make the best of it, but it isn't."

That was March last year. Flash forward to Melbourne a week ago. Lloyd Webber is in the stalls of the Regent Theatre to view the first run-through of a radically different Australian version of Love Never Dies starring two relative unknowns: Ben Lewis as the Phantom and Anna O'Byrne as Christine.

Later that evening, the world's most successful living composer rings his wife and says: "I've got to tell you, it's the other end of the scale. This one is bliss!"

What happened in between could almost make a musical. How Lloyd Webber overcame harsh reviews and a cancer scare to restage the show by collaborating with a creative team on the other side of the world.

"I can't really even put it into words but I feel very deeply that this show takes what I originally did (The Phantom) into another dimension," he says. "It sort of closes a chapter."

We will know if there's a happy ending tonight, when the new $9 million production of Love Never Dies has its Australian premiere in front of an audience containing top producers from North America and Asia.

Whether or not they surrender to its passions, Lloyd Webber believes he is seeing Love Never Dies "as I always hoped it would one day be. I didn't know that would happen here but, honestly, it is an absolutely extraordinary piece of work".

Lloyd Webber sensed the new approach was right even before the overture ended. Gobsmacked by the sight of dome-capped towers and twinkling lights signifying New York's Coney Island fairground, he decided: "You just know that you're in the world where it's supposed to be."

For the past week, Lloyd Webber's world has orbited around the gloriously gothic Regent and a theatre suite overlooking Collins St.

The morning we meet, his lordship looks relaxed in a navy blazer, grey slacks and black slip-on shoes - as if he's wandered in off the deck of a yacht - but producer Tim McFarlane (The Really Useful Group Asia Pacific) advises that Lloyd Webber has been haunting the Regent since he arrived from London: dashing off notes to cast and crew, slogging through tech runs and fine-tuning every aspect of a show he calls "97 per cent there".

"Yes, I've had six days doing what I love doing," he says, "which is actually being a composer working with the director."

Simon Phillips (retiring artistic director of the MTC) is directing this second version of Love Never Dies. It was McFarlane who suggested he meet Lloyd Webber in the UK about restaging the show Down Under and they agreed it would benefit from "going back to the drawing board and reconceiving everything".

That meeting led to another at Lloyd Webber's Mediterranean home, where Phillips's preferred designer, Gabriela Tylesova, unveiled a scenic model with swooping roller-coaster curves.

"I've never seen anything like it before," an astonished Lloyd Webber told her. And standing before the real thing this week, the composer was still dumbfounded by its daring, saying: "Wow, wow."



MILLIONS say the same thing about The Phantom. Lloyd Webber's mega-hit musical has been seen in 149 cities and taken more than $5 billion. But, almost from the moment that famous chandelier rattled in 1986, Lloyd Webber was looking at ways to extend the story of the Phantom, Christine and Raoul.

"I care very much for those characters and the love triangle that exists there," he says.

In 1994, Lloyd Webber discussed the idea of a sequel with novelist Frederick Forsyth. Ten years later, he and comic writer Ben Elton came up with a story that placed the trio on the other side of the Atlantic.

Lloyd Webber was especially attracted to Coney Island - "The only place you could go to where everybody was a freak of some kind" - and imagined a romantic trap being laid there in 1907: 10 years after the Phantom's dramatic disappearance from the Paris Opera House.

"This is a very personal piece for me," he says. "There's probably more of my real self in this than anything else I've ever done."

For his new tale of unrequited love, Lloyd Webber crafted music with a darker, more operatic hue than its classical-pop predecessor and imagined an electrically charged carnival world where his songs could soar.

Shaping a clear storyline proved harder. As he says: "If the book is not fundamentally right, you can be in an awful lot of trouble."

A "perfect storm" of trouble engulfed Love Never Dies as its West End debut approached. Phantom fanatics who objected to a sequel staged what he calls a "professionally run internet campaign against us".

Then Lloyd Webber was diagnosed with cancer. He expected to recover quickly from a prostate operation but explains: "I wasn't back properly and I wasn't on the case as I could normally be with a production that actually wasn't right ... all of us involved with it should have said, 'We've got to put it on hold'."

The theatre critics in London pounced and bloggers cruelly dubbed the show Paint Never Dries. Lloyd Webber says now: "Because I was ill and everything, it probably would have been better if it had been actually produced by someone else."

Second time round, Lloyd Webber has focused on the script and the score and allowed the Australians maximum creative space - a privilege he and lyricist Tim Rice enjoyed in the late 1960s and '70s.

"I sometimes wonder whether Jesus Christ Superstar (1972) would even have been heard of if we'd (first) done it in the theatre," he muses. "Instead, we just made it as an album and said, 'If you want to stage it, you're just going to do what we wrote or not'. Because we were kids and you could say those sorts of things."

Recently reunited on a production of The Wizard of Oz, Rice told Lloyd Webber: "The thing is, Andrew, when we started off, you just did it and didn't listen to anybody. Now, at this stage of our careers, we end up with so many people and don't always come up with the right result."

Love Never Dies mark II could be an exception.



LLOYD Webber's only "real reservation" about Melbourne was the size of the Regent, but those doubts eased after he saw Phillips's "consummate staging".

"Simon seems to know exactly what he wants. I have to say, I'm incredibly impressed," he says.

He is full of praise also for choreographer Graeme Murphy, musical supervisor Guy Simpson, and the cast. Asked about plans to take Love Never Dies overseas, he hesitates, then says: "I would like to see this production go everywhere. It's just the best."

What about New York?

"This is the show that should go to Broadway without any question."

For now, Lloyd Webber is probing every crochet in his score for Love Never Dies. This week, he even penned some new music.

"Only a little touch," he stresses, "but these things are cumulative. I want to do a little bit of work with the orchestra still."

That's my cue to leave but as I go, I ask why we identify so powerfully with the Phantom. "I don't know the answer to it," he sighs. "Maybe it's to do with everybody wanting to change something about themselves."

What would Lord Lloyd Webber change about himself?

"If you know what you want to do in life, you're a very lucky person. If you are then successful and able to make a career out of the one thing you want to do, you're an extraordinarily lucky person. Sometimes, I think I'm the luckiest person alive," he says.

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/entertainment/love-never-dies-is-phantom-take-two/story-e6frf96f-1226064421319