Dark Knight Of The Soul

Dark Knight of the Soul

2011-09-26T16:14:00.000+10:00

Today:

54,884 hits after 5 years precisely!!

Yay!

Meat Loaf Enlists Lil Jon, Chuck D for Upcoming 'Hell'-ish Album

2011-08-12T16:45:00.001+10:00

by Gary Graff, Detroit
August 01, 2011 6:35 EDT

As he continues to tour in support of his 2010 album "Hang Cool Teddy Bear" -- and to commemorate his 40th anniversary as a recording artist -- Meat Loaf has three new projects in the works, including a studio album that will feature rappers Chuck D from Public Enemy and Lil Jon.

"Ever since we started with ('Hang Cool Teddy Bear' producer) Rob Cavallo, from that minute on I've been back in the music business and having a really, really great time -- which I haven't had for five years before that," Meat Loaf, who's returned to Sony Music -- which released three of his albums, including 1977's multi-platinum "Bat Out of Hell" -- tells Billboard.com.

First up will be "Hell in a Handbasket," due out in February (except for Australia and New Zealand) and an album Meat Loaf calls "the most personal record I've ever made. It's about how I feel the world's gone to hell in a handbasket. It's really the first record that I've ever put out about how I feel about life and how I feel about what's going on at the moment." Meat Loaf says the album is finished -- no release date has yet been established -- and "sounds different," although he adds that "it's rock, definitely rock," produced by Paul Crook, who's part of his current touring band, with Cavallo consulting.

As for the rappers, Meat Loaf met Lil Jon when the two appeared on "Celebrity Apprentice" this past spring, while Chuck D came through Anthrax's Scott Ian, who is Meat Loaf's son-in-law. "(D) was going to do one thing, and he came back and did something else and we flipped out," Meat Loaf reports.

Meat Loaf also has about nine songs towards another studio album, who's title we won't reveal. "We've started to do drum tracks on those songs, and we'll get more in pretty soon," he says. Meanwhile he's planning a 2012 Christmas album called "Hot Holidays" that will feature guests such as Garth Brooks, Reba McEntire "and different rock people and some actors...After I played Sony ('Hell in a Hand Basket') I said, 'Look, I've got two other records. I've got a Christmas record and I've got another record,' and they said, 'Well, get us the Christmas record and start working on the other one.' So there you go -- I'll just keep recording."

Meat Loaf -- whose first album, "Stoney & Meatloaf" with current Bob Seger backup singer Shaun Murphy, came out in 1971 on Motown's Rare Earth label -- says he's also keeping an eye out for further acting opportunities, although at this point "I'm more focused on the music than I've been in a long time." But he's also happy to be name-checked in an new TV ad for Allstate Insurance. "I liked it. I think it's funny," he notes. "They showed it to me, and they paid me for (use of) my picture. It's autographed, by the way; it goes by so fast you can't really read it, but it says, 'To the professor...' It's pretty cool."

Meat Loaf is recording in-between tour dates, which go into early September in the U.S. He's also booked a run of Australia and New Zealand for for October, including a spot on the A Day on the Green festival Oct. 8 in Hunter Valley. "Hell in a Handbasket" will be released in those countries to coincide with the tour.

http://www.billboard.com/news/meat-loaf-enlists-lil-jon-chuck-d-for-upcoming-1005299992.story#/news/meat-loaf-enlists-lil-jon-chuck-d-for-upcoming-1005299992.story

Love Never Dies (but the West End musical has)

2011-08-07T19:10:00.000+10:00

By Rob Sharp, Arts Correspondent

Saturday, 18 June 2011

Andrew Lloyd Webber's sequel to Phantom of the Opera, Love Never Dies, which has divided fans and critics throughout its brief history, will close in London's West End in August after just under 18 months playing at the Adelphi Theatre.

A spokesperson for the production confirmed that the show would close after it was revealed yesterday that another show, One Man, Two Guvnors, currently playing at the National Theatre, would transfer to the Adelphi from November.

The spokesperson said: "I can confirm that the show's run will end on 27 August." A spokesperson for Lord Lloyd-Webber's Really Useful Group refused to comment further.

The lavish production, which cost £5.5m, has had a troubled run, not least because of Phantom fans objecting to the production through a Facebook group and a website, loveshoulddie.com. The group has branded the show a "train wreck" and a bastardisation of the original early 20th century story by the French writer Gaston Leroux, subsequently made into a 1986 hit musical composed by Lord Lloyd Webber with lyrics by Charles Hart.

According to The Stage theatre critic Mark Shenton, the show, which stars Ramin Karimloo as the phantom and is set 10 years after the original story, "suffered from a series of production miscalculations". These included Lord Lloyd-Webber's "hubristic" plans to open the show simultaneously on three continents, something which never materialised.

Lord Lloyd-Webber later admitted it was a mistake to continue with the show in the wake of his cancer diagnosis in October 2009. "I had a unique issue because I got cancer in the middle of all of it," he said this month. "With hindsight we should have said, 'Let's put the whole thing on hold until I'm 100 per cent again.' Frankly I wasn't feeling very well."

In the same interview the impresario admitted that the show suffered from the lack of an outside producer to help steer its progress.

The show received mixed reviews when it opened last year, with one critic branding it "Paint Never Dries". In November it was postponed for changes to be made, and it bounced back from early box-office jitters to pick up seven nominations at the Olivier Awards this year.

In October it was reported that a planned Broadway run of the show was "indefinitely postponed". In May an Australian version of the show opened to more positive reviews than the original.

Shenton said: "I can hear the gloating already from the mad 'Love Should Die' lobby of Love Never Dies detractors, who have run their disgraceful campaign of intimidation and aggravation, lies and deceit around the show since before it even opened. But now they are finally getting their wish."

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/news/love-never-dies-but-the-west-end-musical-has-2299298.html

Really Useful Group maps out split

2011-06-27T20:37:00.000+10:00

Posted: Sat., Jun. 25, 2011, 4:00am PT

Really Useful Group maps out split
Webber company planning restructure
By David Benedict

London-- In the midst of ongoing industry whispers about the future of Andrew Lloyd Webber and his 35-year-old Really Useful Group, the org is laying the groundwork for a 2013 split that will divide the company and its 70-strong staff into two divisions, both entirely owned by Lloyd Webber.

Really Useful chair Mark Wordsworth tells Variety that one company will manage and program the seven West End theaters owned or co-owned by Lloyd Webber, while the second will oversee "brand Lloyd Webber," producing the composer's musicals and controlling the rights to his popular body of work. Restructuring won't take place until 2013 due to employment and tax issues.

The company unveils the plan just as questions about the future of Really Useful have gained traction in the wake of last week's news of the early shuttering of the West End production of "Love Never Dies," Lloyd Webber's much-vaunted sequel to the seemingly unstoppable "The Phantom of the Opera." Word of the August closing leaked out unsupported by any press statement from the company.

That only added to a list of woes. Last year's deal to sell four of Really Useful's West End theaters to Michael Grade and Michael Linnit collapsed, and soon thereafter came the announcement that Andre Ptaszynski would be stepping down as the company's chief exec at the end of June. Further, although London box office figures are never published, insiders indicate that Lloyd Webber's current production of "The Wizard of Oz," cast via a primetime-TV reality show, is underperforming at the 2,255-seat London Palladium.

Small wonder, then, that questions are being asked. Yet Wordsworth roundly refutes the analysis that the company's future is fueled by a past now low on gas.

He concedes that no Really Useful production is slated for London until the "Cats" revival with Cameron Mackintosh in 2013. "But five top-grade productions in one city in a five-year period -- 'Evita,' 'The Sound of Music,' 'Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,' 'Love Never Dies' and 'The Wizard of Oz,' three of which were cast via TV shows -- is a heavy creative output for any company," he says.

Counterbalancing the all-quiet on the West End front, he points to future worldwide productions.

"The Australian 'Love Never Dies' is very successful, so we're deciding where that might go and how we develop it. Michael Grandage's production of 'Evita' is on Broadway in 2012, and 'The Wizard of Oz' will go at some point."

He and Lloyd Webber are also enthusiastic about Des McAnuff's production of "Jesus Christ Superstar" at the Stratford Festival in Ontario: "We're looking for Broadway slots and also talking about an arena tour," Wordsworth says.

And there's a Mandarin production of "Cats" opening next year in a prestigious new opera house in Guangzhou, China.

The structural change is an attempt to better manage such upcoming activity.

"RUG exists to support Andrew in all his creative activities: not just his new productions and the seven theaters but to manage his copyrights, royalties, stock and amateur rights," Wordsworth says, adding that over the past five years, rights management has taken a back seat to the London productions.

Once the group dissolves into two companies, one will concern itself with theater ownership and programming. That indicates a change of heart regarding the earlier attempt to sell off the venues.

According to Wordsworth, when last year's deal fell through, the company was approached by "everyone else on the planet" to buy the theaters.

But having recovered from prostate cancer, Lloyd Webber is now intent upon developing the properties himself, not least because three of them -- Her Majesty's, New London and Cambridge -- have their futures settled with, respectively, long-running hits "Phantom," "War Horse" and the Royal Shakespeare Company's incoming critical and audience smash "Matilda." No longer liabilities, they're now looking like prime assets.

The company's rights arm will be akin to the Gotham-based Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization (sold in 2009 to Imagem Music Group), which controls the rights to the legendary canon of the duo ("The Sound of Music," "South Pacific").

"It will take forward Andrew's new ideas, anything from shows being cast by TV in the U.S. through stadium tours, online video and games with Andrew's content. It will also beef up the stock and amateur side and be more proactive."

Even Ptasynski's departure is explained by the fact that the group will no longer exist as such. Besides working as an independent producer, he remains with Really Useful to manage and program the theaters.

As a composer, Lloyd Webber's last major profit-maker was "Phantom" a quarter of a century ago. His subsequent offerings "Sunset Boulevard," "Whistle Down the Wind," "The Beautiful Game," "The Woman in White" and (so far) "Love Never Dies" have failed to make it into the black.

But if his recent writing has disappointed financially, the business -- what Wordsworth terms "brand Lloyd Webber" -- may be strong enough to silence the naysayers.

Contact David Benedict at benedictdavid@mac.com

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118039120

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 trailer

2011-06-18T17:28:00.001+10:00

Holy heck!

1 Radioactive Bite, 8 Legs and 183 Previews

2011-06-15T17:27:00.000+10:00

THE NEW YORK TIMES

By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: June 14, 2011

There is something to be said for those dangerous flying objects — excuse me, I mean actors — that keep whizzing around the Foxwoods Theater, where the mega-expensive musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” has entered the latest chapter of its fraught and anxious existence. After all, if you’re worried that somebody might fall on top of you from a great height, the odds are that you won’t nod off.

Those adrenaline-raising acrobatics are a necessary part of the lumpy package that is “Spider-Man,” which had its long-delayed official opening on Tuesday night, after 180-some preview performances. First seen and deplored by critics several months ago — when impatient journalists (including me) broke the media embargo for reviews as the show’s opening date kept sliding into a misty future — this singing comic book is no longer the ungodly, indecipherable mess it was in February. It’s just a bore.

So is this ascent from jaw-dropping badness to mere mediocrity a step upward? Well, until last weekend, when I caught a performance of this show’s latest incarnation, I would have recommended “Spider-Man” only to carrion-feasting theater vultures. Now, if I knew a less-than-precocious child of 10 or so, and had several hundred dollars to throw away, I would consider taking him or her to the new and improved “Spider-Man.”

The first time I saw the show, it was like watching the Hindenburg burn and crash. This time “Spider-Man” — which was originally conceived by the (since departed) visionary director Julie Taymor with the rock musicians Bono and the Edge (of U2) — stirred foggy, not unpleasant childhood memories of second-tier sci-fi TV in the 1960s, with blatantly artificial sets and actors in unconvincing alien masks.

“Spider-Man” may be the only Broadway show of the past half-century to make international headlines regularly, often with the adjective “troubled” attached to its title. So I’m assuming you already know at least a bit of its long and tortuous history of revision, cancellation, indecision and injury (from production-related accidents), and of its true star.

That would be Ms. Taymor (who retains an “original direction by” credit), who in the 1990s was hailed as the new Ziegfeld after reinventing a Disney animated film, “The Lion King,” as a classy, mass-appeal Broadway blockbuster. The prospect of her hooking up with Spidey, the nerdy-cool Marvel Comics crime fighter, seemed like a swell opportunity for another lucrative melding of pageantry, puppetry and culture high and low.

Those elements were certainly in abundance in the “Spider-Man” I saw several months ago. That production, which featured a script by Ms. Taymor and Glen Berger, placed its young superhero in a broader meta-context of Greek mythology and American Pop art, with a “geek chorus” of commentators and a classical goddess named Arachne as the morally ambiguous mentor of Spidey and his awkward alter ego, Peter Parker.

Unfortunately, traditional niceties like a comprehensible plot and characters got lost in the stew. After critics let loose with howls of derision, “Spider-Man” took a three-week performance hiatus to reassemble itself, with tools that included audience focus groups. Exit Ms. Taymor. (Bono, the Edge and Mr. Berger stayed put.)

Enter Philip William McKinley — a director whose credits include several versions of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey’s “Greatest Show on Earth” — and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, a writer of both plays and comic books. Now if you check out the directory of paid theater listings in The New York Times, you’ll see that the title “Spider-Man” is prefaced by the promising (if slightly desperate-sounding) words: “REIMAGINED! New Story! New Music!”

This is not false advertising. “Spider-Man” now bears only a scant resemblance to the muddled fever dream that was. It is instead not unlike one of those perky, tongue-in-cheek genre-spoof musicals (“Dames at Sea,” “Little Shop of Horrors”) that used to sprout like mushrooms in Greenwich Village, with witty cutout scenery and dialogue bristling with arch quotation marks.

Well, that is, if you could imagine such a show being stripped of its irony and supersized by a diabolical mad scientist with an enlarging ray. Though “Spider-Man” has shed its geek chorus and scaled down the role of Arachne (T. V. Carpio), it retains the most spectacular-looking centerpieces from the Taymor version. (George Tsypin is the set designer.) They include a vertiginous vision of Manhattan as seen from the top of the Chrysler Building, judiciously repositioned for plot purposes.

But they do seem out of proportion to what has become a straightforward children’s entertainment with a mildly suspenseful story, two-dimensional characters, unapologetically bad jokes and the kind of melodious rock tunes that those under 12 might be familiar with from listening to their parents’ salad-day favorites of the 1980s and ’90s. The puppet figures and mask-dominated costumes worn by the supporting villains still seem to have wandered in from a theme park. The projection designs by Kyle Cooper continue to suggest vintage MTV videos, as does the unimaginative choreography by Daniel Ezralow and Chase Brock.

The bonus is that anyone can follow the story now. (Boy is bitten by radioactive spider, boy acquires amazing powers, boy fights crime, boy has doubts, boy triumphs.) And the performers no longer seem overwhelmed by what surrounds them. Their characters now register as distinct if one-note personalities.

In the title role Reeve Carney is an appropriately nonthreatening crush object for tweens, an appealingly agitated Everydweeb with great cheekbones and a sanitized, lite version of a concert rocker’s voice. He is well paired with the wryly sincere Jennifer Damiano (“Next to Normal”) as Mary Jane Watson, Peter’s girlfriend.

Ms. Carpio’s Arachne (now a beneficent fairy godmother rather than an erotically troubling dream spider) provides the most arresting vocal moments with her ululating nasality. Michael Mulheren is suitably blustery and fatuous as the pandering newspaper editor J. Jonah Jameson. And Patrick Page, as the megalomaniacal scientist who becomes the evil mutant called the Green Goblin, provides the one reason for adults unaccompanied by minors to see the show.

His role has been expanded, and Mr. Page uses the extra time not just to terrorize the audience amiably, as you expect mean green scene stealers to do. (He has charmingly reinvented that staple of melodramatic villains, the sustained insane cackle.) He also has become the show’s entertaining id, channeling and deflecting our own dark thoughts about this lopsided spectacle.

“I’m a $65 million circus tragedy,” he crows at one point. “Well, more like 75 million.”

But even Mr. Page is only a sideshow (not to switch metaphors) to the main event. And that’s the sight of real people — mostly stuntmen — flying over the audience, and the implicit danger therein. (An amplified voice warns the audience not only to turn off their cellphones but also to avoid trying to catch a ride with the professional fliers.)

Unlike the first time I saw “Spider-Man,” the flying (the first instance of which occurs about 45 minutes into the show) went off without a hitch on this occasion. The potential magic is undercut, though, by the very visible wires and harnesses that facilitate these aerodynamics.

Partly because the performers are masked, you experience little of the vicarious wonder and exhilaration that comes from watching Peter Pan or even Mary Poppins ride the air in other musicals. The effect is rather like looking at anonymous daredevils who have been strapped into a breakneck ride at an amusement park. Come to think of it, Coney Island might be a more satisfying choice.

http://theater.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/theater/reviews/spider-man-turn-off-the-dark-opens-after-changes-review.html?adxnnl=1&pagewanted=2&adxnnlx=1308122895-pwrrSYQgYFTJz5YrRVYAfg

Love Never Dies is Phantom, take two

2011-05-28T02:28:00.000+10:00

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

U2 Spiderman musical is "a stinker"

2011-02-10T13:49:00.001+11:00

By Anthony Lund on 09/02/2011

New York theatre critics have united in their condemnation of the project.

There are some musicals that never make it to Broadway and remain lost forever in some writers’ bottom drawers forever. Jim Steinman’ Batman is one such example of what could have been a great hit. There are others such as the U2-scored Spiderman musical which do make it to the stage, then fall flat on their face.

The musical, which has the subtitle, “Turn Off The Dark” is turning off almost very theatre critic in New York while still in its preview period.

The musical has been in production for a few years, but has suffered a bit of development hell that has continually stalled its release. It may as well have remained there as far as those who have seen the musical unanimously agree.

In its first reviews, the musical has been called a “Stinker”, “the most expensive musical ever to hit Broadway and may rank among the worst”, and last but not least, “broken in every respect beyond repair.” All in all not the most appealing of introductions, and surely not what Bono and Co were hoping for.

Then again, will this be one of those cases where the bad reviews have people flocking to see just how terrible it is for themselves.

http://www.musicrooms.net/rock/26201-u2-spiderman-musical-is-a-stinker.html

'Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark' producer blasts critics -- EXCLUSIVE

2011-02-10T13:47:00.000+11:00

Feb 8 2011 02:47 PM ET

by Adam Markovitz

In the wake of the critical drubbing endured today by the Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, producer Michael Cohl is speaking up in defense of his show — and in contempt of the critics who he says aren’t giving it a fair shot. “Any of the people who review the show and say it has no redeeming value are just not legitimate reviewers, period,” says Cohl, who claims the show’s detractors (The New York Times and The Washington Post both called Spider-Man one of the worst productions in Broadway history) are out of touch. “It’s hard to have people that don’t get pop culture reviewing a pop culture event, isn’t it?” (Cohl isn’t the only Spider-Man insider bashing the critics — the show’s spokesman, Rick Miramontez, released an exclusive statement to EW earlier today about the reviews: “The PILE-ON by the critics was ridiculous and uncalled for. Their actions are unprecedented and UNCOOL.”)

The costliest show ever mounted on Broadway, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark has rarely been out of the headlines in recent months, thanks to the recurring safety issues that contributed to a series of postponed opening dates. Cohl insists that the show will still be a work in progress until it officially opens on March 15. But when asked whether critics would be invited to the show’s official opening night, Cohl declined to give a yes or no response, saying only, “We didn’t invite them this week. They clearly don’t need an invite, do they?” Still, he says the reviews haven’t sunk his spirits yet. “I woke up this morning more determined and more positive than ever. I said, ‘Here we go.’”

http://popwatch.ew.com/2011/02/08/spider-man-producer-critics/

U2 Spiderman musical is "a stinker"

2011-02-10T12:46:00.001+11:00

Good vs. Evil, Hanging by a Thread

2011-02-08T20:38:00.001+11:00

Theater Review | 'Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark'
Good vs. Evil, Hanging by a Thread

By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: February 7, 2011

Finally, near the end of the first act of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” the audience at the Foxwoods Theater on Saturday night got what it had truly been waiting for, whether it knew it or not.

Calamity struck, and it was a real-life (albeit small) calamity — not some tedious, confusing tripe involving a pretty girl dangling from a skyscraper and supervillains laying siege to Manhattan. And not the more general and seriously depressing disaster that was the sum of the mismatched parts that had been assembled onstage.

No, an honest-to-gosh, showstopping glitch occurred, just as the title character of this new musical was about to vanquish or be vanquished by the evil Green Goblin. Never fully explained “mechanical difficulties” were announced by an amplified voice (not immediately distinguishable from the other amplified voices we had been hearing for what felt like forever), as the actors in the scene deflated before our eyes. And for the first time that night something like genuine pleasure spread through the house.

That glee soon took the form of spontaneous, nigh-ecstatic applause, a sound unheard in the previous hour. After vamping on a green fake piano (don’t ask), Patrick Page (who plays the Goblin with a gusto unshared by any other member of the cast) ad-libbed a warning to Reeve Carney (who stars as Spider-Man), who had been awkwardly marking time by pretending to drink Champagne.

“You gotta be careful,” Mr. Page said. “You’re gonna fly over the heads of the audience, you know. I hear they dropped a few of them.”

“Roar,” went the audience, like a herd of starved, listless lions, roused into animation by the arrival of feeding time. Everyone, it seemed, understood Mr. Page’s reference to the injuries that have been incurred by cast and crew members during the long (and officially still far from over) preview period for this $65 million musical. Permission to laugh had been granted, and a bond had temporarily been forged between a previously baffled audience and the beleaguered souls onstage.

All subsequent performances of “Spider-Man” should include at least one such moment. Actively letting theatergoers in on the national joke that this problem-plagued show has become helps make them believe that they have a reason to be there.

This production should play up regularly and resonantly the promise that things could go wrong. Because only when things go wrong in this production does it feel remotely right — if, by right, one means entertaining. So keep the fear factor an active part of the show, guys, and stock the Foxwoods gift shops with souvenir crash helmets and T-shirts that say “I saw ‘Spider-Man’ and lived.” Otherwise, a more appropriate slogan would be “I saw ‘Spider-Man’ and slept.”

I’m not kidding. The sheer ineptitude of this show, inspired by the Spider-Man comic books, loses its shock value early. After 15 or 20 minutes, the central question you keep asking yourself is likely to change from “How can $65 million look so cheap?” to “How long before I’m out of here?”

Directed by Julie Taymor, who wrote the show’s book with Glen Berger, and featuring songs by U2’s Bono and the Edge, “Spider-Man” is not only the most expensive musical ever to hit Broadway; it may also rank among the worst.

I would like to acknowledge here that “Spider-Man” doesn’t officially open until March 15; at least that’s the last date I heard. But since this show was looking as if it might settle into being an unending work in progress — with Ms. Taymor playing Michelangelo to her notion of a Sistine Chapel on Broadway — my editors and I decided I might as well check out “Spider-Man” around Monday, the night it was supposed to have opened before its latest postponement.

You are of course entitled to disagree with our decision. But from what I saw on Saturday night, “Spider-Man” is so grievously broken in every respect that it is beyond repair. Fans of Ms. Taymor’s work on the long-running musical “The Lion King,” adapted from the animated Walt Disney feature, will have to squint charitably to see evidence of her talent.

True, signature Taymor touches like airborne puppets, elaborate masks and perspective-skewing sets (George Tsypin is the scenic designer) are all on hand. But they never connect into a comprehensible story with any momentum. Often you feel as if you were watching the installation of Christmas windows at a fancy department store. At other times the impression is of being on a soundstage where a music video is being filmed in the early 1980s. (Daniel Ezralow’s choreography is pure vintage MTV.)

Nothing looks truly new, including the much-vaunted flying sequences in which some poor sap is strapped into an all-too-visible harness and hoisted uneasily above the audience. (Aren’t they doing just that across the street in “Mary Poppins”?) This is especially unfortunate, since Ms. Taymor and her collaborators have spoken frequently about blazing new frontiers with “Spider-Man,” of venturing where no theater artist (pardon me, I mean artiste) has dared to venture before.

I’m assuming that frontier is supposed to exist somewhere between the second and third dimensions. “Part of the balance we’ve been trying to strike is how ‘comic book’ to go and how ‘human’ to go,” Ms. Taymor has said about her version of the adventures of a nerdy teenager who acquires superhuman powers after being bitten by a radioactive spider.

Anyway, there are lots of flat, cardboardish sets, which could easily be recycled for high school productions of “Grease” and “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” and giant multipanel video projections (by Kyle Cooper). That takes care of the two-dimensional part. The human aspect has been assigned to the flesh-and-blood cast members, and it is a Sisyphean duty.

Some wear grotesque masks that bring to mind hucksters on sidewalks handing out promotional material for fantasy-theme restaurants. (Eiko Ishioka is the costume designer.) Those whose own features are visible include — in addition to Mr. Carney (looking bewildered and beautiful as Spider-Man and his conflicted alter ego, Peter Parker) — a strained Jennifer Damiano as Mary Jane Watson, Peter’s spunky kind-of girlfriend, and T. V. Carpio as Arachne, a web-weaving spider-woman of Greco-Roman myth who haunts Peter’s dreams before breaking into his reality. (I get the impression that Arachne, as the ultimate all-controlling artist, is the only character who much interests Ms. Taymor, but that doesn’t mean that she makes sense.)

There is also the Geek Chorus (Gideon Glick, Jonathan Schwartz, Mat Devine, Alice Lee), a quartet of adolescent comic-book devotees, who would appear to be either creating or commenting on the plot, but in any case serve only to obscure it even further. They discuss the heady philosophical implications of Spider-Man’s identity while making jokes in which the notion of free will is confused with the plot of the movie “Free Willy.”

For a story that has also inspired hit action movies, it is remarkably static in this telling. (A lot of the plot-propelling fights are merely reported to us.) There are a couple of picturesque set pieces involving Arachne and her chorus of spider-women and one stunner of a cityscape that suggests the streets of Manhattan as seen from the top of the Chrysler Building.

The songs by Bono and the Edge are rarely allowed to take full, attention-capturing form. Mostly they blur into a sustained electronic twang of varying volume, increasing and decreasing in intensity, like a persistent headache. A loud ballad of existential angst has been written for Peter, who rasps dejectedly, “I’d be myself if I knew who I’d become.” That might well be the official theme song of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.”

SPIDER-MAN

Turn Off the Dark

Music and lyrics by Bono and the Edge; book by Julie Taymor and Glen Berger; directed by Ms. Taymor; choreography and aerial choreography by Daniel Ezralow; sets by George Tsypin; lighting by Donald Holder; costumes by Eiko Ishioka; sound by Jonathan Deans; projections by Kyle Cooper; masks by Ms. Taymor; hair design by Campbell Young Associates/Luc Verschueren; makeup design by Judy Chin; aerial design by Scott Rogers; aerial rigging design by Jaque Paquin; projection coordinator/additional content design by Howard Werner; arrangements and orchestrations by David Campbell; music supervisor, Teese Gohl; music direction by Kimberly Grigsby; music coordinator, Antoine Silverman; vocal arrangements by Mr. Campbell, Mr. Gohl and Ms. Grigsby; additional arrangements/vocal arrangements by Dawn Kenny and Rori Coleman; associate producer, Anne Tanaka; executive producers, Glenn Orsher, Martin McCallum and Adam Silberman. Presented by Michael Cohl and Jeremiah J. Harris, Land Line Productions, Hello Entertainment/David Garfinkle/Tony Adams, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Norton Herrick and Herrick Entertainment, Billy Rovzar and Fernando Rovzar, Jeffrey B. Hecktman, Omneity Entertainment/Richard G. Weinberg, James L. Nederlander, Terry Allen Kramer, S2BN Entertainment, Jam Theatricals, the Mayerson/Gould/Hauser/Tysoe Group, Patricia Lambrecht and Paul McGuinness, by arrangement with Marvel Entertainment. At the Foxwoods Theater, 213 West 42nd Street, Manhattan; (877) 250-2929; ticketmaster.com. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes.

WITH: Reeve Carney (Peter Parker/Spider-Man), Jennifer Damiano (Mary Jane Watson), T. V. Carpio (Arachne), Patrick Page (Norman Osborn/the Green Goblin), Michael Mulheren (J. Jonah Jameson), Ken Marks (Uncle Ben), Isabel Keating (Classics Teacher/Aunt May), Jeb Brown (M J’s Father), Mat Devine (Grim Hunter), Gideon Glick (Jimmy-6), Alice Lee (Miss Arrow), Jonathan Schwartz (Professor Cobwell), Laura Beth Wells (Emily Osborn), Matt Caplan (Flash), Dwayne Clark (Boyle/Busker) and Luther Creek (Kong).

A version of this review appeared in print on February 8, 2011, on page C1 of the New York edition.

http://theater.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/theater/reviews/spiderman-review.html

'Spider-Man' deftly spins substance, spectacle

2011-02-08T20:35:00.002+11:00

By Elysa Gardner, USA TODAY

NEW YORK — Broadway's Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark won't open until March 15, but by now you've probably heard a few rumblings.

The $65 million collaboration between U2's Bono and The Edge and celebrated director Julie Taymor has seen its opening pushed back several times. Injuries also have made news, not to mention comic monologues.

What has been less widely reported is this: Beyond the offstage drama and lavish budget, and all the feats and flash accompanying them, lies an endearingly old-fashioned musical.

Spider-Man's primary goal — based on a preview this critic saw last week — is to tell a thrilling, moving story through song, dialogue and, yes, a little razzle-dazzle. OK, a lot of razzle-dazzle — and not much of it old-fashioned.

At the preview, a crewmember warned the audience in advance that the production could be halted at any time for technical reasons. The show was stopped once, briefly, then proceeded without a hitch.

More @ h ttp://www.usatoday.com/life/theater/reviews/2011-02-08-spiderman08_st_N.htm

Stage Dive: Scott Brown Sees Spider-man: Turn Off the Dark

2011-02-08T20:33:00.000+11:00

Some of my colleagues have wondered aloud whether Spider-man will ever be finished — whether it is, in fact, finishable. I think they're onto something: I saw the show on Saturday night, and found it predictably unfinished, but unpredictably entertaining, perhaps on account of this very quality of Death Star–under–construction inchoateness. Conceptually speaking, it's closer to a theme-park stunt spectacular than "circus art," closer to a comic than a musical, closer to The Cremaster Cycle than a rock concert. But “closer” implies proximity to some fixed point, and Spider-man is faaaar out, man. It's by turns hyperstimulated, vivid, lurid, overeducated, underbaked, terrifying, confusing, distracted, ridiculously slick, shockingly clumsy, unmistakably monomaniacal and clinically bipolar.

But never, ever boring. The 2-D comic art doesn't really go with Taymor's foamy, tactile puppetry, just as U2's textural atmo-rock score doesn't really go with the episodic Act One storytelling. Yet even in the depths of Spider-man's certifiably insane second act, I was riveted. Riveted, yes, by what was visible onstage: the inverted Fritz Lang cityscapes, the rag doll fly-assisted choreography, the acid-Skittle color scheme and Ditko-era comic-art backdrops. But often I was equally transfixed by the palpable offstage imagination willing it all into existence. See, Spider-man isn't really about Spider-man. It’s about an artist locked in a death grapple with her subject, a tumultuous relationship between a talented, tormented older woman and a callow young stud. Strip out the $70 million in robotic guywires, Vari-lites, and latex mummery, and you’re basically looking at a Tennessee Williams play.

First, some background for the six people out there who remain (miraculously) unpolluted by Spidey-leaks. (Skip this paragraph if you have been in the loop.) Spider-man: Turn Off the Dark is a much-delayed project announced years ago; producers have come and gone like fall foliage. Taymor, a revered visual artist and anointed director of The Lion King, is at the helm, and co-wrote the book. A proud control freak, she saw in the Spider-man character a peculiarly American expression of ancient myth, and sought to put him in dialogue with the storytelling traditions that bore him. Meanwhile, Marvel Comics and the show’s producers sought to put Spidey in dialogue with tens of millions in front money, on the perfectly reasonable expectation that they’d see a healthy return. (This was back when the movie franchise was alive and kicking.) Since then, the show’s suffered several delays of its opening, the slings and arrows of a skeptical (and shut-out) press, and at least four high-profile accidents, some of them extremely serious.

The plot of the show leaked early, but still defies understanding. Sure, the first act is simple enough. It’s Spider-man’s familiar origin story, his transformation from mild-mannered dweeb Peter Parker into the famous Web Slinger. That arc is scripture for mass audiences, thanks to the first movie, and it’s charmingly carried out here by the L.A. rocker Reeve Carney in the lead role. The storytelling is assisted by a “Geek Chorus” of four nerds — one female (Alice Lee) and demonstrably sharper than the rest. (She goes by “Miss Arrow,” the name of Peter Parker’s feminine nemesis and “opposite number” from the comics.) They dream up a new story of Spider-man, complete with lots of swinging around — and here, Taymor delivers. Once the characters start flying (about 30 minutes in), they don't stop. The entire theater becomes a human aviary, and at least four sequences are devoted exclusively to showing off the aerial rig.

Then comes the second act, which cliff-dives headlong into the realm of dream and myth, allowing Taymor to interrogate the Spider-man character (and, one senses, her own artistic rationale for taking a corporate job). But her primary interest in Peter Parker is announced early on, in Act One: Where did he get the suit? (He obviously didn't make it. It's too beautiful to have been created by a heterosexual teenage boy.)

As a Spidey-story, Taymor’s show is a solid B-minus. (Some of the story basics get garbled and whiplashed, and basic foreknowledge of Spidey 101 is strongly recommended, especially for patrons over the age of 9.) As a pop-art installation treating the subject of pop art, however, the thing is off the scale. What you're watching is the stem cells of a protean imagination dividing and dividing and dividing, right out of control. Taymor's mind discards what she's made as fast as she makes it, always on the move, in search of its next impulse. A series of frames have been erected, one inside the other — the chorus, the superhero "origin story" — in an attempt to contain this monadic, nomadic Creator-force. But it's no use. The result is savage and deeply confusing — a boiling cancer-scape of living pain — that is nevertheless thrilling.

Did I mention there's a number where leggy lady-spiders try on shoes?

Focus!

For those of you who insist on paying a century note for unfinished goods, I'll try to respond to the burning-est of your burning questions, point by point.

1. Why does Glenn Beck like this show so much? The short answer is: Because it is a kid's show. (Which contains not one but two chalkboard scenes!) The longer answer: It's a kid's show with somebody's cockeyed gender-studies thesis stapled to its back. The even-longer answer: Beck and Spider-man both exist in a state of perpetual adolescence; both are serious little Trapper Keeper scribblers, stream-of-consciousness free-associaters totally enamored of their own bad poetry. The key distinction: Taymor's bad poetry is still pretty ravishing. (Though both kinda make you want to stock up on canned food and gold.)

2. Do people fall and die? Not on my night. But it wasn't exactly smooth sailing, either. There was a technical glitch at the end of Act One, which apparently recurs on several nights: It has something to do with a climactic aerial battle between Spider-man and the Green Goblin (Broadway superhero Patrick Page) on top of the Chrysler Building. (The Chrysler pistons in and out of this show so relentlessly, it must violate blue laws.) These were the only delays and stoppages I witnessed, but they were enough to mangle an already contorted late-act storyboard into total nonsense.

Not to worry, though: Tech screw-ups are apparently just a cue for Page to start vamping. He's a master, and one gets the feeling he's had plenty of practice. He was in the middle of an evil cackle when the stage manager called for a caesura. "That just takes the villainy right out of ya!" he cracked, to enormous laughs. Then he plopped himself down in full foam-villain drag at a prop piano and "played" a reprise of "(I'll Take) Manhattan," which Gobby taunts Spidey with, atop the Chrysler. (Yes, it's true: The show's most delightful musical moment comes not via Bono and Edge, but Rodgers and Hart.) Carney, his Spidey mask doffed, joined him, sipping a prop champagne flute. "Careful there," said Page, still half in character, "you gotta fly out over the audience in a minute." This broke up Spidey, and the audience, too. Page surfed it, swiveled into an aside: "You know, I hear they dropped a couple of 'em." Huge, ghoulish laughs. For a moment, we get a glimpse of the show's potential as English "pantomime" — the sprawling, winking family entertainments they enjoy across the pond. Irony-wise, could it be Julie Taymor's done by accident what Dance of the Vampires tried so hard to do on purpose?

At this point, I honestly hope they never fix the (non-injurious) glitches: They puncture the show's pretense and furnish meta-theatrical opportunities that can't be staged. We've had Epic Theater, we've had Poor Theater — is this the dawn of Broken Theater?

Corollary: Is it ghoulish that I'm half-expecting someone to fall? You bet! But don't worry about it: Your gleeful morbidity is part of a larger cultural disease, of which Spidenfreude is only the outermost protrusion. And isn't that half the fun of "circus art," anyway? The phrases "death-defying!" and "without a net!" weren't invented by Julie Taymor and Bono. Look, we're sick fucks. We've always been sick fucks. The only difference is, nowadays we pay more for it than we did in the 1890s.

3. Is this really Spidey? Or something else Julie Taymor made up in her Krang-like crazybrain and labeled "Spider-man"? No, it's Spidey. Or rather, it's just as Spidey as Alan Moore's Swamp Thing was Swamp Thing. Taymor's doing what any big-name writer does when she takes over a comic-book title: She's grafting her own obsessions onto it. Comics, despite all their surface pieties and supposed obsession with "continuity," are an incredibly plastic form, a substrate for almost any sort of storytelling. Taymor's taken full advantage of that, and announces her intention to meddle in the mythology by hauling out her "Geek Chorus." The fanboys, who are engaged in some vague act of comics creation, announce their intention to create the most "disgustingly extreme" version of the Spider-man story. They're challenged by Miss Arrow, speaking for Taymor, who argues with the received Spider-wisdom and posits a higher authority, Arachne (Across the Universe's T.V. Carpio, perhaps a little too itty-bitty in voice-and-presence for a goddess role). Arachne, any student of the classics will remember, was the first spider — a human woman transformed by Athena after she won a weaving contest against the goddess. Turns out she's the root cause of Spider-man, the Gaean original predating the male demiurge. In the form of that genetically modified superspider — for she is all spiders — Arachne gave Spider-man his powers. The not-so-subtle implication is that Taymor herself has now entered the stage: Artist and art have merged. ("I'm the only real artist working today," Arachne cracks.) At this point, we learn that Arachne's not just a weaver of cloth, but a weaver of dreams, and Taymor begins a light pillage of Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" mythos. (You can't accuse her of not knowing her comics.) This also gives her free rein to break her own (already scanty) rules: Dream and reality warp and woof into a tapestry of total confusion, and the second act descends into mostly watchable chaos. There's a supervillain fashion show, an unforgivably punny plot point involving "the world wide web" (it's a web, get it?), and lots of swipes at the nasty old news media, with all its negativity and print-the-rumor churlishness. (Guilty as charged!)

Oh, it's all nonsense, of course. It doesn't make a lick of sense, even with the fervent annotations of the Chorus helping us through. The show's metabolism speeds up in the second act, even as its central nervous system breaks down, and eventually, even Taymor seems to be feeling a little winded. She starts relying heavily on massive video-screens, featuring naive CGI versions of a villainous pantheon that includes Carnage, Swarm, and Lizard. The second act, taken all in all, is basically how I've always imagined the Björk–Matthew Barney honeymoon: lots of atavistic rock-moaning, lots of 40-story phallic symbols, lots of bees.

4. Is the music any good? As far as I could tell, there are only two U2 songs in this show: "Boy Falls From the Sky," Spidey's big motif, and "Rise Above," Arachne's song. The rest of the music is a warm, not unpleasant ear bath of urgent rock pattern-building. Much of it's wonderfully cheesy, as if the Edge stepped out for a smoke and ceded the stage to John Carpenter. (Oh, if only!) I don't expect to see U2 back on Broadway anytime soon, but it's been fun having them over for an extended, if inconsequential jam. Reeve Carney's voice is an excellent instrument for this sort of thing: He's got an extremely gratifying rock tenor, nicely shreddy but never too emo-broken, and closer to Train than U2.

5. What's it like out there in the audience? What audience? Hate to break it to you, Joe Ticketbuyer, but you're just part of the scenery. The orchestra seating exists mainly to give us jeopardy (and a target) for the many flying people hurled overhead. Nervous? Don't worry, you're allowed to drink in the theater: Never before have I sat in a mezzanine so littered with beer cans! (Not to worry, theater snobs: They were Heinekens!)

So that's where things stand with Spider-man, on this February 7. As maximalist camp, it succeeds thunderously. Is that what it intends to be? Irrelevant. To ascribe intent would be to limit the power of this show's occasionally frightening, often confounding, always metastasizing imagination. I recommend Spider-man never open. I think it should be built and rebuilt and overbuilt forever, a living monument to itself.

Follow me at Facebook and on Twitter @scottstagedive.

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2011/02/stage_dive_scott_brown_on_spid.html?imw=Y&f=most-emailed-24h5

Spider-Man - Turn off the Dark

2011-02-08T20:31:00.000+11:00

Published Monday 7 February 2011 at 09:49 by Mark Shenton

Julie Taymor’s production of The Lion King became the seventh longest-running show in Broadway history when it played its 5,462nd performance in January. Meanwhile, her latest directorial effort - which swaps turning an animated feature into 3D to musicalise a cartoon strip instead with Spider-Man, Turn Off the Dark - is currently breaking records of different kinds. Not only is it the most expensive musical of all time, with a bloated budget of a reported $65m and counting, but it is also set to become the longest previewing musical in Broadway history.

It’s a show that has repeatedly refused to officially open - a third opening night date, set for February 7, has now been moved to March 15, by which time it will have played for three and a half months and 110 previews, at full price (and more) to paying customers that also saw it overtake Wicked as the highest grossing show currently playing on Broadway one recent week. Yet every performance is being prefaced by a warning, delivered live from the stage, that the show has forgone an out of town try-out and may therefore be liable to be stopped at any point should any safety concerns arise, and that audience members should not attempt to hitch a ride on Spider-Man when he’s flying.

On the February 5 matinee I saw, over two months into the preview run, the show was duly stopped for an extended five minute pause, and while no one sought to jump on top of any of what turns out to be 11 Spider-Man’s that share the flying and other stunts, the show needs to carry another safety warning of its own, one that the majority of New York critics have, so far, been prevented from delivering (even as every blogger, tweeter and bulletin board poster has had their very vocal say), namely that the show, as it currently stands, is a thundering, over-hyped, undercooked disappointment.

It should be stressed that the creators, having bought extra preview time (at the audience’s expense, in every sense), have not yet officially finished their work on it, so this has to therefore only be an interim report; but is all the blood, sweat and tears worth it? Is it any good, or is there at least the potential for it to be so?

Expectations have been sky-high, of course, partly because a flying spectacle was promised to send the actors hurtling sky-high, over the heads of the audience across the entire theatre. So first things first - yes, as in productions of old like Peter Pan, you can see the wires, but unlike them, you also can’t always see the flying. From my balcony perch, much of the flying below and under me was invisible, while from the stalls, it would frequently be above and behind you. Expect business for osteopaths to soar not just among the cast but also audiences as they twist to follow it.

But it’s not just your body that may need twisting, your mind may also have trouble following the plotting as it seeks to first provide the back story of how Peter Parker became Spider-Man, narrated by a “geek” chorus of excitable kids who narrate some of the show but are soon perplexingly dropped from view. It then predictably morphs into a projection of the age of anxiety that we now live in with Spider-Man becoming a figure that protects the city of New York from a series of villainous threats.

Perhaps we need to ask him to protect musical theatre from opportunistic producers that are trying to hitch a ride on his leotard-covered body (just as audiences are specifically told not to). It’s been a bumpy journey so far, with lots of crash landings (including one that put a Spider-Man stunt double in hospital).

But if the technical problems may yet be ironed out, Bono and the Edge’s debut as Broadway composers also turns out to be an uninspiring disappointment - two onstage guitarists are on hand to provide the rock riffs, but the music stays stubbornly unmemorable and earthbound, even when the show is seeking to fly.

It is difficult, too, for the actors to give much human dimension to the cartoon characterisations they have been given, although Jennifer Damiano as MJ (Peter Parker’s love interest) and British actor Matthew James Thomas (the alternate whom I saw in the title role instead of the billed Reeve Carney) bring some heart, warmth and vulnerability to a show that otherwise fatally fails to have any.

http://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/review.php/31188/spider-man-turn-off-the-dark

'Spider-Man' on Broadway: No superpowers needed to sniff out this stinker

2011-02-08T20:19:00.001+11:00

By Peter Marks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 7, 2011; 8:39 PM

NEW YORK - If you're going to spend $65 million and not end up with the best musical of all time, I suppose there's a perverse distinction in being one of the worst.

Mind you, I haven't seen every stinker ever produced, so I can't categorically confirm that "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" belongs in the dankest subbasement of the American musical theater. But its application certainly seems to be in order.

What's apparent after 170 spirit-snuffing minutes in the Foxwoods Theatre - interrupted by the occasional burst of aerial distraction - is that director Julie Taymor, of "The Lion King" fame, left a few essential items off her lavish shopping list:

1. Coherent plot

2. Tolerable music

3. Workable sets

To be sure, Taymor has found a way to send her superhero soaring above the audience. And yet, the creature that most often spreads its wings in the Foxwoods is a turkey.

As you no doubt are aware, "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" has made one of the most snakebitten (and heavily publicized) forays onto Broadway in memory. Money problems were followed by mechanical mishaps that sent several seriously injured actors to the hospital. Preview performances began Nov. 28; a formal opening night had been scheduled for Dec. 21. The musical's producers pushed back the date to Jan. 11, and later to Feb. 7, and then to March 15.

Reasonable observers can differ on how long a news organization should wait to inform readers about the merits of any production once it has been running for months (and charging as much as $275 for an orchestra seat). Based on the preview period's ever-expanding length and the intense public interest generated by the nationwide news coverage, this newspaper decided, like many other outlets, not to wait out the latest delay and observe Feb. 7 as the opening.

At the outset of the preview I attended, a man appeared onstage to read a short speech about the production's technical issues and to assure us that "the [New York State] Department of Labor has approved all of our aerial sequences." It should be noted that no significant glitches occurred over the ensuing two hours and 50 minutes.

Clearly, though, the Department of Lucidity has not been in the building in quite a while. Story-wise, "Spider-Man" is a shrill, insipid mess, a musical aimed squarely at a Cub Scout demographic. Looking at the sad results, you're compelled to wonder: Where did all those tens of millions go?

The 8-year-old boys in the audience might be able to key on the Cirque du Soleil-style stunts on wires and video-game graphic elements, and probably not worry too much that "Spider-Man" is a tangle of disjointed concepts, scenes and musical sequences that suggests its more appropriate home would be off a highway in Orlando. Come to think of it, the optimal audience might be non-English-speaking.

The tale doesn't so much unfold as ooze out, on the operating theory that if you throw everything against a theater wall, something might stick. It essentially begins with the superhero metamorphosis of nerdy Peter Parker, played by the likable Matthew James Thomas at the performance I attended; he alternates in the role with Reeve Carney. From there, things get convoluted, fast.

Solemn comic-book myths merge with solemn Greek myths and apocalyptic environmental visions for the origin stories of heroes and villains, who multiply in numbers (and ever more outrageous get-ups) as the production wears on. Shapeless expository scenes in laboratories and newsrooms elongate the proceedings. A perfunctory romance lurches along between Peter and the love of his life, budding actress Mary Jane Watson (Jennifer Damiano).

A so-called "Geek Chorus" of caffeinated Marvel comic fanatics (Gideon Glick, Jonathan Schwartz, Mat Devine and Alice Lee) hangs out on the edge of the stage, offering utterly superfluous commentary. Maybe they'd earn their place up there if they could explain the ludicrous role of Arachne (T.V. Carpio), a woman transformed by the goddess Athena into a spider who has spent several millennia awaiting the arrival of another spider-human hybrid. She's a New Agey sort of bad gal who has the worst song in the show, something to do with a raid on 50 shoe stores by Arachne's gang of eight-legged Furies. The high-heeled spoils are affixed to, yes, the spider-ladies' extremities.

Or wait, maybe the bottom of the barrel is a weird on-the-runway sequence, in which a cadre of second-tier villains with names like Swiss Miss and Carnage do a bit of high-fashion sashaying. In the running, too, is a bizarre military number, as well as the first-act closer, a rip-off of a Rodgers and Hart song. The latter is sung by - get out your score cards - the other main-event evildoer, the Green Goblin, a former scientist played by the talented classical actor Patrick Page.

Page and the other principal actors, burdened by Taymor and Glen Berger's lumbering book, never stand a chance.

The score, by Bono and the U2 guitarist the Edge, is an ineffectual bystander. It's loud and pulsing and devoid of personality. I've rarely experienced a production in which the music is so completely drowned out by the sets. Designer George Tsypin uses elaborate hydraulics to conjure the Chrysler Building and other Manhattan skyscrapers from all sorts of angles and perspectives.

The images are intended to showcase the musical's star. That would not be a person, but a rope trick. Spider-gliding is what this show is selling, and so you wait for the wires to be hooked to the phalanx of stunt men who take turns being guided from midair onto ledges on the theater's upper levels.

If watching actors in latex land in the mezzanine is your idea of an evening well spent, "Spider-Man" won't seem a gargantuan waste. Musical lovers, however, might wish the whole unsalvageable thing would just take a flying leap.

Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark music and lyrics by Bono and the Edge, book by Julie Taymor and Glen Berger. Directed by Taymor. Dance and aerial choreography, Daniel Ezralow; lighting, Donald Holder; costumes, Eiko Ishioka; sound, Jonathan Deans; projections, Kyle Cooper; aerial design, Scott Rogers; music direction, Kimberly Grigsby. With Isabel Keating, Michael Mulheren. About 2 hours 50 minutes. At Foxwoods Theatre, 213 W. 42nd St., New York. Visit www.ticketmaster.com or call 877-250-2929.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/07/AR2011020704088_2.html?hpid=topnews&sid=ST2011020704113

Gorgeous, Dumb `Spider-Man' Remains Inert After 65 Previews: Jeremy Gerard

2011-02-08T20:18:00.000+11:00

By Jeremy Gerard - Feb 8, 2011 8:59 AM ET

There were two showstoppers during the 65th preview of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” on Saturday night, and they weren’t songs.

This was meant to be the weekend critics came, though the producers of this elaborately afflicted musical once again postponed opening night until March 15.

No dice. Critics from the New York Times, local tabloids, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, among others, dropped in anyway. And so did I, for the second time, to re- review a show I had found close to unsalvageable on Dec. 26.

Preview number 65 was no improvement over number 30. In fact, it was worse.

At around midpoint in Act I, Reeve Carney couldn’t take flight as he was supposed to. While the crew futzed with the wires, Spidey and his nemesis the Green Goblin (Patrick Page) sauntered over to a downstage piano and ad libbed what turned out to be the funniest lines of the night.

“Better be careful with that Champagne,” warned the Goblin as Spider-Man lifted a glass.

“Pretty soon you’ll be flying over the audience’s heads.” He paused. “I hear they’ve dropped a few of ‘em.” That drew a great laugh.

Dangling Conversation

Minutes later, during their big, 30-second battle scene, Spider-Man had to be helped onto one of his high perches and the Goblin was left dangling for several minutes over the pricey seats.

Director Julie Taymor had said she would be crafting a new second act that required time. Back in December, the show ended ambiguously, with a morose super-hero. That’s been replaced by a crowd-pleasing buss that Mary Jane plants on him as he bungees, upside-down, from the rafters.

The best thing about “Spider-Man” remains George Tsypin’s sets, a giddy-making color-saturated mash-up of bold comic-strip tableaux and ingenious, perspective-altering views of the Chrysler building, a teeny subway train, a threatening city schoolyard.

They frame Taymor and costume designer Eiko Ishioka’s outlandishly bedecked villains and life-size puppets. Donald Holder has unleashed every exclamatory trick of the lighting designer’s trade to make the show a heart-quickening visual trip, pumped up by Daniel Ezralow’s acrobatic choreography.

Spider-Woman?

Bono and The Edge, mostly out touring with U2 when not at Davos, have dropped in from time to time without changing the songs, which remain loud, dull and unmemorable.

Neither Taymor nor her co-writer, Glen Berger, have found a way to improve the book, a protofeminist stew that foolishly decants the myth of the weaver Arachne into a story that’s incoherent to begin with.

After all this expenditure of talent and money, “Spider- Man” is probably unfixable because too much has gone into making humans fly, which is not what they are good at. It imitates poorly what the “Spider-Man” movies do brilliantly with computer graphics -- and without putting live actors in jeopardy.

They are fine actors. In addition to Carney and Page, I liked Jennifer Damiano, who has little to do as girlfriend Mary Jane Watson, but does it winningly, and Michael Mulheren as crass Daily Bugle editor J. Jonah Jameson.

Maybe the show eventually will run for several performances in a row without having to stop to untangle someone. Some triumph.

At the Foxwoods Theatre, 213 W. 42nd St. Information: +1- 877-250-2929; http://spidermanonbroadway.marvel.com. Rating: **

What the Stars Mean:
**** Excellent
*** Very Good
** Average
* Not So Good
(No stars) Avoid

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-07/gorgeous-dumb-spider-man-remains-inert-after-65-previews-jeremy-gerard.html

'Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark' on Broadway: Spidey is stuck in a tangled web

2011-02-08T20:16:00.001+11:00

February 07, 2011

“Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark” plays on Broadway at the Foxwoods Theatre, 213 W. 42nd St., New York. (Tickets at 877-850-2929 or www.ticketmaster.com)

BROADWAY REVIEW

NEW YORK — After the $65 million spent, the endless delays, the injuries, the cast changes, the incessant spinning of stories on the Web, Julie Taymor's “Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark” now has to be willing to stand in the light. Deck chairs can be rearranged forever.

This show has delayed its opening so many times that it has become the butt of jokes on talk shows and magazine covers. This review, based on the Jan. 30 performance, appears one day after a previously scheduled opening, and after the last delay that felt even remotely reasonable, given that full-price “previews” have been taking place since Nov. 28. Furthermore, in practical terms, the show has already made what major changes it will be possible to make before the official March opening. Both ticket buyers and the generally curious deserve a review now.

The much-told woes of “Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark” boil down to a problem that has similarly ensnared far humbler new musicals: an incoherent story.

For without a book with consistent rules that a mainstream audience can follow and track, without characters in whom one can invest emotionally, without a sense of the empowering optimism that should come from time spent in the presence of a good, kind man who can walk up buildings and save our lousy world from evil, it is all just clatter and chatter. Delayed openings, physical changes, fresh flying sequences, the toil of dedicated performers and even new musical numbers from U2's Bono and The Edge, no less, cannot fix what should have been solved long before any human performer left the safety of the ground.

In an attempt to connect comic books to grander narratives (and forgetting that comic books already are connected to grander narratives), Taymor and Glen Berger, who share book writing credit, have purloined a character named Arachne from Greco-Roman mythology. Arachne, (in mythology, a mortal weaver who gets turned into a spider) is centrally positioned as both demon and siren of desire for Peter Parker. Too centrally positioned. A smarter producer in the classic David Merrick mold would, in some early meeting, have angrily marched everyone onto 42nd Street and pointed out the name “Spider-Man” blazing on the marquee outside Broadway's Foxwoods Theatre. Not “Arachne.”

But from the rise of the curtain on Arachne, the show disappears inside this mythic creature (severely played by T.V. Carpio), an alienating and charmless aerial stranger to us. Thereafter, neither Patrick Page's cackling Green Goblin (who should be the main diabolic force in the show but here hardly comes into a much more reluctant focus until intermission) nor Jennifer Damiano's Mary Jane, nor the Spider-Man/Peter Parker we came to see, can pull out the narrative thread.

In the first act, that thread wants to tell the familiar tale of Peter (Reeve Carney), adolescent nerd, secretly turning into a superhero, fighting evil by night and swooning over MJ by day. In the midsection, the Green Goblin villain revs up some nastiness and battles Spidey. That continues some into Act 2. But in the second half, Peter/Spidey seems mostly to fight his own duality.

Even that story is buried yet deeper by an outer frame of adolescent comic book fans, or “citizens,” who show up near the top of the show talking about Spider-Man, pop up as narrators throughout, and generally seem to control the inner story we are watching. But it's never clear: Are they watching it? Creating it? Reacting to it? Can they change it? Where are they? When are they? There is no clarity of frame. In fact, even the lines themselves don't track from one to the other in any kind of satisfying way.

In essence, Taymor and Berger tie themselves in knots trying to shove the inherently dualistic nature of melodrama into a psychological hexahedron of their own creation. Great conceptual artists like Taymor are rarely comfortable with melodrama, which has struggled for respect throughout history. Fine. Stay away. But be wary of putting a comic book on the stage.

Time and again, the show runs away from what I suspect the creators feared would be too predictable or cheap, but that we miss. There is no direct Peter-to-Spidey transformation scene. There are no shooting webs (not substantively, anyway). There is no rush of romance. There is no truth. Every time old Spidey gets someone to fight, beyond the eight-legged critter, the villain is immediately defanged by absurdly cartoonish behavior, nixing any of the stakes. His other main foes, The Lizard, Swarm et al., are reduced to a rushed and belated cinematic montage that looks more like a garish version of an outre presentation during Fashion Week. And yet, in other moments, the show is as terrified of its genre as a 1960s mother worried about the eyesight of kids devouring comics under the sheets. Rules change faster than any kid could turn a page.

That's because there is a fundamental discomfort, and thus disconnect, between the material, the artists engaged in its interpretation and the form of the Broadway musical.

Overall, Carney's brooding Peter is so busy dealing with faux-Freudian trauma over his Arachnidan dreams (the two legs of Mary Jane aren't as interesting as eight), that his performance becomes so brooding and internalized he seems to forget how to soar. At the show I saw, Damiano was replaced for reasons unannounced by her much, much warmer understudy Kristen Martin, before the end. But I saw more than enough to see that Damiano is struggling to find her center as Mary Jane. Carney is similarly off-track. It's also not his fault. Peter has normal adolescent problems, for sure, but it doesn't work for him to have so many bad dreams that he gets no pleasure from catching bad guys.

The score is a disappointment. There are two memorable songs, both in the second act: “The Boy Falls From the Sky,” a formatively compelling and melodic ode that Carney sings, and sings very well, and a sweet, wise, suddenly rooted ballad for MJ titled “If The World Should End.” “Bouncing Off the Walls” is fun. Elsewhere, we get what mostly feels like fragments, riffs and mood treatments from masterful musicians who no doubt were as confused as to the aesthetic world here as everyone else. Most disappointing of all is the failure of the score to articulate empowerment.

There is, no question, some engaging aerial work, albeit as devoid of emotional connection as everything else. Some will enjoy the Green Goblin and Spidey wrestling above one's head. There are hardworking performers. And although George Tsypin's set overall is a massively disappointing confusion of styles and shapes, there is one undeniably majestic and revealing moment when our perspective is thrillingly thrown and we see the city, racing down from the top of a skyscraper.

Because the new ending sequence — with Spidey flying around the theater — is the only moment when the show starts to capture some of the spirit of flight, I suspect there is some growing understanding of the cause of all these problems. But those few moments can't compensate for a night wherein overwritten nonsense takes us away from Spider-Man's world, our world, our fantasies, and out, out into some fractured mythic fantasy that needed to get caught in a good old-fashioned net. When it was still a child.

http://leisureblogs.chicagotribune.com/the_theater_loop/2011/02/review-spider-man-turn-off-dark-broadway-chicago-tribune.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+chicagotribune/thetheaterloop+%28Chicago+Tribune+-+The+Theater+Loop%29

Theater review: 'Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark' at Foxwoods Theatre

2011-02-08T20:14:00.000+11:00

February 7, 2011 | 3:54 pm

Well, it turns out there is a valid reason the producers of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” have been keeping critics at bay. Julie Taymor's $65-million, accident-prone production, featuring an erratic score by U2’s Bono and The Edge, is a teetering colossus that can’t find its bearings as a circus spectacle or as a rock musical.

The endlessly postponed official opening was last moved from Feb. 7 to March 15, but the battle over health care reform has a better shot at being resolved before the manifold problems of this frenetic Broadway jumble get fixed.

In the meantime, “Spider-Man” has been making lucrative lemonade out of all the lemons the media has thrown an embarrassing spotlight on. (The show, previewing since late November at the Foxwoods Theatre, has already beaten “Wicked” in the weekly box office tallies.) Not even a nuclear bomb detonation, as the satiric newspaper the Onion joked, can stop this juggernaut, which has survived financial crises, a spate of cast member injuries and enough bad press to sink a presidential candidate.

But the time has come to assess the work, not the hullabaloo surrounding it. So much emphasis has been placed on the technological hurdles, the notion that “Spider-Man” is trying things that have never been attempted before in a Broadway house. What sinks the show, however, has nothing to do with glitches in the special effects. To revise a handy little political catch phrase, “It’s the storytelling, stupid.” And on that front, the failure rests squarely on Taymor’s run-amok direction.

This is, after all, her vision, and it’s a vision that has been indulged with too many resources, artistic and financial. The production, lacking the clarity that's born out of tough choices, adds when it should subtract, accelerates when it should slow down. Taymor’s inventive staging of “The Lion King” was a victory for the craft and commerce of theater alike. But the investors of “Spider-Man” have inadvertently bankrolled an artistic form of megalomania.

The book, by Taymor and Glen Berger, is an absolute farrago, setting up layers and subplots before the main narrative line has been established. A female spider figure from Classical mythology named Arachne (T.V. Carpio) has been introduced, mucking up the traditional Marvel tale. There’s even a chorus, a group of comic-book-addicted kids, who at first appear to be joshing fans of the “Spider-Man” saga but later seem to be actually inventing the tedious version unfolding before us. Apparently, they’re the creative team’s surrogates. Not that it matters much in the end. The conceit is dispensed with as the second act transforms into a video game, interrupted by high-flying shenanigans that had many in the audience nervously bowing their heads as human cartoons swooshed above them.

The biggest shame in all of this is that the leads — Reeve Carney, who plays Peter Parker/Spider-Man, and Jennifer Damiano, who plays Peter’s love interest, Mary Jane — are utterly captivating. Their appealing sensitivity, however, is no match for the machine they’re trapped in. Forget about the snarling threats of the Green Goblin (Patrick Page decked in a verdant, plasticky getup that would seem obvious even for a Halloween parade) — the real villainy is Taymor’s overreaching desire to top herself.

The music is hit or miss, with three screechers for every rousing cri de coeur rock ballad. But the show is most alive when the sound that Bono and The Edge made famous connects to the emotional predicament of Peter Parker, who’s torn between the demands of crime-fighting and the dictates of his own homebody heart. The best numbers, “No More,” “Bouncing Off the Walls” (thrillingly staged as the title suggests) and “If the World Should End,” emerge from the protagonist’s or Mary Jane's inner state of being. Too much else, unfortunately, is a cacophonous brew.

The visual world of the production is more confusing than mesmerizing. Taymor, working with a fleet of designers, seems unable to settle on a style, bounding between comic-book cut-outs and expensive sci-fi gadgetry, between ingenious thrift and galumphing glitz. It would be pointless to sort out the hodgepodge of historical eras, but, among other jarring incongruities, there's a reference to the Internet at a newsroom so comically old school it would seem to predate Clark Kent.

Incoherence isn’t much fun to sit through. The two friends who attended Friday night's performance with me, a fashion executive and a filmmaker, both regular New York theatergoers, were muttering to each other before the first act was done. My fashion industry friend, who bought the tickets, spent the second act savoring a martini at the bar at Sardi’s. The filmmaker stuck it out with me, hoping against hope that Taymor’s vision would somehow pull itself together. The poor guy left Foxwoods feeling as though he had been lured inside someone's psychotic hallucination.

The aerial antics were impressive to an acrophobic like me. I feared for the actors’ safety, though, stupidly or not, I managed to convince myself that every safety measure was being employed. But there’s a kiddie show aspect to these soaring stunts that seems at odds with a spectacle that many will find too complicated, brooding and weirdly suggestive for young children.

Who exactly is “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” for anyway? The only answer I can come up with is an audience of Julie Taymor types who care only about panoramic sensibility— a bit of slow-mo choreography here, a smattering of diabolical mask work there. Much as I enjoyed the clever shifts in perspective during the skyscraper scenes, it was hard for me to picture adults or young people yearning for a second visit, never mind critics who may feel obliged to check back in with the production when (or should I say if?) it officially opens. Nothing cures the curiosity about "Spider-Man" quite like seeing it.

Perhaps this is why the show’s long-term prospects seem to me nearly as grim as the fate of Bette Davis' character in another work with 'dark' in the title — “Dark Victory.” Not since that 1939 weeper have the words "prognosis negative" seemed so apt.

Related:

Critic's Notebook: 'Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark' needs some light shed on it by critics, and soon

--Charles McNulty

twitter.com\charlesmcnulty

charles.mcnulty@latimes.com

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2011/02/theater-review-spider-man-turn-off-the-dark-at-foxwoods-theatre.html

'Spider-Man' Musical Review: 'Chaotic, Dull and a Little Silly'

2011-02-08T18:26:00.002+11:00

8:19 PM 2/7/2011 by David Rooney

The big shock when sitting down finally to assess this $65 million web-slinging folly, is what a monumental anti-climax it turns out to be.

NEW YORK – As the dominant parent of the problem child Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark, Julie Taymor does herself no favors by including a program note about a mythological creature brought down by hubris. In an ungainly mess of a show that smacks of out-of-control auteurial arrogance, the parallel speaks for itself.

Official opening is not until March 15, but following repeat postponements and what feels like 30 years of previews, The Hollywood Reporter is observing the previously scheduled opening of Feb. 7 with this review. The capitalization hiccups, cast reshuffles, technical glitches and series of injuries have been too exhaustively chronicled to require a recap here. But the big shock when sitting down finally to assess this $65 million web-slinging folly, is what a monumental anti-climax it turns out to be.

Sure, there’s still five pre-opening weeks to keep tinkering, but the point at which any savvy producer would have sent for script doctors is long past. While much has been said about the decision to begin performances without an ending in place, this “rock circus drama” has no beginning or middle either.

There’s one thrillingly beautiful image about ten minutes in -- during a song appropriately titled “Behold and Wonder” -- as aerialists suspended from saffron-colored sashes weave an undulating fabric wall that fills the stage. And the impressive speed and agility of the flying sequences is a major leap forward in action terms from the slow glide of Mary Poppins.

But mostly, Spider-Man is chaotic, dull and a little silly. And there’s nothing here half as catchy as the 1967 ABC cartoon theme tune.

The absence of the word “musical” from Taymor’s definition of the show seems key. The songs by Bono and The Edge display minimal grasp of music’s function in goosing narrative or illuminating character. And despite all the wailing-guitar attitude, they only squeak by as atmospheric enhancement. Aside from one or two stirring anthems in familiar messianic U2 mode, this is strictly album filler, with echoes of everyone from T. Rex to Alice Cooper, plus an occasional nod to The Who’s Tommy. The lyrics – when you can decipher them – are either too vague or too literal.

But an underwhelming score is the least of the show’s worries. What really sinks it is the borderline incoherence of its storytelling.

Diehard fans of the Marvel Comics classic or Sam Raimi’s big-screen iterations are likely to be irked by the dismissive handling of the origin story in Taymor and co-writer Glen Berger’s book.

Establishing scenes with Peter Parker (Reeve Carney) and Mary Jane (Jennifer Damiano), the death of Uncle Ben (Ken Marks), the entomological experimentation of mad scientist Norman Osborn (Patrick Page), Peter’s radioactive spider bite and Osborn’s transformation into the Green Goblin are all dealt with almost perfunctorily.

You sense Taymor’s impatience with this nuts-and-bolts stuff as she keeps digressing to check in on a useless “Geek Chorus” of comic-strip fanatics. Their debates over the direction the action should take succeed only in bringing it to a halt.

The director’s strength has always been creating stage pictures and visual coups, not developing characters or story, so it’s perhaps no surprise that everything between Spidey’s first flight and his overhead Green Goblin battle is a shapeless blur.

But it’s in the second act that internal logic disintegrates. That’s when Taymor’s interpolation from Ovid steps out of the shadows. A mortal who took on the Goddess Athena in a weave-off and won, Arachne (T.V. Carpio) was transformed into a spider. Exiled to the astral plane, she eyes Peter as the man-candy to end her loneliness.

Arachne launches her initial attack via an illusory band of supervillains dubbed the Sinister Six, whose “Ugly Pageant” is among the show’s more superfluous set-pieces. Their clashes with Spider-Man also expose the limited applications of stage ingenuity to this type of action, relying on filmed inserts that look like generic video-game samples.

The show really jumps the shark, however, in a number titled “Deeply Furious,” in which Arachne and her Furies go shoe-shopping before entering the human world. Seriously. The much-ballyhooed climactic face-off between Spidey and Arachne is now in place, but the diminishing returns of the airborne sequences rob the ending of excitement.

Like choreographer Daniel Ezralow’s flying work, George Tsypin’s designs also dilute their impact through repetition. Taking his cue from the Marvel superhero’s co-creator Steve Ditko by way of Fritz Lang, Tsypin fills the stage with looming skyscrapers and vertiginous columns, making striking use of forced perspective. Eiko Ishioka’s villain costumes plunder a different comic-strip source, borrowing their grotesque exaggerations from Dick Tracy. But the sameness and cluttered disharmony of the visuals becomes wearing.

The cast do fine within the limited scope of their roles, and Carney, Damiano and Carpio all have expressive voices. But only Page as the larger-than-life Osborn/Goblin fleshes out a character.

Spider-Man at least can be considered a success in making Broadway part of the pop-cultural conversation, and ticket sales have boomed. How long they will continue to do so is the question. For rubberneckers eager to see what the fuss is about, there may be enough noisy spectacle here to convince them they’ve seen something. But when this amount of time and money is tossed at a show, even demanding theatergoers should be awed, not bored.

Music and lyrics: Bono, The Edge
Book: Julie Taymor, Glen Berger
Director: Julie Taymor
Choreography/aerial choreography: Daniel Ezralow
Set designer: George Tsypin
Costume designer: Eiko Ishioka
Lighting designer: Donald Holder
Sound designer: Jonathan Deans
Projection designer: Kyle Cooper
Aerial design: Scott Rogers
Arrangements/orchestrations: David Campbell
Presented by Michael Cohl & Jeremiah J. Harris, Land Line Productions, Hello Entertainment/David Garfinkle/Tony Adams, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Norton Herrick and Herrick Entertainment, Billy Rovzar & Fernando Rovzar, Jeffrey B. Hecktman, Omneity Entertainment/Richard G. Weinberg, James L. Nederlander, Terry Allen Kramer, S2BN Entertainment, Jam Theatricals, The Mayerson/Gould/Hauser/Tysoe Group, Patricia Lambrecht, Paul McGuinness, by arrangement with Marvel Entertainment.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/spider-man-musical-review-chaotic-97241

Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark

2011-02-08T18:19:00.003+11:00

(Foxwoods; $140 top/$275 premium)

By Steven Suskin

A Michael Cohl & Jeremiah J. Harris (et al) presentation of a musical in two acts with music and lyrics by Bono and The Edge, book by Julie Taymor and Glen Berger. Directed by Taymor, choreography and aerial choreography by Daniel Ezralow. Music direction by Kimberly Grigsby.

With: Reeve Carney, Jennifer Damiano, T.V. Carpio, Patrick Page and a cast of 39.

After 10 playing weeks and some $12,500,000-worth of tickets, the attractions of "Spider-Man" are still in the spectacular physical production, and if the audience at Saturday's matinee preview was not standing and cheering, they still could be described as warmly appreciative. It's a work in progress, and creator Julie Taymor has been making changes through the preview period, and is reportedly planning to continue to rework the musical numbers (within the framework of the existing music and lyrics). Weaknesses lie with the book, music and lyrics, a kiss of death for most musicals; Taymor and her producers seem to think this a minor flaw, and initial box office returns suggest they might be right.

The Spider-people have compared their situation to a traditional pre-Broadway tryout, with months of changes prior to the Broadway opening; but in most other cases, the major activity is the time-consuming job of removing songs that don't work and writing replacements that will. With the exception of the opening number (which seems derived from music used elsewhere in the show), the current song-list is identical to preview #1; songwriters Bono and The Edge, who are off on a U2 tour, have indicated that they have not and will not write new songs.

At preview No. 64, the first major aerial sequence of the show, 42 minutes in, was halted by some tech glitches. Once airborne, though, the sequence is impressive, and the second is an amazing aerial fight waged over the heads of the patrons in prime orchestra seats. The second act flights are considerably less exciting, except for one with the resident spider woman and five other flying gals. This one is a visual feast, heightened by a combination of lights, projections, and colored webs.

Story, which follows four nerdy teenagers as they devise the adventures of a teenaged superhero from Queens, is sketchy and ill-formed. Some of the dialogue, by Taymor and Glen Berger, seems ad-libbed on the spot and there are a couple of big holes in the story. (A major plot development centers on photos taken of Spider-Man by Peter Parker, but how does he take close-ups of himself while he is fighting?)

The performers are somewhat smothered by effects. Jennifer Damiano, late of "Next to Normal," stands out as the embattled heroine; Matthew James Thomas, on as standby to leading man Reeve Carney, was perfectly likable. Otherwise, only Michael Mulheren manages to break through the material.

The music and lyrics are less of a score than an endless and repetitive soundtrack; it is something of a surprise when the second act suddenly provides two effective songs ("Turn Off the Dark," "If the World Should End"). Two lead guitarists stand on the stage-right apron throughout the performance, often looking bored. Presumably the changes will include intensive surgery on "Deeply Furious," the spiders-in-high-heels number which is fast developing into musical-theater legend.

Sidebar: Broadway Tryout

Variety has a longstanding practice of reviewing stage shows in out-of-town tryouts. This review is consistent with that, except that "out of town" in this case is in the center of Manhattan.

"Spider-Man" began previews Nov. 28, targeting a Dec. 21 bow. The opening was pushed to Jan. 11, then Feb. 7, and currently March 15. Facing hints that critics were planning to observe the Feb. 7 date, the producers last week protested that the show "will be ready for review when the artists who are creating this show deem it ready." Variety will run a complete review when the show officially opens.

For the record, despite a recent run-in with the New York City Dept. of Consumer Affairs, there was no visible signage at the Foxwoods (formerly Ford/Hilton) indicating that this was a preview performance and that refunds/exchanges were available.

Set, George Tsypin; costumes, Eiko Ishioka; lighting, Donald Holder; sound, Jonathan Deans; projections, Kyle Cooper; masks, Taymor; orchestrations, David Campbell; production stage managers, C. Randall White and Kathleen E. Purvis. Reviewed Feb. 5, 2011. Running time: 2 HOURS, 35 MIN (plus stoppage time).

http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117944526

Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark - the not-so-super hero of Broadway

2011-02-08T18:17:00.001+11:00

After the official press night of a troubled musical based on the classic Marvel comic book is postponed - yet again - The Daily Telegraph's theatre critic loses patience and buys a ticket to find out whether the show is as bad as they say. The answer: Yes, it is.

By Charles Spencer, Theatre Critic 10:00PM GMT 06 Feb 2011

Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark
Foxwoods Theatre, New York

Never mind turning off the dark. I spent much of this dreadful new musical muttering Please, Lord, make it stop.

And sometimes, miraculously, it did. Though the show has been previewing since last November, and audiences are being charged almost $300 for a top price ticket, the performance I saw on Saturday night twice ground to a halt in the first half. "Sorry folks, just a moment and we'll be back with you," a harassed voice announced over the public address system as the chief villain of the piece, the Green Goblin, dangled helplessly over the audience for several minutes, stuck on the wire on which he was supposed to be flying.

Just a few minutes earlier he and Spidey had to improvise to fill another hiatus as something else went wrong and the show was stopped. Spider-Man poured himself a glass of stage champagne only to receive a stern warning from the goblin. "Careful," said the actor Patrick Page. "You've got to fly over the heads of the audience and I hear they dropped a few," he joked in a reference to the accidents that have bedevilled this production, landing several actors in hospital with serious injuries. It was, by some distance, the most entertaining moment of the entire show.

After numerous postponements, Spider-Man still doesn't officially open until next month, but theatre critics are now breaking the embargo, deciding it is ridiculous not to review a show that has already been running for more than two months, and is doing huge business at the box office.

Technical hitches aside, there is no time to make major improvements now, and the musical strikes me as being beyond salvation.

The director Julie Taymor, who was responsible for the hugely enjoyable stage version of Disney's The Lion King, has come up with a dire script in collaboration with Glen Berger. Not only does she drag the ancient Greek myth of Arachne into the storyline, a brilliant weaver who was turned into a spider by the goddess Athena, she has also added a Geek Chorus (geddit?) of nerdy comic-book fans who are supposed to be making up the narrative as the show progresses. As a result the production often seems both baffling and pretentious. We are a long way here from the guilty pleasures of the Marvel comic-books and the terrific Spider-Man movies.

There's a leaden lack of humour about most of the script, and though the flying sequences are exciting when they work (and even more fun when they don't) there is nothing here to match the thrills, skills and sheer imagination of Cirque du Soleil at its best.

But perhaps the biggest bummer of all is the score, written by Bono and The Edge from U2, and containing not a single memorable song in the course of the show's punishing two-and-three-quarter hours. Simultaneously grandiose and banal, the music never really rocks and sounds like a series of rejected demos for an album that never got made. Sure, it creates a moody film-noir atmosphere at times, but where are the big take-home tunes?

The designs are impressive, conjuring up a dystopian vision of New York, and the cast perform as if they really believe in the dire material they are lumbered with. Reeve Carney has a winning charm and moments of real anguish as Peter Parker, the reluctant super-hero; Jennifer Damiano makes a sexy, spirited heroine as his girlfriend Mary Jane Watson and Page proves a splendidly camp over-the-top villain as the mad scientist Norman Osborn who is transformed into the even nastier Green Goblin.

Unfortunately none of their game efforts are enough to save this 65-million-dollar sinking ship, which goes down with all hands.

* One star

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/8306871/Spider-Man-Turn-off-the-Dark-the-not-so-super-hero-of-Broadway.html

The 10 worst musicals of all time

2011-01-05T21:33:00.001+11:00

Dominic Cavendish 12:01AM BST 24 Apr 2008

As the knives come out for 'Gone with the Wind', Dominic Cavendish looks back on the history of stage disasters

1 Carrie (1988)

This atrocious adaptation of Stephen King's novel - taken by the Royal Shakespeare Company to Broadway where it folded after 21 performances - remains the primus inter pares of the musical flop. King's story of a menstruating schoolgirl with telekenetic powers and a mad religious mother was served up with a ghastly gloop of rock-pop and fake blood. It was hailed as "a resounding mistake" in England and duly went on to be ferociously panned in New York, losing a neat $8 million.

2 Which Witch (1992)

The brainchild of Benedicte Adrian and Ingrid Bjornov - members of Norwegian pop group Dollie Deluxe - this "opera-musical" was a cod 16th-century tale of thwarted passion that culminated in the young Italian heroine being burnt at the stake as a witch. King Harald and Queen Sonja of Norway visited the Piccadilly Theatre to lend their support to "the most heavily panned London stage musical in a generation" - but it folded after 10 weeks. "Flops don't come much floppier," said the Telegraph. Nul points.

3 Bernadette (1990)

Described as "one of the most bizarre and spectacular failures in London musical theatre history", the show - naively expected to pack out the Dominion - was based on the story of Bernadette Soubirous, a young peasant girl who had visions of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes in 1858. It was written by a piano-tuner and his wife, financed by readers of the Daily Mirror and an ex-chauffeur and, astoundingly, the Pope blessed the cast. To no avail: it lasted three weeks.

4 The Fields of Ambrosia (1996)

A jaunty, taste-free US musical about capital punishment, set in the deep South in 1918. The hero, a state executioner, falls for a German femme fatale he's due to fry - and eventually sings the finale from his own electric chair. The Daily Mail described it as "the biggest turkey, the floppiest flopperoo, the greatest slice of ham to hit the West End stage in years". It didn't last a fortnight.

5 Jeeves (1975)

Even Andrew Lloyd Webber has had his off-days. Riding high after Jesus Christ Superstar and Joseph, the composer turned to Alan Ayckbourn to help bring the comic charm of Jeeves and Wooster to the stage, but the "heavy-handed affair" was denounced as "like a dream of all the Wodehouse novels combined in the ultimate ghastly weekend". It lasted 38 performances.

6 Moby Dick (1992)

"Sixth-form girls perform Herman Meville's novel in their school swimming-pool" - doesn't sound like a recipe for success, does it? And it wasn't. Scantily clad females, "Dick" jokes and a swiftly forgettable score saw this Cameron Mackintosh-backed extravangaza being harpooned by the critics. It survived 15 weeks at the Piccadilly Theatre before sinking below the waves.

7 Twang!! (1965)

Lionel Bart gave the world Oliver!. Five years later he also gave the world this troubled "burlesque" version of the Robin Hood legend. Director Joan Littlewood abandoned ship after the first regional try-out and Bart, against the advice of Noël Coward, invested his own fortune in the show. "The worst musical for years," chortled the critics. Bart was left in a state of financial ruin.

8 The Hunting of the Snark (1991)

Mike Batt, the producer of the Wombles records, gambled heavily and lost on his lavish adaptation of Lewis Carroll's nonsense epic poem. Batt wrote the book, music and lyrics and even gave Kenny Everett his West End moment as the Billiard Marker. A reported £2.1 million was spent on the show, which successfully emptied the Prince Edward theatre and bowed out after seven weeks.

9 Children of Eden (1991)

John Caird and composer-lyricist Stephen Schwartz (who gave the world Godspell) turned the Old Testament, from the Creation to the Flood, into a biblical concept show and created a holy mess, by most accounts. "Clearly God is miffed/He's left us all adrift" ran one lyric, summing up the ill-fated enterprise, which was cast out of the Prince Edward theatre after 10 weeks.

10 Oscar Wilde (2005)

Former Radio 1 DJ Mike Read's bio-musical account of the life of Oscar Wilde achieved special notoriety for surviving just one proper performance - press night - at the Shaw Theatre. Read, the Telegraph concluded, "passes golden genius through the filter of presumptuous mediocrity and produces over two hours of leaden dross".

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/3672844/The-10-worst-musicals-of-all-time.html

‘Phantom’ Sequel Going Underground While Changes Are Made

2010-10-23T14:17:00.000+11:00

October 22, 2010, 10:57 am
‘Phantom’ Sequel Going Underground While Changes Are Made
By DAVE ITZKOFF

Detractors of the “Phantom of the Opera” sequel, “Love Never Dies” — it has a few — who would like to see that Andrew Lloyd Webber musical shut down are about to get their wish, for a few days anyway. The West End production of “Love Never Dies” at the Adelphi Theater will close from Nov. 22 through Nov. 25 while its producers make changes to the show, the Web site Official London Theater reported.

In a statement at that site, Mr. Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group says, “Some changes were written up over the summer and destined for the Australian production, and as they make improvements to the show we’d be mad not to put them into the Adelphi.”

The statement did not describe those changes, but The Daily Mail of London reported that the lyricist Charles Hart, who worked with Mr. Lloyd Webber on the original “Phantom” as well as “Aspects of Love,” reworked some lyrics for “Love Never Dies,” and that the theater producer Bill Kenwright “will help put right some of its problems, which include the much-troubled ending.”

The Australian production of “Love Never Dies” is scheduled to open in Melbourne in May; its Broadway production has been indefinitely postponed from spring 2011.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/22/phantom-sequel-going-underground-while-changes-are-made/

Producers find no space in the city for a plethora of big-budget musicals

2010-10-16T16:46:00.000+11:00

Michaela Boland, National arts writer
From: The Australian
October 16, 2010 12:00AM

There aren't enough venues for the number of theatrical blockbusters heading our way

DURING the past decade Sydney was the home of musical theatre in Australia. The city boasts the nation's biggest population, the most tourists and the headquarters of leading media organisations.

Without too much trouble these attributes have been harnessed on many occasions to launch multimillion-dollar shows that have then travelled the nation and, at their best, toured internationally. Shows such as Dirty Dancing: The Classic Story Live on Stage, The Boy From Oz and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert: The Musical all opened in Sydney before national tours and an eventual tilt at the West End or Broadway, or both.

Disney Theatrical Australia elected to open The Lion King at the Capitol Theatre in Haymarket, Sydney, in 2004.

The producers of Billy Elliot the Musical in 2007 chose the same theatre for the Australian debut of their West End-hatched musical, a third version of which later opened on Broadway.

But now that has changed.

Andrew Lloyd Webber this week announced he had chosen Australia for the international debut of Love Never Dies, his sequel to The Phantom of the Opera.

The musical takes up the love story between the Phantom of the Paris Opera House and the object of his obsession, soprano Christine Daae, 10 years later at Coney Island in New York. Love Never Dies opened in London in March to mixed reviews.

The Australian version will be reworked by an Australian creative team led by director Simon Phillips and, if the new version works, Lloyd Webber's The Really Useful Group will consider Broadway. Love Never Dies, however, will open at Melbourne's Regent Theatre in May.

Likewise, Disney's second Australian musical Mary Poppins is now ensconced at Melbourne's Regent Theatre.

Jersey Boys, Wicked and Hairspray, the three other big expensive musicals in Australia, also opened in Melbourne.

The state government's Victorian Major Events Company offers enticements to lure the shows south and producers wax lyrical about the marketing support it provides.

The Really Useful Group managing director Tim McFarlane says: "It was always a very particular thing about the association of the Phantom and Melbourne." The original The Phantom of the Opera opened in Melbourne in 1990.

"That was really the prime motivator, but when you add on top of that the support you get in Melbourne as well from VMEC, Melbourne City Council, Tourism Victoria and patrons it is compelling," he says.

But there's another side to the story. Impresarios find Sydney downright hostile. "It's dire, it's really difficult to get a set of dates [in Sydney]. The problem is every show has to play Sydney and Melbourne to get its money back," producer John Frost says.

Producers all want their show to land at the 2000-seat Capitol Theatre, which boasts a busy city locale and street awnings that inform shoppers at the nearby bustling market that their show is in residence.

Second choice is the Star City Casino Lyric Theatre, which is comfortable and convenient but not exactly glamorous. Third choice for most producers is the Theatre Royal, where Jersey Boys is proving to be a hit despite limited street awnings, hectic one-way King Street traffic, dinky decor and the frequent rumbling of the subterranean railway.

By listing those three theatres, it implies there are choices available to producers in Sydney, but in this turbulent economy where well-made shows are finding strong audiences despite A-reserve tickets selling for $145, each of those theatres is booked.

The Capitol has bookings until 2015; the Lyric, which recently closed for three months for renovations, is just as busy.

Frost, who this year toured the play Calendar Girl, is producer of Wicked and Doctor Zhivago, which will open at the Lyric Theatre on February 19 next year.

He is developing musicals of An Officer and a Gentleman and Dream Lover, the Bobby Darin Story and he is producer of Fame the Musical, which premiered at Melbourne's Regent Theatre in April before a season in Brisbane.

Fame opened at the Capitol Theatre in Sydney on Thursday but only after a break necessitated by the fact there was no space in the city. Wicked was at the Capitol, Jersey Boys had booked the Theatre Royal and the Lyric was being renovated.

Enforced hiatuses on the national touring circuit are hitherto rare and always undesirable.

Wicked is in hiatus now. Having wrapped in Sydney, it cannot open in Brisbane until January.

Frost says he minimises costs by contracting cast and crew for each season, rather than for the entire run of the show, but they still need to re-rehearse before each season.

"I'm working as far out as 2014 and 2015, it's really hard to get dates, everyone's feeling it," he says. "Doctor Zhivago is only playing eight weeks in Sydney because it was all it could get, eight weeks in the whole year."

Next year Sydney theatres will prove to be a bigger logjam than this year.

Mary Poppins opens at the Capitol Theatre in May, the same month Hairspray is scheduled to arrive at the Lyric, and if Jersey Boys does as well in Sydney as it did in Melbourne, it will remain at the Theatre Royal until at least mid-year.

Love Never Dies had better work in Melbourne because a Sydney transfer will be impossible for some time. Likewise for the comic Broadway jukebox musical Rock of Ages, which opens at Melbourne's Comedy Theatre next April.

Global Creatures, the Australian company behind the Walking with Dinosaurs live show, which is scheduled to return for a national tour in April, is fortunate it plays arenas.

Canada's Cirque du Soleil will also tap the buoyant Australian economy next year with a return arena tour of Saltimbanco.

Frost says the solution is to build another theatre in Sydney, but that will take seven years. It's a job that should begin soon, however, because the Sydney Opera House's Opera Theatre is in need of substantial renovation, which will force out the Australian Ballet and Opera Australia for at least 18 months, probably longer.

McFarlane says the problem is not confined to Sydney, "theatre availability around the country for the next few years is really tough".

The producers of a new musical theatre production based on Olivia Newton-John's movie Xanadu have come up with a solution, however.

Xanadu will undergo a national tour from March next year in a 2000-seat grand chapiteau.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/producers-find-no-space-in-the-city-for-a-plethora-of-big-budget-musicals/story-e6frg6z6-1225939063690

Phantom fans say love should die

2010-10-16T15:37:00.000+11:00

By Cassie White

Updated October 15, 2010 13:53:00

Andrew Lloyd Webber's sequel to Phantom Of The Opera may not be the cash cow the Victorian Government had hoped for Melbourne, after it was dropped from Broadway and received scathing reviews in London.

Victoria is paying to bring Webber's Love Never Dies to Melbourne, where it will show at the Regent Theatre from May 2011.

But the production was delayed twice from its Broadway debut, then eventually dropped all together, and has been panned by critics in the US and London where it played at the Adelphi Theatre.

So the Victorian Government's decision to bring it to Melbourne has left some wondering why taxpayers should fund a stage show that no-one else wants.

When making the announcement, Victorian Government Minister Tim Holding said the production could add millions of dollars to Melbourne's economy.

"Over the last four years, blockbuster theatre shows such as Wicked, Jersey Boys and, currently, Mary Poppins have drawn hundreds of thousands of interstate and overseas visitors to Melbourne ensuring that our hotels, restaurants and famous retail precincts are busy throughout the year," he said.

"Securing the Australian premiere of Love Never Dies strengthens Melbourne's position as the theatre capital of Australia."

The script for Love Never Dies was written by British author Ben Elton and the Australian production will be revamped - led by Simon Phillips and choreographed by Graeme Murphy.

Phillips told The Age that the changes will boost the production's chances of succeeding in Australia.

"There are significant changes to the plot ... This makes it shorter with the longueurs chopped and allows the show to cut to the chase," he said.

But the existence of Love Never Dies has outraged some Phantom Of The Opera fans so much that they have created an anti-sequel group called Love Should Die (LSD).

One LSD member - who wishes to remain anonymous to avoid being harassed by fans of the sequel - cannot believe the Government has paid to bring it here.

"I'm appalled, I really am. It hasn't been stated how much money the Government is spending but I'm assuming it's a fair amount and I just can't believe they haven't looked into this properly before saying they'd fund it," she said.

"To me they couldn't have, because they would have seen that it's not doing any good in England, it was to open in America and it's not doing that now, so we're just going to be another experiment with it opening here.

"They're going to change some or all of the story to make it better; now if they have to do that to a musical isn't that telling the Government something? I just don't get why they haven't looked into it properly and thought 'no, our money can go better elsewhere'."

She describes the sequel as a "complete contradiction" to Phantom Of The Opera.

"It goes against everything that the first musical was. I wasn't against the idea of a sequel, I just thought it didn't need one in some ways because it had an ending and everyone who sees it goes away with their own views on how it ended, or what might have happened," she said.

"With the sequel, it comes along and tells you how it ended and it's just wrong in every way. The characters are wrong; the Phantom is now this namby-pamby person, Raoul's a drunk and a gambler, Christine's a whore, Meg's a killer - it's just ridiculous.

"I do realise people's lives can change in 10 years but this storyline is like a really bad fan fiction and it's just wrong.

"To me it's like Webber had this goal where he wanted to do a sequel regardless and just went bang, bang, bang there you go."

The Australian's theatre critic, Alice Croggon, says it is a mystery why the Victorian Government chose Love Never Dies after its poor track record overseas.

"It's good that the Victorian Government is interested in bringing productions like this to Melbourne and I don't want to criticise their enthusiasm for making Melbourne a cultural destination, which is what this is all about; bringing tourists in and big commercial events," she said.

"[But] it's slightly baffling that they've chosen this production though, it has to be admitted.

"Some of the English reviews have been hilarious. The West End Whingers christened it 'Paint Never Dries' and they weren't alone. It got pretty consistently bad reviews and not just from the critics.

"Online there were Phantom Of The Opera fans who [posted] hundreds of pages of mainly negative responses to the opera, which isn't such a good thing. So it certainly hasn't gone down especially well."

Mr Holding's office did not return ABC News Online's calls.

First posted October 15, 2010 13:32:00

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/10/15/3039506.htm?site=melbourne

Phantom success goes on

2010-10-16T15:35:00.000+11:00

Robin Usher
October 13, 2010

MELBOURNE'S status as Australia's natural home for musical theatre has taken a big leap forward with the decision by English composer Andrew Lloyd Webber to choose it as the home for a new production of his sequel to the world's most successful show, The Phantom of the Opera.

It means the current London production of Love Never Dies will have served as the out-of-town tryout for the revised Melbourne version, to open at the Regent Theatre next May.

''This will be a completely new show,'' Lloyd Webber said via video link from London yesterday to a media conference in Parliament House's Queen's Hall. ''Melbourne is the place I have chosen to develop this production and there is every chance it could go on to Broadway.''

He added there was also the prospect of touring to Asian capitals, if it worked.

The multimillion-dollar production will have an all-Australian backstage team led by Simon Phillips, the outgoing artistic director of the Melbourne Theatre Company and director of the home-grown international success Priscilla: the Musical, which is about to open in Toronto before a New York season next year.

The choreographer is internationally acclaimed Graeme Murphy and the set and costume designer is award-winning Gabriela Tylesova, who has worked for both the MTC and Opera Australia.

The show opened in London to mixed reviews last March and although it is still doing good business its proposed transfer to New York has been cancelled.

Tourism Minister Tim Holding said it was a coup for Melbourne to attract the show which, if successful, could add more than $40 million to Victoria's economy.

''Over the past four years blockbuster shows such as Wicked, Jersey Boys and Mary Poppins have drawn hundreds of thousands of interstate and overseas visitors to Melbourne,'' he said. ''We worked very hard to bring this show here.''

He said it was a tribute to the strategy adopted by the Victorian Major Events Company to be able to have several large-scale musicals running successfully at the same time.

Auditions for Love Never Dies begin on October 25. Lloyd Webber will be here in January to decide on final casting and will return in April as the production nears completion.

Phillips said from Toronto, where he is finishing rehearsals for the new Priscilla season, that the stakes were high with the new show, but improvements to the story increased the chances for success.

''There are significant changes to the plot,'' he said. ''This makes it shorter with the longueurs chopped and allows the show to cut to the chase.''

The story, by Ben Elton, is set on New York's Coney Island where Lloyd Webber says the Phantom has fled to be ''a freak amongst freaks'' 10 years after the famous chandelier crashed to the floor of the Paris Opera.

He said the character was obviously older but still charismatic with a voice to die for. His love, Christine, is a world-famous soprano in a failing marriage to Raoul. ''She is a marvellous singer but the acting demands are more complex.''

http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/opera/phantom-success-goes-on-20101012-16hsh.html

Search for a Phantom of the Opera star

2010-10-16T15:33:00.000+11:00

Sally Bennett
From: Herald Sun
October 14, 2010 12:00AM

THE search for the next Phantom has begun.

Love Never Dies, the sequel to Phantom of the Opera, will open at Melbourne's Regent Theatre next May.

The creative team for the all-Australian production is in place, all that's needed now is to find the stars.

Love Never Dies creator Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber said yesterday that all roles were up for grabs and he had no one in mind for the lead yet. "But I know exactly what we need," he said. "He's got to be a really charismatic figure and he's got to have a voice to die for.

"Of course Christine (the female lead) has got to be beautiful ... and she has to be the most marvellous singer."

Nationwide auditions for Love Never Dies, which fast-forwards the Phantom story 10 years, begin on October 25.

Possible candidates to play the Phantom include crooner David Campbell and theatre stars Bobby Fox (Jersey Boys) and Mitchell Butel (Avenue Q).

Female contenders for the lead role of Christine could include opera singers Annette O'Halloran and Taryn Fiebig.

The Australian production of Love Never Dies has a dream creative team in Simon Phillips as director, Graeme Murphy as choreographer and Gabriela Tylesova as set and costume designer.

It will come straight to Melbourne from London, where it made its world premiere in March.

Sir Andrew said he was excited about Phillips directing the show.

"Musical theatre today is international and it's about working with the best people in the best situations," he said in a broadcast from London to Melbourne's Parliament House for yesterday's launch.

"I'm really excited about the possibility of working with very talented people."

Sir Andrew said he would spend a lot of time in Australia from January until the premiere.

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/entertainment/search-for-a-phantom-of-the-opera-star/story-e6frf96f-1225938361783

Brand New Australian Production for Love Never Dies

2010-10-16T15:31:00.001+11:00

Mebourne has stolen the march on Sydney yet again, with the premiere of another musical blockbuster.

Stage Whispers Editor Neil Litchfield attended the media briefing at the Queen's Hall in Victoria's Parliament House.

Andrew Lloyd Webber today announced, via satellite link from London, that Australia will have an all new production of Love Never Dies, his continuation of the story of The Phantom of the Opera, with a new, Australian creative team.

Simon Phillips will direct the production, which begins previews at Melbourne's Regent Theatre in May 2011. Graeme Murphy will choreograph and the production will have a new design by Gabriela Tylesova.

After a preliminary speech from Victoria's Minister for the Arts Tim Holding listing the numerous sporting and cultural events taking place in Victoria, Lloyd Webber joked about following Tiger Woods into Melbourne with Love Never Dies.

Mr Holding was evasive about the precise amount the Victorian Government has paid to secure the production, but stressed that the flow-on benefits to the Victorian economy from interstate and regional tourism more than justified the outlay.

When host Ray Martin asked Lloyd Webber why Australia and why Melbourne, he replied:

"I have always had a very special relationship with Australia for my musicals. One particularly was Jesus Christ Superstar which, when it opened on Broadway, I was never very happy with. It was only when it came to Australia that it really took off. Of course the London production of Jesus Christ Superstar, directed by Jim Sharman, was based on the Australian one. So when Tim (McFarlane) said to me that Simon Phillips wanted to direct it, I just said, let’s do it."

Martin subsequently asked if Melbourne was going to become the new pre-Broadway, given that clearly there are changes he wants to make before going to New York or Los Angeles.

Lloyd Webber responded.

"No, I think that Melbourne will be the place where we can really finally develop the production I wanted to do. I don’t see it in any sense as an off-Broadway situation, any more than Jesus Christ Superstar, which opened originally in Sydney of course, then became the London production.

"I think today that musical theatre is international, and that it’s about working with the best people in the best possible situations. To think about London and Broadway as where you’re going to do something is out of date now. Some of the best theatre that’s happening around the world now is happening in places that are miles away from London or Broadway, so I’m really excited about the possibility of working with two really talented people. I’m not interested in talking about London or Broadway, just getting the best possible how and the best possible result."

Among Lloyd Webber's many Australian connections, Martin mentioned Ben Elton, now a Perth resident, in connection with the show's book.

"Ben is an old friend of mine," he replied, "and when we were talking about doing the sequel to The Phantom of the Opera, it was Ben who unlocked the story for me. I think the production that we’re going to be doing in Melbourne is going to take the story even further than we did in London. There’s one crucial thing which we’re going to make even more exciting. The whole thing is going to be, for me, like it’s a new show reborn."

All this discussion skirted politely around, yet pointed clearly to, the fact that the show, which received a disappointing critical response to its West End production in March, is undergoing quite a makeover.

Nationwide auditions commence in a fortnight, on Monday October 25, with Andrew Lloyd Webber visiting Australia for the final round of auditions in January, returning in April when the finishing touches are being put on the production. The auditions will follow conventional lines. Despite the success of reality TV auditions for the leads in recent Lloyd Webber West End productions, Australian networks haven't shown any interest.

Asked if there was a chance that if he loved our stars here, he might take them to Broadway, Lloyd Webber replied, “Well we didn’t do too badly with Sunset Boulevard with Hugh Jackman. Artists come from everywhere. That’s the extraordinary thing about today.”

Image: Andrew Lloyd Webber by satellite from London

loveneverdies.com.au/

http://www.stagewhispers.com.au/news/brand-new-australian-production-love-never-dies

Dark Knight Of The Soul

2010-09-27T14:39:00.002+10:00

Today:

41,290 hits after 4 years precisely!!

Yay!

Edit: Same day as Google's b'day, I never knew that

Spider-Man's sticky figures

2010-05-15T13:28:00.003+10:00

Costly B'way show may tour big arenas

Last Updated: 5:31 AM, May 14, 2010
Posted: 12:32 AM, May 14, 2010

Michael Riedel

MY favorite $50 mil lion target is swinging back into view.

"Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" (and bankrupt the theater) will go into rehearsals this summer, begin previews in October and open in November, theater sources say.

And by January, I bet it'll be the biggest financial disaster in Broadway history.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

First the news: Patrick Page has been offered the role of the Green Goblin. He'll replace Alan Cumming, who withdrew from the production a few weeks ago, citing scheduling conflicts.

Page is an old hand at being green and mean. He created the title role in "Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas."

Director Julie Taymor spent the week auditioning actresses to play Mary Jane. Taymor's first choice, Evan Rachel Wood, withdrew from the production last year, also because of "scheduling conflicts."

Cute little Reeve Carney is still on board as Spider-Man. I guess he's the only original cast member with nothing better to do.

As for the money, it is, believe it or not, in place. Michael Cohl, who was brought in by Bono, the show's composer, to sort out the financial mess, has put up a big chunk of it, and work has resumed at the Hilton Theatre, which has been torn apart to accommodate the gigantic set.

But Cohl doesn't want to be on the hook for the whole show, so he's quietly trying to lay off as much of his investment as he can.

If you're a stage-struck sucker, I hear you can get into "Spider-Man" for about $11 million.

"They're calling everybody," says a veteran producer. "They don't want to carry the whole thing on their backs."

The finances are, of course, laughable.

The show's weekly running cost is $850,000. And that's before royalty payments. Factor those in, and the weekly nut jumps to more than $1 million. A person who's crunched the numbers says "Spider-Man" will have to run five years -- at full capacity, and by selling lots of premium-priced seats -- just to earn back the $50 million production cost.

"It's a fantasy," this person says. "How many shows sell out every seat at every performance for five straight years?"

Cohl and his co-producers, including Marvel Comics, know this is true. And when they speak to potential suckers -- I mean investors -- they admit the show is unlikely to pay back on Broadway. But they say they'll clean up on the road.

Their plan is to launch the show here and then send it out on tour. But it's not going to play 1,500-seat theaters: It's going to play 10,000-seat sports arenas.

"They're trying to sell it as a rock concert," says a producer. "But you're not going to sell out a 10,000-seat basketball stadium unless Bono and The Edge are playing the songs. Basically, it's gotta be a U2 concert. Nobody's going to sit in nosebleed seats to see a Broadway musical."

"Spider-Man" collapsed last summer when David Garfinkle, the hapless lead producer, failed to come up with the money. Other, more experienced producers took a look at the show but concluded that the finances were "insane" (as one said at the time) and that, when it came to budget-busting spending, Taymor was worse than Greece.

Not a whole lot has changed since. True, Garfinkle's been sidelined and Cohl's now in charge. But even he's not going to rein in Taymor.

And when "Spider-Man" goes into previews -- and once overtime for the hordes of stagehands kicks in -- watch that production cost soar to $60 million.

Bono and The Edge better tune up their guitars.

michael.riedel@nypost.com

http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/theater/spider_man_sticky_figures_FMvwejmJ4Ndm220au85j0M

Batman: Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You (They linked to Dark Knight Of The Soul)

2010-04-27T19:12:00.003+10:00

Batman: Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You
The Dark Knight is hitting the stage -- no, not the sound stage.
by Jim Vejvoda
US, April 25, 2010 - Move over, Phantom. Here comes Batman.

Warner Bros., DC Comics, and two of the companies behind the touring stage shows Walking With Dinosaurs and Mamma Mia! are in the early stages of developing Batman Live, a stage show rendition of the Dark Knight Detective. But according to The Hollywood Reporter, don't expect the Dark Knight to burst into showtunes or grace the Great White Way. "The show is neither a musical nor a Broadway-bound theatrical production but rather an elaborate arena production aimed at kids and families," said the trade.

Animation vets Alan Burnett (Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, Green Lantern: First Flight) and Stan Berkowitz (Superman/Batman: Public Enemies, Justice League: The New Frontier) are crafting the script, which will reportedly feature multiple villains.

THR adds that Batman Live will debut either in 2012 after Christopher Nolan's Batman 3 opens or sometime prior to it in 2011.

Years ago, former Batman director Tim Burton tried to stage Batman: The Musical but the project was aborted.

http://au.movies.ign.com/articles/108/1086029p1.html

Warner Bros., DC Comics developing 'Batman Live' stage show (exclusive)

2010-04-27T19:04:00.000+10:00

April 25, 2010

A Batman stage show soon might be swooping to a town near you.

Warner Bros. and DC Comics are in the early stages of developing a tour, tentatively titled "Batman Live" and starring the Caped Crusader, working with Nick Grace Management and Water Lane Prods., companies behind the popular "Walking With Dinosaurs" and "Mamma Mia!" touring shows.

The show is neither a musical nor a Broadway-bound theatrical production but rather an elaborate arena production aimed at kids and families.

Alan Burnett, a longtime animation veteran whose credits include Batman and Superman television shows as well as such animated movies as "Batman: Mask of the Phantasm" and "Green Lantern: First Flight," is writing the story and script. The logline is being kept under wraps, but it's known that the show will feature numerous villains.

Warner Bros. Consumer Products is spearheading the project, whose deals with NGM and WLP are licensing agreements. Other partners might come aboard.

The credentials of NGM and WLP are well-known in the stage world. The award-winning "Dinosaurs" show, for example, boasted intricate dinos and sets, and the tours generated tens of millions of dollars, consistently ranking near the top of Pollstar's annual ranking.

No timeline for the "Batman" show is set, though one scenario involves aiming to come out after Christopher Nolan's third "Batman" movie in 2012. Another scenario has it opening in 2011.

Mounting any type of stage production featuring a superhero can be tricky -- just look at the on-again, off-again Spider-Man Broadway musical -- but Batman could be the first DC Comics character with his own touring stage show. His erstwhile colleague Superman was the center of a Broadway show in 1966, but it closed after a few months despite fairly positive reviews.

Warners' consumer products division declined comment.

Burnett is repped by the Arlook Group.

http://www.heatvisionblog.com/2010/04/batman-live-stage-show-warner-bros-dc-comics.html

'Phantom' menace: Sequel is shaky

2010-03-13T16:54:00.002+11:00

Webber show off to rough start in UK

Last Updated: 11:59 AM, March 12, 2010
Posted: 3:53 AM, March 12, 2010

Michael Riedel

At the opening of Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Love Never Dies" Tuesday night, I ran right into the composer's wife, Madeleine.

Beautiful and clever, Madeleine's always quick with a quip.

"Michael," she said, smiling. "You've come a long way -- to trash us."

No, no, Madeleine. I'm just here to report on the premiere and dole out a little gossip. We'll leave the trashing to the Internet chatters -- whose early salvo, "Paint Never Dries," will haunt this show forever -- and the critics, some of whom have taken up their assignment with gusto. The Times of London, The Evening Standard and The New York Times dismissed this $12 million sequel to "The Phantom of the Opera" as an unsalvageable wreck.

But other critics enjoyed it. The Telegraph raved about the score and the creepy production; The Independent called it "phabulous."

Response among insiders was mixed as well. A New York investor announced, "I can kiss my 25,000-pound investment goodbye." Another said, "Great score, but there's a lot of tweaking to do." A top London producer added, "They've got to work on the story. It's so predictable."

"Love Never Dies," set to open on Broadway in November, takes the Phantom to Coney Island, where he runs a freak show. Still obsessed with Christine, he lures her to New York. She arrives with her husband, Raoul, who's a drunken gambler, and her son, Gustave, whose father may be Raoul or -- de-da-de-dum! -- the Phantom. (Said a wag, "They should call it 'Who's Your Daddy?' ")

That the musical's generating such a grab-bag response may be due to the fact that even some of the creators don't think it's ready yet. The Americans on board -- director Jack O'Brien ("Hairspray") and choreographer Jerry Mitchell ("Legally Blonde") -- were frustrated that they had only two weeks of previews to stage such a huge spectacle. They begged for more time, sources say, but Lloyd Webber's minions were concerned that postponing the opening would generate even more negative chatter.

And the previews were rocky. Anyone who works on a Lloyd Webber show will tell you there's always a moment when the Great Man throws a Great Fit. During a rehearsal of "Woman in White," the leading lady spoke a note instead of singing it and Lloyd Webber threatened to take his score home. (I'm told they now keep two copies of a Lloyd Webber score in the pits of his shows as a precaution.)

On "Love Never Dies," he reportedly became so frustrated, he muttered, "I'm just going to write a check for 10 million pounds and close the show."

He's also butted heads with O'Brien, who's no pushover. O'Brien once told the ensemble to play their parts subtly. Then Lloyd Webber came around and said everybody should play it up. An exasperated O'Brien, sources say, threw up his hands and said, "I don't know what he wants!"

There's a rumor swirling here that O'Brien and Mitchell may leave the show before it opens in New York. (It's said they took the job for the money, although I refuse to believe anyone would work on an Andrew Lloyd Webber show for anything but the art.) Hal Prince, who directed the original "Phantom," is whispered to be waiting in the wings.

I ran that by Andre Ptaszynski, who runs Lloyd Webber's empire, The Really Useful Group. He said, "The mention of Hal Prince is a stunner to Andrew and me. No such thing was anywhere on the radar. Why would it be? We love Jack and are very pleased with his work, though, as is often the case, there is a further mile to go."

Ptaszynski also said the creators met Wednesday to pore over the reviews and "discussed the work we and Jack would like to do before the show opens on Broadway."

A big issue, sources say, is the opening scene, which is slow and confusing.

Another, much deeper problem is the Phantom himself. In the original, he's mysterious, sensual and terrifying. This time around, he cries a lot. And his first entrance isn't an entrance. He's at a piano, scribbling. He's got a killer first song -- the soaring " 'Til I Hear You Sing Once More" -- but he needs a thrilling entrance. (In the original, he materializes in the mirror.) When I mentioned this to someone working on the show, he snapped, "Tell that to Jack O'Brien."

Ramin Karimloo, who plays the Phantom, sings beautifully, but as critics have mentioned, he's bland. You come expecting Michael Crawford and you get Gerard Butler's stand-in.

Nobody here thinks the mixed verdict will stop Lloyd Webber from bringing "Love Never Dies" to Broadway. He's the richest composer in theater history precisely because he's thumbed his nose at the critics and gone straight to the people who matter: the paying public.

But it's clear there's work to be done. And from what I'm hearing, it's going to be a white-knuckle ride. Just like the Cyclone at Coney Island.

michael.riedel@nypost.com

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/theater/webber_show_off_to_rough_start_in_ppIUFX4Nca3lULbFTAkZNN

Andrew Lloyd Webber insists it’ll be all right on the night

2010-03-06T20:04:00.001+11:00

From The Times
March 6, 2010

Ben Hoyle, Arts Correspondent

Some of the most successful musicals of all time would never have survived to become long-running favourites if they had premiered in the digital age, according to Andrew Lloyd Webber.

The Times reported yesterday that although Love Never Dies — his sequel to The Phantom of the Opera — does not open until Tuesday, it has already been denounced by so-called “phans” all over the globe. Some have seen the West End preview, but many have not.

Speaking yesterday during rehearsals at the Adelphi Theatre, on the Strand in London, he said that the internet had made life much more difficult for anyone trying to bring an ambitious new stage production to the public.

He says that Love Never Dies is one of the best things he has ever done. “It’s the score that I’ve put the most into,” he said. “Those people that have heard it think that we are trying to do something completely new. Tim [Rice, his writing partner on many of his early hits, but not this musical] thinks it’s one of the best librettos I’ve ever had. I don’t think anything like this has been created for a long while.”

Love Never Dies, which moves the action on ten years and transports it from Paris to Coney Island, New York, has been developing for years.

But with days to go until the opening night, it clearly irks him that the show is having to do battle with the internet, where fan sites and theatre chat rooms act as a global echo chamber for a minority of opinionated audience members, as well as providing an easy opportunity for industrial sabotage.

“What we really have to consider is all this stuff on the net,” he said. “It’s a very worrying situation for anybody now who’s opening any kind of play or musical.”

“Three years ago I was alerted [to the potential for sabotage] with somebody else’s musical theatre production. It was discovered by various machinery that another producer was knocking it [on the internet]. Everybody knows a little about this in the theatre.

“At that time I put a ban out to everybody who was working directly or indirectly with me that we will not post anything on the web to do with any production in the West End because it’s very dangerous.”

Does he believe that this practice is still widespread? “Yes.” Does it explain some of the comments aimed at Love Never Dies? “No.”

The evidence collected by Lloyd Webber’s digital team suggests that the critics with “vested interests” in this case are not rival producers but “phans”. He suspects that they are people who have seen the original Phantom hundreds of times and have developed an obsessive relationship with the show.

“What’s happening is that this small number of people have now got this marketplace where they can be the Benedict Nightingale [The Times’s veteran chief theatre critic] of the day.”

What they ignore is that previews are not the same thing as the finished article, Lloyd Webber added. Audiences should understand that they are watching a work in progress. “It is a problem now because if you go back in history, I dread to think what anybody would have said about the first preview of Cats, or, frankly, Les Misérables, which was a huge undertaking and wasn’t right at the beginning.

“Cameron [Mackintosh] and Trevor Nunn bravely got it through and, despite not very good reviews, it turned into one of the biggest musicals of all time. If anybody [with access to the internet] had seen the first preview of Cats I think it would have been closed.

The internet has changed the rules of the game and it has fallen to Love Never Dies to test the water. “Wicked, which is probably the biggest musical in the world right now, when that started there were a lot of Wizard of Oz fans who objected to it,” says Lloyd Webber.

“There’s a whole sad culture around the world of people who seem to only live by the old Phantom of the Opera,” he said. “But I suspect in a year’s time most of those, if they come to see thiss, will understand and enjoy it.”

Lloyd Webber is fully aware that a flop could tarnish his most successful creation, but he is quietly confident ahead of Tuesday night’s world premiere, whatever the critics decide.

“Phantom got some terrible reviews. The Sunday Times called it “masked balls” and that was it. But the point is that by opening night we knew we were away. I will know on Tuesday whether we’ve got a worldwide hit or not.”

Audiences might be best advised to hold off a little bit longer if they wish to see the new show at its best.

“There’s an old adage,” Lloyd Webber said, rather surprisingly. “Never go and see a musical until a month after it opens.”

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/article7052118.ece

Lloyd Webber sequel incurs scorn of online ‘phans’

2010-03-06T18:01:00.000+11:00

From The Times
March 5, 2010

Ben Hoyle, Arts Correspondent

Opening night is still four days away but Andrew Lloyd Webber’s sequel to The Phantom of the Opera is already threatening to stake an unwanted claim to theatre history.

Love Never Dies may well be the most pre-emptively vilified show yet. Vicious verdicts began popping up online immediately after previews started at the Adelphi in London on February 22. They have kept coming, attacking the singing, the music, the lyrics, the story by Ben Elton and Frederick Forsyth, the set, the ticket prices and various endings tried so far.

Perhaps the internet and the borderline obsessive protectiveness that many people feel towards the original musical made that inevitable. Before anyone had seen the show, die-hard “phans” were bombarding the inboxes of theatre critics and reporters in London and New York with complaints about its very existence.

One influential theatre blog parodied the show as “Paint Never Dries”, describing it as tedious and gloomy with inaudible singing and an “interminably drawn-out finale”. The discussion boards of the theatre news website What’s On Stage (owned by Lloyd Webber’s company The Really Useful Group) had 62 pages of comments as of yesterday afternoon, viewed more than 70,000 times. The most recent posting, from someone who declared themself to be a “big fan” of the original, called the show “appalling, appalling, appalling”.

Alistair Smith, news editor of The Stage, said that the industry has been taken aback by the criticism. “I think this is a genuine new phenomenon and we can’t yet tell what effect it will have [on the show’s prospects]. There are probably only two shows that people are this obsessed with: Phantom and Les Misérables. These people develop a sense of ownership and feel it’s their show, not the composer’s.”

Those obsessive audiences are the bedrock of the original Phantom’s success. As the publicity material puts it, Phantom is “the most succesful single piece of entertainment of all time” with a box office gross of more than £2 billion. Lloyd Webber has not had a hit on anything like that scale since but neither has anybody else. He is sufficiently aware of the threat posed to the global target market by the criticism to have a team of people analysing the online chatter for him.

Andre Ptaszynski, chief executive of The Really Useful Group and a producer for Love Never Dies, said that negative online reviews “probably can be really damaging” but after a difficult start 80 per cent of the total comment was favourable.“All the online comment was confirming what we knew was wrong,” he said. “On Monday two weeks ago they were saying, ‘the last scene is really dreadful’. It was the first time we’d done it in front of an audience . But we have tried at least three versions since and now it really works.” The show has taken advance bookings of £9 million on a production cost of £6 million. Dates are pencilled in for the US, Asia and Australia, pending a decision likely to be based “more on popular reaction than critical reaction”, he said. “Andrew has been one of the easiest targets in popular cultural life for decades. Critics often take the high ground and ignore that his work is incredibly popular.”

Previous Lloyd Webber premieres

Jesus Christ Superstar, New York, October 14, 1971: “It all rather resembled one’s first sight of the Empire State Building. Not at all uninteresting but somewhat unsurprising and of minimal artistic value. The total effect is brilliant but cheap”

Aspects of Love, London, April 17, 1989: “The opening number, Love Changes Everything, consists of a blandly repeated six-note phrase over two chords. Another innocuous little phrase accompanies George’s favourite slogan, ‘Life goes on, love is free’. Lloyd Webber then goes on to exploit this as if he had hit on the Grail motif from Parsifal”

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/article7050528.ece

Phantom phone calls

2010-03-06T17:54:00.001+11:00

Michael Coveney:

Everyone I know seeems to have seen Love Never Dies already, and comment on the score is flowing freely through the newspapers and on the blogosphere.

Critics have listened to the score and the Press previews are starting on Saturday.

So once again the whole idea of a First Night next Tuesday is a wash-out. And the peculiar thrill of being able to say “I was there” when the show opened is blown away on the wind.

I know from reliable colleagues like Baz Bamigboye and Edward Seckerson that the new score is a peach, Well, I know it for myself and, without preempting later critical comment, I am intensely looking forward to hearing “live” the eerie dissonance of the song the Phantom can’t express until, ten years after they parted, he hears Christine sing again.

The title song of “Love Never Dies” is in its third incarnation. I first heard it at Lloyd Webber’s fiftieth birthday party, when Kiri Te Kanawa sang it to lyrics by Don Black (”The Heart is Slow to Learn”).

Then it cropped up again in The Beautiful Game, lyrics by Ben Elton, as “Our Kind of Love.” And now Glenn Slater’s lyrics return the song to the dramatic context is was written for, when the Phantom sequel was a twinkle in the composer’s eye.

All great composers re-write their main material. Prokofiev’s opera The Fiery Angel comes back as his brilliant Third Symphony. Beethoven and Rossini never wasted and wanted not.

So Lloyd Webber is merely following some familiar precedents. Making a joke of this, someone spots Oscar Hammerstein in the popular throng at the fairground.

But he’s also been liberated, I think, by this new fairground setting on Coney Island, with hurdy-gurdies and lovely girlies, a fantatstically complex and interesting quartet deep into the second act, and the pounding rock of “Beauty Underneath” that sounds like a Bonnie Tyler song, very much in Whistle Down the Wind mode.

I’m a bit worried by the crude melodrama of the denouement, and disappointed to learn that Bob Crowley’s design is based on projections rather than mechanical structures, but one can only judge that sort of thing in performance.

But the revelation of the Phantom’s tryst with Christine on her wedding eve in the opera house, their one night of guilty passion, is beautifully unravelled in “Beneath a Moonless Sky.”

I agree with those who don’t think much of the title, and the absence of star names could still hurt the show. Mind you, what show, I asked myself when I stood outside the Adelphi last night before the opening of Private Lives next door at the Vaudeville.

There’s no front of house, no buzz, no-one buying tickets, no sign of anything.

It wasn’t like that first time round. The Phantom of the Opera opened at Her Majesty’s on Thursday 9 October 1986, with a thrilling star performance by Michael Crawford in the title role; it was a night of sex, glamour, wonderful costumes and soaring melody, something missing from the West End for quite some time back then.

Even before Crawford was announced — on a lunchtime radio news programme, I seem to recall - the title song had been recorded as a video by Ken Russell and launched on Terry Wogan’s television chat show. The recording was made by Sarah Brightman and Steve Harley, of Cockney Rebel fame, and it climbed to Number Seven in the charts.

Simultaneously, Cliff Richard joined Sarah in releasing “All I Ask of You” as a single. Then Crawford — who really was a very big star — was announced, and the box office went crazy, and stayed that way for twenty years.

The late, much lamented designer Maria Bjornson, who has been touchingly evoked by Lloyd Webber in the pre-publicity, always maintained that the power of Phantom as a love story was down to the fact that Lloyd Webber never possessed Sarah completely.

He loved her, of course, and they were married probably in order for him to write the show. There was also the ghost of his dead father in there somewhere, the angel of music, perhaps.

It remains to be seen if the composer has reactivated that inspiration in quite the same way, or perhaps even gone beyond it. We shan’t know for sure till the middle of next week.

http://blogs.whatsonstage.com/2010/03/04/phantom-phone-calls/

ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER: I STILL TAKE RISKS

2010-03-06T17:46:00.000+11:00

Friday March 5,2010

By Simon Edge

THE feverish atmosphere is almost unprecedented but not quite in the way the marketing people wanted. Next Tuesday sees the official opening of Love Never Dies, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s massively hyped sequel to his stage musical The Phantom Of The Opera, and it’s clear the show has a maze of dripping catacombs to wade through if it’s to win critical or commercial success.

The first preview was cancelled due to “technical demands” and since then advance audiences have clogged internet bulletin boards with negative feedback. Much of this comes not from Lord Lloyd-Webber’s usual detractors but from diehard Phantom fans who think a sequel is sacrilege. One reviewer reports getting daily e-mails as part of a guerrilla campaign to influence the notices, saying: “This has never happened to me in 26 years as a professional critic.”

There’s no doubt that the 61-year-old Lord Lloyd-Webber of Sydmonton is taking a big risk with the new show. But for someone who has just stared death in the face during a successful battle with prostate cancer the gamble is perhaps not such a big deal.

Lloyd Webber himself stresses that writing Love Never Dies predates his brush with death. “I had completed the score before I learned that I had prostate cancer,” he tells me. “I had long wanted to do a sequel to Phantom and not to any other of my shows because I felt that the way the original show ends is an unfinished story waiting to be told.”

But it’s not hard to relate the steely defiance that characterises his current project with the gritty determination to triumph over a form of cancer that kills one man every 13 minutes.

The original Phantom, which opened in London in 1986, has notched up more than 9,500 performances in the West End alone. It’s also Broadway’s longest-ever running show, has been seen by 100 million people worldwide in 149 cities across 25 countries and can claim to be the most successful single piece of entertainment of all time, surpassing ET, Titanic and Star Wars.

While film studios are always quick to trot out sequels to successful movies the stage musical equivalent is much rarer. Why bother when you can just roll out more productions across the globe? And whereas fans of Star Wars or Batman can be guaranteed to queue up for the next instalments in the franchise, musical theatre obsessives prefer to see the same show over and over – and they don’t want to see it dragged down by a potentially sub-standard follow-up.

SDLqWe feel strongly that Love Never Dies is a completely misguided venture that is a detriment to the story of the original Phantom Of The Opera,” say the organisers of a Facebook group cheekily called Love Should Die.

“It is not in the interest of or desired by the story’s many fans. Virtually everything about the show strikes us as illogical, irrational, offensive and frankly stupid. While there is little that can be done at this stage to stop the show from reaching the stage at all we aim to provide a platform for the many people out there who maintain that this should never have been given the green light.”

But it’s not surprising that such criticism does not deter a man who has just fought off a life-threatening illness.

The first sign that something was wrong came during the winter of 2008. The father-of-five was rehearsing and recording the score of Love Never Dies at his home in Majorca when he noticed he had a weak bladder. “Throughout the night I was desperate to go to the bathroom,” he recalls. “It was little but far too often. I had an irritating burning sensation, which I put down to a mild infection.”

Back in London he went to his GP for tests but no infection showed up. Only after reading an article about the symptoms of prostate cancer did he go for a specialist consultation and was referred to the private London Clinic for a biopsy. There followed a surreal episode where he was advised to leave by a back door to avoid a gaggle of paparazzi. He assumed they were waiting for him and it was only when he opened the papers the next morning that he realised they really wanted Amy Winehouse, who was suspected of having a boob job at the same clinic.

W hen he did finally get his cancer diagnosis he was urged by his PR team to hush it up and say he was simply run down. But he dismissed this secretive instinct. “Why? I thought. I have prostate cancer. Women talk about breast cancer. Look at Kylie.

“I suspect men are deeply embarrassed about any problem that suggests it affects their libido or masculinity. My specialist is certain that lives are lost because the symptoms can be the kind of stuff that the average macho male is embarrassed by. This is barmy. If the cancer is only in the prostate it is not going to kill you. But once it is big enough to take a trip out of your prostate, walk around your bones, your liver, your spinal cord, other complications begin.”

He decided to have surgery rather than laser treatment but a string of complications, including scarring from a botched appendicitis procedure when he was three years old, meant a relatively simple operation became a painful saga.

But he was eventually given the all-clear. “It is the hugest relief,” he says. “We have arrived at the end of a long journey at the best possible outcome.”

Although he was urged to take things easy he has plunged back into his work, including his latest series for the small screen. “I think the BBC casting series have proved that using television to find stars can work very well for the theatre,” he tells me, referring to the TV talent contests to cast productions of The Sound Of Music, Joseph and Oliver! in which he has emerged as a cuddlier, less scathing version of Simon Cowell.

“Five of our finalists for I’d Do Anything [the Oliver! contest] went on to star in West End productions and I hope we can repeat that success with the new series Over The Rainbow, which will search for a Dorothy to star in a new production of The Wizard Of Oz,” he says.

But his main energies have been channelled into Love Never Dies.

“He’s on a hiding to nothing because how do you improve on the most successful work in entertainment history?” says Mark Shenton, theatre critic of the Sunday Express and the West End’s most influential blogger. “I suspect he’s doing it because Phantom is such a personal story for him. There are obvious autobiographical echoes in a composer becoming obsessed with a soprano, particularly given that Christine in the original show was first played by Sarah Brightman, who was his wife at the time.”

The composer could easily rest on his extraordinary global successes, including Evita, Cats and Starlight Express as well as Phantom, rather than risk the jibes that will accompany failure.

“People judge him by a unique standard,” says Shenton. “The Beautiful Game was considered a flop but it ran for a year. So was Sunset Boulevard, which ran for two years, and Whistle Down The Wind, which ran for three. He has been so successful that people expect him to have huge hits but the truth is the last time he had a blockbuster that went global was Phantom.”

However the sequel, or “continuation” as Lloyd Webber calls it, shapes up on opening night, his willingness to expose himself to failure continues to impress admirers and critics alike. “It takes a lot to write a musical and I think he wants to prove he can still do it,” says one insider, who describes the score of the new show as “amazingly good”, while holding reservations about some of the casting.

“Andrew is remarkable for remaining the same throughout the months of anxiety and pain that his illness has caused him and it’s entirely in character that his determination to triumph over cancer is mirrored in his willingness to take on those who say he can’t do a successful sequel to Phantom,” he says.

Love Never Dies is at the Adelphi Theatre, London. For tickets call 0844 412 4651 or visit www.loveneverdies.com

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/161742/Andrew-Lloyd-Webber-I-still-take-risks-

Check this out

2010-02-28T04:44:00.001+11:00

Most interesting, most interesting indeed

http://www.garygoddard.com/hospitality-design/phantasy-resort-and-casino/

Ryan.

New Phantom's shaping up nicely

2010-02-28T04:35:00.001+11:00

By Baz Bamigboye
Last updated at 1:22 AM on 26th February 2010

Andrew Lloyd Webber's score for Love Never Dies soars and I can't get it out of my head - but as 'the good lord' himself observed after the first preview on Monday, 'there's still work to be done'.

He added: 'We're halfway there.'

When I returned to the show on Wednesday some changes had been put in, but director Jack O'Brien, lyricist Glenn Slater, designer Bob Crowley, choreographer Jerry Mitchell and others are concentrating on getting the prologue and the ending right.

They want to trim the prologue to get to a number called The Coney Island Waltz faster.

The ending, which I'm not giving away here, is clumsy and the best minds in theatreland are trying to fathom how to re-stage it.

There are also other moments in Act 1 that are being re-examined, particularly when audiences first see the Phantom. It's an underwhelming moment. We've got to be knocked out by it!

The first song Ramin Karimloo's Phantom sings is Till I Hear You Sing and it's a plaintive cry to see Christine Daae again.

He 'aches down to the core' because he hasn't heard her sing for ten years.

And while Karimloo has a fabulous baritone that stops the show, he doesn't have the showbusiness artistry that Michael Crawford displayed as the original stage Phantom.

That's being worked on.

Sierra Boggess is a true star with Broadway smarts and when she comes on in the second act to sing the title song, she knocks it out of the park, to use the parlance of one of my theatrical friends. It's a terrific melody, beautifully sung.

I've mentioned this in passing before, but the composer explains in the programme how he wrote Love Never Dies (Slater penned the lyrics years later) a long time ago and used it for a song recorded by Kiri Te Kanawa under the title The Heart Is Slow To Learn.

He later used the chorus of the melody for a number in The Beautiful Game, but it was cut.

It fits in just fine as Love Never Dies. Lloyd Webber has created melodies that will last. The creative team have a lot of work to do in different areas but they are confident they will have it all done by official opening night of March 9.

'It's not as if we have songs and storylines to rewrite. It's a question of staging and tweaking,' was how it was put to me.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1253858/Madonna-signs-Abbie-Cornish-new-film-Edward-VIIIs-abdication.html#ixzz0gcWUXqYQ

'Phantom' lives to 'Love' again

2010-02-28T04:31:00.000+11:00

Musical sequel wades into high-risk waters

By DAVID BENEDICT

The longest runner in Broadway history and London's second-longest after world record holder "Les Miserables," "The Phantom of the Opera" has amassed global grosses of more than $2.63 billion. With box office revenues higher than for any film or stage play in history, including "Titanic," "E.T." and "Star Wars," it has been seen in 144 cities in 27 countries by more than 100 million people.

Thus the most daunting problem for Andrew Lloyd Webber's follow-up, "Love Never Dies," is great expectations.

The official line from Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Group is that the latest musical is not a sequel but a "continuation" of "The Phantom of the Opera."

And small wonder -- outside of three "Nunsense" follow-ups, musical theater has never pulled off a hit sequel. The shortlived "The Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public" and the even shorter "Bring Back Birdie" (four perfs) stand as evidence.

On the plus side, Lloyd Webber's £6 million ($9.25 million) new tuner arrives with a readymade marketing hook via all those potential ticketbuyers who have already bought into the story -- having experienced "the brilliant original," the phrase currently emblazoning London posters for "Phantom."

Helmer Jack O'Brien ("Hairspray," "The Coast of Utopia") has been on board for about 2 1/2 years. He's clear-eyed about the pros and cons of this unique property.

"No one will thank us for doing this," he tells Variety. "I have said that since the beginning. This is not something you do as a lark, without a sense of responsibility. Whatever one thinks of the first show, it has gone into the imaginative repertoire of its audience."

O'Brien points out that according to Lloyd Webber, when "Phantom" opened in 1986, the smart money was on rival tuner "Chess." The latter premiered five months earlier but only managed a run just shy of three years. "'Phantom' just slipped in," says O'Brien. "Then whatever happened, happened."

He believes the original's global success means the new show will be scrutinized "probably unfairly," but O'Brien remains buoyant. The book -- on which he worked alongside a slew of collaborators past and present including Frederick Forsyth, Ben Elton and lyricist Glenn Slater -- is set 10 years after "Phantom" amid the eerie fairgrounds of Coney Island. The aim is not unlike the sequel-meets-prequel approach of "The Godfather Part II," which improved upon the original.

These days, Lloyd Webber is arguably more famous as a showbiz mogul than as a composer (his most recent new tuner, "The Woman in White," was not a financial success). Not only did he produce Jeremy Sams' hit revival of "The Sound of Music," he made himself immensely visible -- and successful -- as "The Lord" on primetime BBC TV, judging talent shows that cast leads in his productions. (Lloyd Webber will revisit that role later this year, casting his forthcoming revamp of "The Wizard of Oz," skedded for 2011.)

For "Love Never Dies," he has eschewed TV casting, instead hiring Ramin Karimloo as the Phantom (he has played the role in the original onstage) with Sierra Boggess ("The Little Mermaid") as Christine.

Lack of TV pre-sell, however, hasn't harmed bookings. Where "The Woman in White," opened in London in 2004 to a $4.6 million advance, "Love Never Dies" currently stands at $12.3 million. That said, the figure wilts in comparison with Cameron Mackintosh's 2009 "Oliver!" revival, which opened to a record-breaking $23 million.

Really Useful Group chief executive Andre Ptaszynski tells Variety the show needs to take $50.9 million to fully recoup. In the 1,500-seat Adelphi Theater, that will take a year. But RUG owns the much larger London Palladium and Theater Royal Drury Lane. Why not choose either of those?

"Essentially, it's a love story and so it needs a more intimate space that will make it more fulfilling for the audience," Ptaszynski says. "And if it works, it's likely to sit longer and more happily in a smaller theater."

One of the key factors determining the hoped-for longevity of "Love Never Dies" is the surrounding economic and cultural climate.

The design and sheer spectacle of both "Les Miz" and "Phantom" helped define their era within a booming economy. Attendances in both London and Gotham have unexpectedly risen during the recession, but the chances of a new, non-jukebox show sticking around are slim. With the exception of the phenomenon that is "Wicked," the survivors these days are either back-catalog tuners like "Mamma Mia!" or Disney's revamps of its movies, "Beauty and the Beast" and "The Lion King." Even those have lately shown less traction -- witness "The Little Mermaid" and "Tarzan."

As with most grand-scale tuners, "Love Never Dies" has had pre-opening problems, beginning with the aborted idea of near-simultaneous openings in London, New York and Shanghai, dreamed up 15 months ago by Ptaszynski and Lloyd Webber.

"After a couple of months, we realized the folly of our ways," Ptaszynski says.

The new rollout for the show allows more room to maneuver.

"We expect to announce a late fall opening on Broadway," Ptaszynski says. "There's lots of working time in the spring if needed."

The show's March 9 London preem was postponed from six months earlier to allow for a comprehensive redesign and reorchestration. Then, a surprisingly brief technical rehearsal period in the theater forced the cancellation of the first preview. At the subsequent first performance, a technical hitch caused everything to grind to a temporary halt.

That, however, is par for the course for new tuners. During the original "Cats" rehearsals Judi Dench was forced to withdraw from the role of Grizabella when she snapped her Achilles tendon -- which is how Elaine Paige got to sing "Memory."

One thing is certain. The show has a buzz. When details of the forthcoming CD appeared online, hundreds of the original's self-styled "Phans" began blogging feverishly, trying to work out the plot from song titles.

Whatever the pressure, as O'Brien tells it, he's not frightened.

"I'm exhilarated. Getting over, around and past the success of the original will be a kind of victory," he says.

What sort of victory remains to be seen.

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118015808.html?categoryId=15&cs=1

The man in the mask is back

2010-02-28T04:29:00.000+11:00

Elizabeth Renzetti

London — From Saturday's Globe and Mail

This is what the Phantom has brought with him across the Atlantic Ocean: the life-size mannequin of his lost love, Christine Daae; the cunning white mask that covers his disfigurement; his magnificent pipes; and his rage. Oh, yes. The Phantom may have moved to America, but he hasn’t traded his gothic obsession for a golden retriever and a pair of slippers.

Near the beginning of Love Never Dies, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new sequel to Phantom of the Opera, the Phantom, high in his crazy-villain lair above Coney Island, stands in front of his Christine doll and sings a great belter of a song called Till I Hear You Sing Once More. It’s a temple-crumbler, and the audience at a preview at the Adelphi Theatre this week received it with great appreciation.

They could not know that Ramin Karimloo, the young Canadian actor originating the role of the Phantom in this show, once brought equal passion to singing in a Tragically Hip cover band, or that his obsessions extend to hockey, not opera ingenues, or that, unlike the Phantom he has never been driven to murder, but does like driving a motorcycle. He doesn’t hate the world, but does loathe buffets. So no real resemblance to the Phantom, then, except for those pipes. Here is proof of Laurence Olivier’s wise observation: “It’s called acting, dear boy.”’

Next month, when Love Never Dies officially opens in London, the beady eyes of every critic and musical-theatre aficionado will be trained on Karimloo and his co-star, Sierra Boggess. After all, Phantom of the Opera was not merely a musical but – in the producers’ words – “the most successful single piece of entertainment of all time.” In certain quarters, the knives are already drawn; in others, the Kleenex boxes are being stockpiled. It’s a heavy weight to carry for a 31-year-old with no formal vocal training, who is vague about whether he actually graduated from high school, who paid his dues singing on a cruise ship and whose main dream, at one point, was to meet the Hip’s Gord Downie.

“I’m very calm, actually,” says Karimloo. “When I was onstage for the first time in the mask and the makeup, I wasn’t nervous. My stomach wasn’t flipping, I wasn’t worried about opening. I was thinking, ‘I can’t wait for people to see this. I’m ready.’”

The sense of calm is a recent acquisition. Last fall, Lloyd Webber announced the new musical to a packed theatre in London, as the Phantom of the Opera’s bona fides were trotted out like poodles at a dog show: longest-running musical on Broadway, 40 million albums sold, productions in 49 cities, 50 theatre awards. Afterward, Karimloo came out onstage to perform Till I Hear You Sing Once More for the first time in public – and in front of jackal-eyed reporters, no less. “That’s the hardest song I’ve ever had to do,” he says, shaking his head. “I couldn’t sleep the night before.’’

At the same event, Love Never Dies’ veteran director, Jack O’Brien, talked about the difficulty of casting: “Finding the actors to do this was not easy. These are daunting roles, and vocally punishing.”

As it turned out, the producers had to go to America to find Boggess, their Christine, but the Phantom – as is his wont – was hiding right under their noses. Karimloo was playing the title role in the Phantom of the Opera onstage in the London production in 2008 when, one day, he noticed a series of missed calls from his agent on his phone. “Where are you?” the agent shrieked. “Andrew wants to see you at four.” It was 2:30; Karimloo joked that he’d try to make it. He didn’t need to ask who Andrew was.

It was no secret that Lloyd Webber had long been tinkering with a sequel to the Phantom, which opened in London in 1986. That musical, based on the 1911 novel by Gaston Leroux, follows a tormented musical genius who lives in the Paris Opera as he pines after a young singer, murders a couple of annoying people and causes a large light fixture to plummet to the floor. It ends with the Phantom broken and alone.

For the sequel, Lloyd Webber first worked with novelist Frederick Forsyth on a version that had the Phantom moving to Manhattan, but he abandoned that. Later, lyricists Ben Elton and Glenn Slater stepped in. On the afternoon when Karimloo was summoned, he had no idea what he’d be singing for Lloyd Webber. He got to the office, and because he doesn’t read music, had someone sing him the part – one of the new songs, which he then performed for the composer. Lloyd Webber listened intently and said, “That’s how it should be done.’’

It was not a fait accompli. Karimloo sang the new songs at workshops, at Lloyd Webber’s house – all while performing eight shows of the original Phantom every week – and still didn’t know if he had the part. He wondered if they’d cast an unknown for the biggest new role in musical theatre. “Deep down I kept thinking, they’ve at least got to entertain getting a big name for the Phantom.”

Then the call came; he had the part. “That’s when the nerves started,” he says with a laugh. He soon began recording the cast album in London, while performing at night and trying to make time for his wife and two young sons.

Karimloo, whose family moved to Canada from Iran when he was two years old, is trim, handsome, exceedingly polite even by Canadian standards, constantly fretting about “tooting my own horn.” He’s a success story for the American Idol generation: With no vocal training except what he’d learned from rock ’n’ roll, he arrived in London, found an agent and began a steady climb from understudy to leading man.

In looks and temperament he’s less Phantom, more Raoul – the romantic lead in the Phantom and its sequel, a captain-of-the-fencing-team type. (In fact, he was once cast as Raoul in the London production of Phantom, despite the reservations of producer Cameron Mackintosh.)

The new role brings Karimloo full circle: He only became interested in musical theatre after being dragged, with a teenager’s sullenness, to a production of Phantom of the Opera at the old Pantages Theatre in Toronto. It was a revelation. Here was a way to sing like a rock star, and act, and get chicks. Had he never been interested in musical theatre before? He shoots an incredulous look. How many boys love musicals? “Um … no.”

This lifelong devotion to Phantom puts him in a vast company of people, many of whom have seen the musical onstage or on film, and own the CD (and possibly the T-shirt and pillow as well.) A vocal minority of those people have already loudly protested against Love Never Dies, prior to its opening on March 9 (see, for example, the Facebook group Love Should Die). As O’Brien, the director, said at the launch, “No one is going to thank us for doing this. We’re playing around with aspects of people’s memories that are sacrosanct. We’d better know what we’re doing.”

Already, the road has been bumpy. There’s been talk of insufficient preparation time for such a complex production. The initial performances were postponed, and when the first preview finally opened this week, a technical glitch delayed the performance. As well, Lloyd Webber suffered health problems, announcing last fall that he had been treated for prostate cancer.

For almost 20 years, on and off, the composer’s been working on a sequel, ever since Maria Bjornson, Phantom’s designer, had told him she disliked the ending. That ending – with the murderous Phantom sobbing as his true love Christine leaves with drippy Raoul – plagued many of the creative team. “She goes off with the cute guy,” says O’Brien, ““But isn’t the real story between the Phantom and Christine? That’s where the knife goes in. We never find out why he’s so unpleasant.”

Well, if you ask Karimloo, the Phantom’s not unpleasant, just misunderstood – for a clinical reason. The actor likes to come up with a backstory for his characters, and he decided that the explanation for the Phantom’s behaviour – his brilliance and social awkwardness, his obsession, his inability to fit in with the world – stemmed from Asperger’s syndrome, a form of high-functioning autism. When he announced this publicly, he received both letters of support from people with Asperger’s, and howls of outrage.

“There was a bit of backlash about that,” Karimloo says. “But I thought, why? I’m not saying he’s a killer because he has Asperger’s. … It humanizes him. That, married with the fact that he’s deformed, was why he was hounded. But the darkness doesn’t come from Asperger’s, his genius and his beauty does.”

In the new production, the Phantom is still a genius, but he’s a little more at home in the world, because he’s chosen to live among the freaks of Coney Island. No lighting fixtures were harmed in the making of the show, but something impressive does drop from the ceiling. And because it’s set at the seaside, and not in a subterranean lair, the Phantom gets his moment in the sun.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/theatre/the-man-in-the-mask-is-back/article1482654/

The man behind the mask: Andrew Lloyd Webber on his new musical Love Never Dies

2010-02-28T04:26:00.000+11:00

The Phantom of the Opera is back in the musical Love Never Dies. Andrew Lloyd Webber tells Edward Seckerson how he came up with the story, composed the music and takes criticism

Friday, 26 February 2010

The Lord works in mysterious ways. For years now Andrew Lloyd Webber has nursed the idea of a sequel to his most successful show The Phantom of the Opera, for years Phantom fans have pondered what might have become of him after that “final exit”.

Nightly he vanishes from his subterranean lair deep in the bowels of the Paris Opera House (a.k.a. Her Majesty’s Theatre) leaving only his iconic half-mask as a symbolic reminder of his continuing omnipotence on stages throughout the world: 149 cities across 86 countries. Follow that. Lloyd Webber has.

It’s 10 years on from the fabled “disappearance” and five minutes walk from Her Majesty’s to the Adelphi Theatre where Phantom 2 Love Never Dies is in the final stages of preparation. The man himself – Lloyd Webber, that is – escorts me into the gutted auditorium where an army of technicians and banks of computer screens are rather more suggestive of space exploration than musical theatre. The orchestra will be in situ for the first time and in a couple of hours the show’s big opener will see Coney Island, New York, rise from the ashes of one of its countless fires and reanimate to the strains of a sumptuous bitter-sweet waltz in the grand tradition of Lloyd Webber’s great idol Richard Rodgers’ Carousel.

The Coney Island setting came out of years of think-tanking involving personalities as diverse as Frederick “The Jackal” Forsyth, Ben Elton, the show’s lyricist Glenn Slater and director Jack O’Brien of whom Lloyd Webber says “Anyone directing Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia, Puccini’s Trittico, and Hairspray in one year is someone you have to meet.” Actually it was Ben Elton’s idea to carry all of the original characters forward to the sequel. Their identity was already well established globally, he said, and introducing major new characters into the mix would only muddy the waters. He was right.

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. 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.”

Coney Island in 1907 was pretty much the eighth wonder of the world. It was the mother of amusement parks, the only good reason, said Freud, for making the long trip across the Atlantic. 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 also happened to be the age of Vaudeville. As settings for musicals go this one was a no-brainer. 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.

And 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. 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. From subterranean to high-rise living – a nice twist. From there he could truly be master of all he surveyed. 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.

Lloyd Webber’s long-held obsession with this project is matched only by the Phantom’s for Christine (remember it was the second Mrs. 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. It’s the principal reason why his shows are “through-sung”. He’s not happy if the music isn’t driving the evening.

“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.

“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. 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. 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. The themes that appear there – including the song “Once Upon Another Time” – would be carried forward towards the eventual dénouement.”

That song, that melody, typifies Lloyd Webber’s musical personality. If it was sung in German (as no doubt it will be one day) it could easily be mistaken for Franz Lehar. 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. His lyric ballads are surely unsurpassed since the heyday of Ivor Novello, Frederick Loewe and Richard Rodgers. 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.

But it’s what I call the emotional memory of these melodies that give them such dramatic potency. 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. When Christine agrees to sing for her mentor one last time she does so to the same tune and the frisson of recognition it engenders makes for a real goosebumps moment. That’s what great melodists do – hard to define but easy to recognise. It’s where the next note seems somehow inevitable the second after you’ve heard it. Rodgers once said “a great melody implies its own harmony” and Lloyd Webber certainly holds true to that maxim.

So where on earth here do these melodies come from? Interestingly he gives me a very similar answer to that which Leonard Bernstein gave me many years ago – that he really has no idea, that the tunes and their attendant harmonies have a habit of creeping up on him while he’s “musing” at the piano. He knows instinctively when he’s hit upon something – it might be the beginnings of a melody, a phrase or two or something more – and even if there is no immediate use for it he’ll write it down and keep it until the right moment calls it to mind. Sometimes the ideas come quickly and easily: “No Matter What” (from Whistle Down the Wind) was one of those – the cash registers were heard ringing before even the last note was down. At other times songs are very much “composed” in response to a specific motivation or brief. With Lloyd Webber’s Eurovision entry “It’s My Time” a catchy hook was not just desirable but required – and anybody that thinks that’s just a bog-standard tune should think again.

I am now doubly curious about the evolution of “ ‘Till I Hear You Sing”: “This took several drafts and it was the tiniest adjustments that made the difference”, says Lloyd Webber. “There are ways it could have gone which would have made it acceptable but ordinary but the use of the flattened 7th made it more intriguing. Other little things like dropping from the key of D to C major affect the listener in ways they can feel but might not be able to identify or explain. I instinctively know when something is right and when it isn’t.”

Actually Lloyd Webber’s melodies readily lend themselves to development but the man himself insists that he is not a symphonic composer but a dramatic one:

“The one thing I have always felt about musical theatre is that it is to an extraordinary degree about construction. Where I have come unstuck sometimes has mostly been to do with the stories not being quite right or not connecting with a contemporary audience. The Woman in White was a perfect example because the central premise, so shocking in Victorian times, didn’t turn a hair with audiences today. I firmly believe that even the greatest theatre songs ever written – like “Some Enchanted Evening” from South Pacific – wouldn’t be known today if they had been in the wrong place of the wrong theatrical vehicle. I once did an album years ago with Sarah Brightman called “The Songs That Got Away” and heard as a collection you’re thinking ‘this is one of the best musicals I’ve ever heard’ but for various reasons each of these songs was buried on account of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. So structure and context are everything – and if you look at a work like Britten’s Peter Grimes there isn’t a wasted or misplaced moment anywhere. As music theatre it’s perfect. Like act two of La Boheme. Anyone considering a career in musical theatre should study that.”

One of the key dramatic moments in Love Never Dies comes when the Phantom starts to recognise an innate kinship with the boy Gustave (echoes of Miles in Britten’s The Turn of the Screw). The tune the boy plays and sings at this point in the show is called “Beautiful” and its eerie Svengali-like chant – truly, subversively, “music of the night” - evolves into one of the principal leitmotifs of the score – quietly sensuous but potentially grand and visionary, too. I am reminded of a very accomplished orchestral piece Aurora by Andrew’s father William Lloyd Webber whose music brother Julian has tirelessly championed over the years.

“It’s interesting you mention that piece because I think it represented a sensuous side to my father’s personality that he was rarely able to show and that I am beginning to realise now was a big influence on me – particularly with this show. It’s made me think about why he was unable to show that side of himself and why I am?.”

There are still those among Lloyd Webber’s detractors who resolutely refuse to acknowledge his talent and doggedly insist that his huge international success is the product of clever global marketing and handfuls of formulaic hit songs liberally reprised. How does he feel about that?

“I always think of something Richard Rodgers said to me when I got to know him slightly towards the end of his life. He told me how depressed he’d got by the reviews for The King and I whose score was compared unfavourably with his previous shows. But even he – perhaps the most gifted popular melodist of them all – realised that it’s not always possible for audiences or for that matter critics to take in what they are hearing on a first or even second hearing. Musical theatre history is littered with bad reviews for now classic pieces. But there’s something else and that’s this: my job is to communicate with my audience and frankly should they be expected to recognise that the ordering of the poems in Cats, for instance, is very precisely structured to create a seamless narrative or that the opening of the show is a mock-fugue? It’s like what you say about the melodies: the effect of those repetitions, whether sung or in underscoring, has an emotional not an intellectual purpose.” The subliminal references to Phantom 1 in Love Never Dies will hopefully make aficionados smile.

After opening Love Never Dies Lloyd Webber has one more pressing date with reality TV when the nation-wide search for the little girl in the gingham frock –Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz – gathers momentum. Lloyd Webber believes that the classic movie has never successfully transferred to the stage because Arlen and Harburg’s songs were too thinly spread. The respective estates have given him special dispensation to create some additional numbers and if that means batting off a succession of Graham Norton “friends of Dorothy” jokes, then it’ll be well worth it. He’s hugely encouraged that these shows appear to have ignited a renewed enthusiasm for musical theatre among the teenage generation. The Wicked audience could now be ready for the prequel.

But back to the year’s biggest opening night. “I’m genuinely excited”, he says, “to see what people make of Love Never Dies because in so many ways it goes much further than the old Phantom did. Without giving anything away about the ending, it’s like I closed a door when I put the last notes down. I don’t think I’ll be able to go any further down this particular musical path – well, not for a while anyway.”

And long, long after that, will people still be humming “‘Till I Hear You Sing”? Of course, they will.

'Love Never Dies' opens at the Adelphi Theatre, London WC2, on 9 March (adelphitheatre.co.uk)

The best of Lloyd Webber: four timeless shows

The Phantom of the Opera

The composer's then wife Sarah Brightman was his muse for this piece a paean of love for her. She played the heroine Christine, a role which struck such a chord with some obsessive fans that they changed their name to Christine. The memorable 'coup de théâtre' of a chandelier seeming to crash into the audience so alarmed the security guard of one visiting royal that he bundled his charge to the floor.

Sunset Boulevard

His most underrated musical. Both dramatically and musically this merited a much longer run and more critical acclaim than it had. But it did give a plum role to actresses of a certain age, from Glenn Close to Petula Clark, with Faye Dunaway being famously rejected by Lloyd Webber.

Cats

Deciding to write a musical around TS Eliot's cat poems was an inspired decision. Trevor Nunn was inspired, too, in his lyrics for the showstopper "Memory", a genuinely moving number, with a little help from Eliot of course. Seats in the auditorium of the New London Theatre that moved added more thrill. It broke all records and only closed because it had reached audience saturation-point.

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

Lloyd Webber and his first lyricist Tim Rice at their joyous best. Their love of pure rock'n'roll is evident in this early collaboration, which contains a lot more humour than later works. Revivals reveal it as evergreen.

David Lister

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/features/the-man-behind-the-mask-andrew-lloyd-webber-on-his-new-musical-love-never-dies-1910817.html

Love Never Dies: Laying the ghost of the Phantom

2010-02-24T16:56:00.001+11:00

Jack O’Brien is the director of Love Never Dies, the follow-up to Phantom, the most successful show in history.

Published: 5:05PM GMT 23 Feb 2010

'You have no idea how much pressure I’m under between now and opening night!” Jack O’Brien tells me, with such a degree of drawling self-composure that you’d swear you could dangle him out of an upper-storey window and he’d barely bat an eyelid.

Actually, albeit that we’re sitting in a dressing-room backstage at the Adelphi theatre, an oasis of hushed tranquillity, I think I can take a reasonably shrewd guess at the frenetic scenario that awaits this seasoned American theatre and opera director the minute we shake hands and part ways.

O’Brien, 70, is tasked with bringing Love Never Dies to the London stage – after which it will open in New York and Melbourne, and, all being well, at various times after that, around the rest of the world, in the steps of the show that spawned it, The Phantom of the Opera.

This isn’t just the follow-up to the most successful musical yet penned by Andrew Lloyd Webber. It’s the follow-up to the most successful entertainment product in history. If you’re aware of nothing else about Phantom, you know it’s a huge hit, but the stats are awesome: it has enjoyed bigger takings than Star Wars, Titanic, and (so far) Avatar, with earnings of £2 billion; and it has been seen by over 100 million people in more than 25 countries.

Simply put, Love Never Dies is the sequel without equal. If anything, the pressure on O’Brien is greater than that faced by Harold Prince, entrusted with directing Phantom in 1986. As O’Brien reminds me: “The hot number that year was Chess [written by Lloyd Webber’s erstwhile regular collaborator Tim Rice]. Phantom wasn’t anticipated nearly as much as Chess was.”

This time, the anticipation isn’t only greater, it’s distinctly double-edged. Instead of drawing from Gaston Leroux’s 1911 novel about the deformed musical genius who haunts the Paris Opera House, the plot, which jumps from 1881 to 1907 and takes in the fairgrounds of Coney Island, has been conceived from scratch, with input from Frederick Forsyth’s 1999 novel The Phantom of Manhattan, Ben Elton and American lyricist Glenn Slater.

There are those – resentful of Phantom’s juggernaut unstoppability, smarting at its composer’s wealth, or simply unresponsive to Lloyd Webber’s lushly romantic, rock-tinged treatment of Leroux’s melodrama – who would relish the spectacle of Love Never Dies showing up dead on arrival.

Then there are those who are possibly as obsessed with the long-runner as its skulking anti-hero is with the virginal young soprano, Christine, who falls under his spell. And this die-hard contingent are cautious, sceptical, fearful even. At Her Majesty’s, I recently sat next to one such fan, a chap from Munich, who had seen Phantom 25 times, and swore he wouldn’t be seeing Love Never Dies until it had been given the thumbs-up by reviewers.

Towards the new show’s already lurking detractors, O’Brien displays scant regard. “People will say what they want without seeing it, and they’re almost always uninformed.” He sympathises, though, with the apprehension. “We’re not taking this lightly. I have said from the beginning: no one will thank us for doing this. We have to dot every i, and cross every t, in showing why we’re continuing to tell this story.’

Lloyd Webber’s motives, he maintains, are impeccable. “No one had him at gunpoint saying, 'Please come up with something.’ He has thought about this for over 20 years. It has been at the back of his mind, haunting him. If this just was about the franchise, he would have done it years ago. This is about something else.”

What that is, what drives Lloyd Webber’s desire to burrow deeper into the story, involves some guess-work that O’Brien is only partly prepared to indulge in. It hardly escaped notice at the premiere that, with Lloyd Webber’s then wife Sarah Brightman occupying the role of Christine, and Michael Crawford’s misfit Phantom akin to a composer, there was an element of self-portraiture about the business.

'I don’t think there’s any question about that,” he replies. “I don’t make assumptions, but you’d have to be very insensitive not to see this as a curious, mythological parallel universe. I’m aware that there’s a deeply personal template to which I’m not invited that feeds the stream.”

Further than that, he won’t go. But hand on heart, he’ll swear that Lloyd Webber – with lyricist Slater – has delivered the goods, and even trumped the original.

“I think the score is richer and more varied. The colours are more astonishing. There are vaudeville American elements and those great throbbing rock-opera moments, too. He uses everything at his disposal.’’

O’Brien launches into a full-blown aria of appreciation: “We’re in a new country, a new century. From gaslit Paris, we’ve moved into the age of electricity. So there’s a different perspective. We’re picking up, but we’re looking back. The fact that Erik, the Phantom, goes to Coney Island, which at that time was about five times more popular than Las Vegas is today, means that he’s now part of a landscape of people allowed to behave in an unconventional way. That gives him a chance to grow. I don’t know what anyone’s anticipation is but I bet anything they’re going to be really surprised by the direction the story goes in.”

As for the look of the thing, O’Brien adds: “Someone said to me, 'Is there a chandelier moment?’ [referring to the famous first-half climax in Phantom when a chandelier comes crashing to the ground]? I said: 'As far as I’m concerned, the whole evening is going to be a chandelier moment.’’’

For more than 20 years the artistic director of the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, California, O’Brien got this potentially mega-lucrative gig almost by chance – meeting Lloyd Webber for a drink in Covent Garden two and a half years ago, while supervising the hit London transfer of Hairspray.

“We had such fun talking, that I got involved in the creation of it at that point.” In his time, O’Brien has had the odd brush with flops – his own musical, The Selling of the President, closed after five performances in 1972. Yet I realise that not once while we’ve been locked in conversation has the slightest look of fear or doubt entered his eyes. This guy knows something we don’t. Yet.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-features/7300428/Love-Never-Dies-laying-the-ghost-of-the-Phantom.html

Love Never Dies thoughts, from Broadway World, West End section

2010-02-23T22:57:00.001+11:00

Love Never Dies -Adelphi Theatre, London 2010
Posted On:2/23/10 at 06:17

One of the biggest flaws of the show, not really mentioned previous, is how it negates the intentions and character plot advancement of the original. SPOILERS AHEAD: At first, when it appeared Raoul had little interest in his boy I thought, ah, the Phantom must have raped Christine when he had her mesmerized, Gustof is his son. Odd but sorta interesting...then they meet in her boudoir in the next scene...and...apparently, sweet naive Raoul-loving Christine, sought out the Phantom the night before her wedding and had sex with him (!). Okay, I know there are those cat ladies who see things oddly, but Christine NEVER loved the Phantom. She loved Raoul. She never sang a love duet with the Phantom. She sang two+ with Raoul. The Phantom was a homicidal sociopath she took pity on and kissed to save her love that the Phantom was about to KILL!!!!!! Yet we are to believe that one kiss had so much in it, on her wedding eve she abandoned her childhood love to crawl under the sewers and schtup the deformed guy? Again, I know there is some revisionist memory that "Phantom" is a love story between the Phantom and Christine...but there is nothing to it. Not a bit. Its beauty is the unrequited love the Phantom has for this girl. She was sweet enough to feel pity, that's it. Now, of course, realistically, Raoul might have become a drunk and their love faded. But please. This is a musical fairy tale. I don't want to think all the sturm and drang from the first musical was all for nought. Among a host of horrible, horrible atrocities in "Love Never Dies" this rewriting of the first show is one of its worst.

http://westend.broadwayworld.com/board/readmessage.php?page=4&thread=1011439&boardid=3

Review: You Will Believe ‘Love Never Dies’ After Seeing This…

2010-02-23T16:34:00.000+11:00

Mon, Feb 22, 2010

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Love Never Dies opened on Monday, 22 February 2010 at London’s Adelphi Theatre to a packed house full of excited theatregoers and Andrew Lloyd Webber himself. The audience was all a buzz with anticipation. It seems that a lot of time had passed since this new show was announced formally at the press launch on 8 October 2009 at London’s Her Majesty’s Theatre but it is here now and is a must see! The world premiere performance of Love Never Dies is scheduled for 9 March 2010.

It is unimaginable all the people required to make a production like this but a thank you goes out to all involved for making such a remarkable and history-making musical. Bravo. Andrew Lloyd Webber must be very proud seeing this idea finally come to life.

It opens on the pier at Coney Island on a dreary, cold, moonlit night with Madame Giry (played by Liz Robertson) reminiscing of Coney Island in its day. The sound effects complimented the set with seagulls and the wind blowing. Even the moon turned into a ferris wheel – how imaginative. The visual effects were stunning as screens and projections enhanced / portrayed what she was thinking about. The tall man, acrobats, fire baton performer, trapeze artists and the circus acts were terrific and their costumes authentic looking. This is just the beginning as it only gets better.

Before I go further into the story, I must comment on the fabulous music written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and conducted by Simon Lee. It intensified and supported what was being performed by the talented actors. Be prepared to get shivers when you hear The Phantom (passionately and perfectly played by Ramin Karimloo) sing ‘Til I Hear You Sing. All the songs are special but my three favorite are ‘Til I Hear You Sing, Look with Your Heart, and Love Never Dies.

The wonderful actors are commended on delivering such convincing performances. A list of the main characters follows but it is not to disregard the ensemble who all add to a successful show.

The Phantom is absolutely perfectly played by the talented Ramin Karimloo. The beautiful Sierra Bogges makes her West end debut playing Christine Daae. Christine’s husband, Raoul, is played by Joseph Millson. As mentioned above, Madam Giry (manager) is played by Liz Robertson and her daughter (and performer), Meg Giry is played by Summer Strallen. The Phantom’s devoted trio Fleck, Squelch, and Gangle were played by Niamh Perry, Adam Pearce, and Jami Reid-Quarrel. And last, but not least… Christine’s son, Gustave (the only new character) is played by a multitude of children but on this night, the character was wonderfully played by Harry Child who sang with a pure voice.

I must reiterate Ramin Karimloo plays such a passionate character. You can feel it in his songs, you can see it in his actions. He is absolutely brilliant. Sierra Boggess is beautiful and delicate with a softer voice. All of the actors are talented in their own right, of course. It is easy to see why everyone got a standing ovation.

This may be a continuation of the most famous love story but it is a separate story all it’s own. Taking place 10 years after the infamous Paris Opera House, it offers one surprise after another. The Phantom is a Man in his own right having created a mysterious and intriguing world on Coney Island, his Phantasma. He sends for Christine to perform there. Due to monetary problems, Christine accepts and brings her husband and son with her, no one realizing who Mr Y is. Her husband seems like a pompous jerk who complains about everything but her child seems to share her qualities and is kind and innocent. Just when they think no one is there to meet them at the dock, a ‘glass’ horse and a seemingly empty carriage with a glass skeleton driver pulls up. The door opens and The Phantom’s Devoted Trio get out to greet them and take them to their master. The visual imagery projected was terrific as it showed ‘the carriage’ travelling over a bridge and a map showing where they were going from and travelling to. The combination of projection, the actual scenery/stage set, and live actors complimented one another and helped to portray the story.

My first opinion of Raoul is confirmed by the way he treats his son and talks to his wife soon after they arrive at the Hotel. He does nothing but complain and his drinking problem evident (which is added to by the gambling problem referred to more than once). Their son, Gustave, has a pure voice to match his pure heart and it is easy to see that Christine loves him dearly. It’s even apparent that she loves her husband and is devoted to him though one wonders why. Raoul leaves for ‘fresh air’ (at the local bar) and Gustave goes to bed after his mother comforts him when he questions if his father loves him. Then Christine, left alone, plays the musical toy that was given to her son and recognizes the music. She is standing there obviously feeling a presence as The Phantom enters from the balcony. They sing the ‘why’ and ‘what if’ game. The love, history, and attraction is so transparent but she remains the dutiful wife. By the way, the detail in the hotel room, particularly the door / balcony was splendid. Gustave awakens from a nightmare and meets his mother’s ‘friend’, Mr Y (the man who brought them there).

The next day, Christine and Gustave go backstage at Phantasma for business-related reasons when who should she run into but Meg Giry. They are joined by Raoul and Madame Giry where they have a surprise reunion. As they sing, Dear Old Friend, it is apparent that it is an awkward reunion and not a welcomed one especially for Meg and Madam Giry. This is when Raoul finds out who the boss is and he is not pleased about the news.

The Phantom calls for Gustave and his devoted trio brings the boy to his room. The boy is intrigued with all the inventions / gadgets (like the walking skeleton with lady’s legs) which pushes a table across the stage). He also plays the piano for The Phantom. The Phantom marvels at his musical talent and enjoys that Gustave is at home there. There is some important news that is revealed before the intermission and not something that makes everyone happy.

After the intermission, the Orchestra plays Entr’acte, a beautiful introduction to Part II. The rest of the scenes are as good as the first half. There are humorous parts throughout the musical… one being in the bar when The Phantom (pretending to be a bartender) reveals himself to Raoul. That was a good scene between the two men in Christine’s life. I will say that Christine obviously will have to make a choice but I won’t say any more. I don’t want to spoil anything so will just continue that it is full of intrigue, surprise, laughter, tears, and an undying love. The ending was very unexpected but again I can’t divulge more because I want you to go and enjoy it. I want you to be surprised and moved. Whether you’re a hopeless romantic or a sceptic of love or whether you just want to see how the story continues… you’ll want to see Love Never Dies. Go, take it in, feel it, and enjoy!

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S P O I L E R A L E R T

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If you want to know more, please read on… if not, PLEASE READ NO FURTHER!!!

The Phantom figures out before intermission that Gustave is his son (which I also figured out so may not be a surprise to you). At the altercation at the bar, the men make an agreement… if Christine performs that evening, Raoul will leave. If she does not perform, The Phantom will let her be and will pay all of Raoul’s debts. It is touch and go what she will do as she is almost pulled in by Raoul’s words. Her love for The Phantom though is too strong and at the last minute while on the stage, she starts to sing. She sings Love Never Dies… Raoul surprisingly honors the deal made or maybe just realizes he has no chance and leaves. She has chosen her true love. Just when you delightedly think there will be a happy-ever-after ending… there is more – Meg has taken Gustave. She is saddened by the realization that her boss loves another and feels used for all the years she gave to him. She is beside herself with grief. After a chase / search on the streets of Coney Island, they are found on the pier. Gustave is scared. Meg lets him go and he flees to the protective arms of his mother. Meg then pulls out a gun… The Phantom’s gun and points it at him while The Phantom and her mother try to talk her out of doing anything stupid or dangerous. She then turns the gun to herself when The Phantom talks her (or sings her) out of doing any self-harm… you think everything is fine until he accidentally calls her Christine at the end. That pushes her over the edge and she almost unknowingly fires the gun at Christine’s direction. Yes, Christine is shot to the dismay of all, even her shooter whom she forgives before she dies. She also reveals to Gustave who his father is and helps him accept it. The Phantom and Christine share a love-filled, emotional kiss and embrace before she tragically dies. The scene ends with Gustave removing his father’s mask and touching his face – a form of acceptance and a moving moment between father and son indicating that they will be okay.

by Ann Kamran (stagetalk.co.uk)

http://www.stagetalk.co.uk/reviews/review-you-will-believe-love-never-dies-after-seeing-this/

Andrew Lloyd Webber interview

2010-02-18T15:33:00.001+11:00

His 1986 musical gave the world its darkest hero and broke every box office record going. Now, amid feverish anticipation, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘Phantom’ is returning. But is his creator coping with the pressure?

By Nigel Farndale
Published: 5:05PM GMT 17 Feb 2010

There are two Andrew Lloyd Webbers, separated by a hyphen. There is Lord Lloyd-Webber, the mogul who owns seven London theatres, collects vintage burgundy, Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and wives (well, three of them anyway). He is a Tory. A man of refined taste. Establishment to his bones.

And then there is Andrew Lloyd Webber without a hyphen. He was so precocious as a child he could compose almost before he could walk. He won a scholarship to Westminster School and an exhibition to read history at Magdalene College, Oxford, only to drop out after one term in order to pursue his dream of writing musicals.

This must have seemed like an act of rebellion bordering on patricide, given that his father was a professor of classical composition at the Royal College of Music. (And come to think of it, even Lloyd Webber’s Tory tendencies have a rebellious cast to them, given that his domineering mother, a piano teacher, was a socialist.)

Lloyd Webber without a hyphen seems to have been impulsive, driven, contrary and perhaps a little socially awkward and gauche, but a man with keen populist instincts and no qualms about pandering to the sort of middle-brow tastes that might have made his father shudder.

So there’s the paradox, then. Not only is he a nonconformist Establishment figure, he is also a slightly vulgar aesthete. And the two identities are separated by a hyphen that was added in 1997 to avoid confusion when he became Baron Lloyd-Webber of Sydmonton. As he might put it, Lloyd ain’t his first name.

In terms of his vocabulary, by the way, he does have a tendency to strain for the colloquial, perhaps in compensation for his received pronunciation – as well as saying ‘ain’t’, he will refer to a ‘beaker’ of wine, or his ‘PR honchos’, or his ‘grey matter’. Anyway, I think it is the Andrew Lloyd Webber without the hyphen that I meet in a rehearsal studio near Waterloo.

At 62, he looks trim and healthy. He is wearing jeans and a pale blue shirt. His hands are small, his grip light and, contrary to reputation, his eye contact steady. His manner is polite but impatient and distracted, and a habit to talk over the top of people gives him the air of a busy man, one who really shouldn’t have had that second cup of coffee.

Prior to this meeting I have spent a long morning at his office in Covent Garden listening, under armed guard it seemed, to a recording of the much-anticipated ‘continuation’ – not sequel – of The Phantom of the Opera. Called Love Never Dies, it takes up the phantom’s story 10 years on, when he has left his lair under the Paris Opera in order to haunt the fairgrounds of Coney Island, Brooklyn.

The musical, which begins previewing at the Adelphi Theatre next week, is to my ears more vaudevillian than operatic, with recurring background hints of a fairground barrel organ. But the overall mood seems similar to Phantom, a mixture of soaring ballads and tender love songs.

Predictably enough, ticket sales have been more than healthy. There are a lot of Phantom fans out there, you see. A lot. In terms of revenue, it is the most successful entertainment of all time, way ahead of the combined world tours of the Rolling Stones, even ahead of Star Wars, Titanic and , so far, Avatar. It has taken nearly £2 billion.

Lloyd Webber began planning what would become Love Never Dies back in 1997. Dozens of ideas were chewed over. At one point even Frederick Forsyth and Ben Elton were called in to give it a go, though not together.

The problem was not the music; Lloyd Webber writes quickly. ‘I often think of random melodies,’ he tells me. ‘And I pretty much hear in my head what I want to do with the orchestra as I’m writing on the piano. But the most important thing with musical theatre is the story. That is where you have to start. With the exception of Cats, which is an oddball, it is always the story that is the most important aspect and when they haven’t worked, as with Woman in White, it was because the story wasn’t right.’

His breakthrough came when he worked out the only place the Phantom could hide in 1907 without people staring at his face. ‘The answer was Coney Island, where freaks can walk around without being noticed. Freud gave the best quote about the place: ‘The only reason to go to the United States is to go to Coney Island.’ So this made the story about vaudeville instead of opera.

Like the original Phantom, Love Never Dies reflects Lloyd Webber’s highly romantic sensibility. ‘This one has taken romance as far as it will go,’ he says. ‘This felt like coming back to my own turf. When it was finally unlocked for me after 20 years of attempts I felt I was coming back to a character I knew well.

'If you looked at the logic of the original, the whole thing falls apart. I remember Hal Prince saying we have to start one scene before the last has ended and let the music overlap – and then just go for it. We don’t need to explain all this because the audience will get it. The story of the Phantom is one of rock masquerading as opera. The passions in Love Never Dies are rock passions.’

To what does Lloyd Webber attribute the enduring appeal of Phantom? ‘It’s to do with sexuality and, well, I remember 20 years ago going to a charity event Elton was giving in a restaurant and I found myself, to my great joy, sitting among five of the world’s most beautiful supermodels and they were all talking about Phantom because it had just opened.

'I think it was Elle Macpherson who said: “If you ask X she is worried about her nose and if you ask Y she is worried she isn’t tall enough and Z thinks she is too skinny. We are all of us insecure about our looks.” And I think that’s it. That is why people identify with the Phantom. Everyone has something about themselves they would like to change.’

To say there is anticipation for the new show is to understate. Is he nervous that Love Never Dies might not live up to expectation? ‘There is pressure. I can’t tell you whether Love Never Dies is of its time, because it ain’t Legally Blonde or Hairspray. All I can say is that I think the story is strong and the lyrics are the best I’ve had since Tim, if you take TS Eliot out of the equation.’

His musical Cats, it should be explained, the one that was a fixture in the West End for 21 years, was based on words by TS Eliot. And the Tim he refers to is Sir Tim Rice.

Rice was the reason the 17-year-old Lloyd Webber dropped out of Oxford. It was a life-changing encounter. Sir Tim was five years older, taller, longer haired, more urbane and socially confident. He also had an ability to write wry and catchy lyrics that electrified the young Andrew.

When these were combined with Lloyd Webber’s instantly memorable and charming melodies, a chemical combustion took place. The obvious comparison of a librettist meeting his perfect composer is when Gilbert met Sullivan, but a better one might be Bernie Taupin and Elton John.

Either way, Rice and Lloyd Webber clicked and within a few years they had produced three of the most successful musicals of all time: Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita. Then, at the height of their creative powers, they fell out.

As Lloyd Webber is the richest person in the British music industry, ahead even of Sir Paul McCartney, it is safe to assume he is not just doing Love Never Dies for the money. He can’t still be hungry can he? I mean, if he still needs the sense of affirmation that comes with success, after all these years of it, isn’t that a form of failure?

‘Why am I still hungry? I think it is just that I love the collaborative element. You depend on each other in a project like this. It is a shared adventure between the cast, director, designer, costume maker, lighting engineer, choreographer. One ingredient could be wrong and a great piece of work will disappear.’

The comment is a reminder that, for all his success, Lloyd Webber has known failure. In fact, he hasn’t had a new hit for a while, and by his standards Woman in White, The Beautiful Game and Whistle Down the Wind constitute flops.

Could it be that his recent brush with mortality, last autumn he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, has focused his mind? To paraphrase a certain mid-market tabloid, Love never dies – but he nearly did.

‘Yes and I did nearly die when I saw that headline because the point about my illness was that I didn’t nearly die, because we caught it in time. I kept having to get up to pee in the night and so I went to have a checkup and, luckily, they spotted it. Men over 50 should really have a prostate check regularly. It is the most common form of cancer in men and if you can get it before it angles off into other parts of the body, it’s not a problem.’

He had a prostatectomy in November and looks very healthy now. ‘Yes,’ he says with a grin. ‘I am. In the circumstances.’ He has an endearingly self-deprecating anecdote to share about the time he was told to leave The London Clinic by a side door via a row of huge dustbins, in order to avoid a gang of paparazzi that had assembled outside the hospital’s front door.

He assumed they were for him but next morning awoke to vast coverage of Amy Winehouse leaving the same place having had, allegedly, a breast enhancement.

He speaks about how he accepts the operation may leave you with an incontinence problem, but that this gets better every day. It can also leave you impotent, but not necessarily. As for the infertility, he is not worried about that because he has five children.

It must have given him intimations of mortality though. ‘Yes, it makes you think.’ What is it all for? That sort of thing? ‘No, more that it makes you realise who your real friends are. I was struck by the number of people who were my friends a long time ago who were the most supportive. Tim, for example. He rang my wife every day. And my first wife Sarah came to see me and she happened to arrive on the same day as Tim and they were getting on like a house on fire, catching up and talking about old times.’

He grins again. ‘There they were talking away by the bed and I might as well not have been there! And then the phone went and it was Sarah Brightman and I thought this is not great timing so I said: “This is a little awkward Sarah, can I call you back?” It made me laugh.’ Sarah Brightman was known as Sarah Two.

Was he surprised to find himself on his third marriage by the time he reached his mid forties? ‘Well I’ve been married 20 years this time, quite a stretch. I’m very pleased that I am still very close to both my ex wives. Both of them have stayed at my place in Majorca this past year. At different times.’

I have to say, I am impressed by the way he has remained friendly with his exes be they in business or marriage. ‘Yes, Tim is such a good friend and Sarah was wonderful when I was ill. She heard the roughs for Love Never Dies before it was mixed in LA last summer and I was quite worried about playing it to her because, in a way, it would mean more to her than to me.’

His marriage to Brightman lasted six years and was played out in the spotlight, including the acrimony of the divorce. Was it a passionate affair to begin with? ‘I think with her it was more about the music.’

He makes himself a coffee and is adept at operating the complicated looking machine. I’m surprised given that he probably has butlers to do that at home.

‘We don’t have butlers. Obviously we have people who look after the houses, but I try not to run things formally. I have good people around me. My PA, my driver, but my best investment is my black cab which means you can go anywhere.’

When he says his cancer made him think, was that partly about the meaning of material possessions?

‘I don’t think I am that materialistic, actually. Obviously at home in the country the art collection is important but we have one big room in the middle of the house where we do everything, the television, the kitchen, everything. I like cooking so I always like to have the kitchen in the central place. Music, architecture and pictures have always been my passions, and all that material wealth has meant for me, is being able to have some of the pictures I liked.’

I try and get a measure of what he was like as a schoolboy. Was he serious? ‘I was a bit. I was passionate about architecture and so was considered an oddball. I could have been academic but I got bored. I think I was quite popular at prep school because they thought I was weird playing the violin, and then one day I got up and did a parody of the masters, six tunes, and after that they thought I had a sense of humour.’

Were his parents pushy? ‘I think my mother would have preferred it if I was more interested in history, but I wanted to plough my own furrow. My parents were supportive about me leaving Oxford, even though the family didn’t have any money. We didn’t have anything to fall back on. We have that now with our 18 year-old, who I have a feeling isn’t going to go down the university route. He’s got all his grades, but he’s been doing work experience and enjoying that. I’ll support him if I think he’s going to the right place.’

When Lloyd Webber was that age, the right place meant being alongside Tim Rice. ‘Yes once I met Tim I realised how few really good lyricists there were. I was aware of a chemistry between us but also an awareness that there was no one else around who had the sort of individuality he had. The turn of phrase he had was so quirky and individual. I had met no one who had come even remotely close to him.’

He talks about Sir Tim a lot. You get the feeling it was, in some ways, his most painful divorce. Was part of the problem that Tim’s heart wasn’t in music theatre? That he finds it a little, well, embarrassing? Wasn’t he always more interested in rock and pop?

‘I think that is true, though goodness knows, he’s made enough records. He’s sometimes deliberately provocative about these things, that’s all. Saying he hates musicals. But I think deep down he cares much more about his work that he would ever say.

'We’ve written a few songs together since Evita and we almost have an album’s worth. And always with Tim there will be a couple of lines in a song that no other lyricist could have come up with. There’s one we’ve worked on called Dance the Dance and it has the line: “She was on the ball and he was so last season”. Wonderful.’

Lloyd Webber had even been hoping that Sir Tim would come on board to write the lyrics for Love Never Dies. He was quoted as saying: ‘I have implied it and he knows perfectly well to phone me.’

Clearly there is still a strong bond between them, so what went wrong? ‘Where Tim and I really had a parting of the ways was over Chess. I think I put it the wrong way to Tim when I said I thought the plot wasn’t theatrical. I said what it needs is a theatre craftsman to give it some John le Carré-type suspense. And for once we got out of step and then next I heard he was doing it with [Abba’s] Benny and Bjorn.’

It sounds like his feelings were hurt. ‘I was a bit hurt, yes, because I felt I could have done something with it. As it turned out, the songs from Chess are right up there with some of the very best ever written for musical theatre. If you audition in New York you will always hear four songs from Chess. But still, for me, there was a fundamental problem with the script. It never worked in the theatre, for me.’

Having been such a successful double act was he nervous about going it alone? ‘Well I had an immediate disaster without Tim, which was when I did Jeeves with Alan Ayckbourn. But then I did a big hit album on my own with Variations and that was a turning point.’

For his part, Sir Tim went on to have a huge hit with The Lion King, made by Lloyd Webber’s only real rival in music theatre, Disney. Ouch.

It occurs to me that, in some way, Sir Tim, who supposedly finds musicals a bit embarrassing, might have been something of a father figure to Lloyd Webber.

I ask Lloyd Webber – who has been quoted as saying that he was never that close to his father – whether he ever got a sense that his actual father considered musicals to be, well, not one of the higher art forms.

‘Not at all. I remember him bringing home a single by the Shadows and saying they are probably the finest quartet working in Britain at the moment. My father got every scholarship going and followed an academic side, but I know deep down inside that he would have preferred to go into film music. His make up was such that he wouldn’t have been able to cope with the problems that crop up constantly in the music theatre or film music world. Also, I think he would have thought he was letting the family down.’ Because? ‘My grandfather belittled it.’

For the record, one of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rare forays into classical music was his Requiem in 1986. It is beautiful and haunting and deserved the Grammy it won. It was composed in memory of his father, William Lloyd Webber, without a hyphen.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-features/7244026/Andrew-Lloyd-Webber-interview.html

Love Never Dies Musical Numbers

2010-02-11T15:26:00.001+11:00

Just revealed on the official website

Musical Numbers

Act 1
Prologue
“Prologue”
Madame Giry, Fleck

Prologue
“The Coney Island Waltz”
The Orchestra

Prologue
“"That's The Place That You Ruined, You Fool!"”
Madame Giry, Fleck

Scene 1 - Outside Phantasia
“Heaven By The Sea”
Ensemble

Scene 1 - Outside Phantasia
“Only For Him/ Only For You”
Meg Giry, Madame Giry, Ensemble

Scene 2 - The Aerie
“The Aerie”
The Orchestra

Scene 2 - The Aerie
“'Til I Hear You Sing”
The Phantom

Scene 2 - The Aerie
“Giry Confronts The Phantom/ 'Til I Hear You Sing (Reprise)”
Meg Giry, Madame Giry, The Phantom

Scene 3 - Pier 69
“Christine Disembarks”
Raoul, Gustave, Ensemble

Scene 3 - Pier 69
“Arrival Of The Trio - "Are You Ready To Begin?"”
Fleck, Gangle, Squelch, Raoul, Gustave, Ensemble

Scene 4 - The Hotel
“"What A Dreadful Town!..."”
Christine Daaé, Raoul, Gustave

Scene 4 - The Hotel
“Look With Your Heart”
Christine Daaé, Gustave

Scene 4 - The Hotel
“Beneath A Moonless Sky”
Christine Daaé, The Phantom

Scene 4 - The Hotel
“Once Upon Another Time”
Christine Daaé, The Phantom

Scene 4 - The Hotel
“"Mother Please, I'm Scared!"”
Gustave, Christine Daaé, The Phantom

Scene 5 - Backstage
“Dear Old Friend”
Meg Giry, Madame Giry, Christine Daaé, Raoul, Gustave, Ensemble

Scene 6 - The Aerie
“Beautiful”
Gustave, Fleck, Gangle, Squelch, The Phantom

Scene 6 - The Aerie
“The Beauty Underneath”
The Phantom, Gustave

Scene 6 - The Aerie
“The Phantom Confronts Christine”
The Phantom, Christine Daaé, Madame Giry

Act 2
Entr'acte
“Entr'acte”
The Orchestra

Scene 1 - The Bar
“Why Does She Love Me?”
Raoul, Meg Giry, Ensemble

Scene 1 - The Bar
“Devil Take The Hindmost”
Raoul, The Phantom

Scene 2 - The Beach
“Heaven By The Sea (Reprise)”
Ensemble

Scene 2 - The Beach
“"Ladies... Gents!"/The Coney Island Waltz (Reprise)”
Fleck, Gangle, Squelch, Ensemble

Scene 3 - Onstage at Phantasma
“Bathing Beauty”
Meg Giry, Fleck, Gangle, Squelch, Ensemble

Scene 4 - Meg's Dressing Room
“"Mother, Did You Watch?"”
Meg Giry, Madame Giry

Scene 5 - Christine's Dressing Room
“Before The Performance”
Christine Daaé, Raoul, Gustave, The Phantom

Scene 6 - Backstage/ Onstage at Phantasma
“Devil Take The Hindmost (Quartet)”
Gustave, Raoul, The Phantom, Madame Giry, Meg Giry, Ensemble

Scene 6 - Backstage/ Onstage at Phantasma
“Love Never Dies”
Christine Daaé

Scenes 7 & 8 - Christine's Dressing Room/ The Streets of Coney Island
“"Ah Christine!"”
The Phantom, Christine Daaé , Raoul

Scenes 7 & 8 - Christine's Dressing Room/ The Streets of Coney Island
“"Gustave! Gustave!..."”
Christine Daaé, The Phantom, Madame Giry, Fleck, Squelch

Scene 9 - The Pier
“"Please Miss Giry, I Want To Go Back..."”
Meg Giry, Christine Daaé, The Phantom, Madame Giry, Gustave

Love Never Dies - A Note From The Composer

2010-02-11T15:19:00.008+11:00

A Note From The Composer

Love Never Dies has been in gestation, on and off, for twenty years. In roughly 1990 I had the idea of continuing the story of the Phantom and Christine and setting it in New York at the turn of the last century. I had a thrilling discussion over dinner with the late Maria Björnson, who created the brilliant design of the original Phantom, in a strange restaurant in the grounds of Chelsea Football Club. She was very excited about a New World location. We felt the key to the piece could be setting the story in New York and that this time the Phantom lived above his realm, perhaps in Manhattan’s first penthouse. But where in America could the Phantom have first gone to? Where could he have been unnoticed and yet been a part of the community?

I saw a documentary about Coney Island. Here was the Phantom’s new home among the freaks and the oddities who were such a part of Coney. I also had the thought that perhaps Christine came to America with her son and I thought I knew how to end the piece.

Before Maria died so tragically young I discussed my ideas with the novelist Frederick Forsyth who developed them and published his own version as a novella ‘The Phantom of Manhattan’. By then I had moved on to other projects. Although I sensed the seeds of a story for a show, I couldn’t make the plot work for me as a composer. But I couldn’t leave the story alone.

In 2006 I decided to look at it again and discussed it with several writers and directors. But again it was to no avail until I outlined the problems I had with the plot to my old friend and colleague Ben Elton.

It was he who found the way through the road block. He pointed out that my first thoughts for a new plot contained several new characters. Ben suggested that any continuation of the story must be about the protagonists of the original show. So the new characters were axed and Gustave, Christine’s son, is the only new principal character we meet. Come the autumn of 2007, Ben had shaped a story that I felt I could make work.

The process of creating the libretto of a musical like this is hugely about collaboration. Where does the lyricist take over from the book writer? When does the book writer’s job stop? How much do I, as composer, shape and drive the show? The answer is, of course, that all our tasks overlap. This libretto is the result of enormous collaboration between Ben, myself, lyricist Glenn Slater and our director Jack O’Brien.

When at last I had a story, I made a decision. It would be daft not to occasionally have a flavour of the original show. But only very occasionally. I decided that none of the main melodies of The Phantom of the Opera would appear in Love Never Dies . After all the story is set roughly ten years on and, with one short exception, I have stuck firmly to my rule.

However there is one of the new melodies whose history I should explain before someone else does. It is ‘Love Never Dies’ itself. This was the only tune I wrote at the time when I first thought of continuing the Phantom and Christine’s story.

It was recorded by Kiri Te Kanawa under the title ‘The Heart is Slow to Learn’. Even though I had given up on the new Phantom, some second sense told me not to release the Kiri Te Kanawa recording, although it did subsequently appear on a limited edition compilation.

But with the Phantom sequel definitely abandoned in my mind, I used the chorus of the melody in The Beautiful Game, the musical I wrote with Ben Elton. Frankly I felt it stuck out like a sore thumb from the rest of the score, and it was eventually cut and replaced by ‘The Boys in the Photograph’, now the title of the show when it is revived. However the dramatic situation in the story of Love Never Dies is exactly the same as the one that I had originally composed the melody for and I was always proud of the moment. Once I had the new plot, I restored it to what I hope is its rightful home.

Otherwise all of the main melodies were composed over the past two years for the story that Ben unlocked.

Andrew Lloyd Webber

It has come to my attention...

2010-02-10T04:13:00.006+11:00

That the last time Andrew Lloyd Webber worked on the Phantom of the Opera sequel, "The Heart Is Slow To Learn" was not the only song he composed for it. I remember at the time the press said he'd written a couple but I thought they might have been exaggerating as usual, or he was keeping them under wraps. I've since discovered another song was played at one of the Sydmonton Festivals, if not there then somewhere else, and it was called "Maze of Mirrors". I have no idea if any recordings exist and I have no idea who wrote the lyrics. Don Black wrote the lyrics for "The Heart Is Slow To Learn" so he may have worked on this one as well. I remember at the time reading the Frederick Forsyth novel "The Phantom of Manhattan" thinking the sequence with the mirror room would make an awesome stage set.

Just another obscure story I've picked up.

Ryan.

They removed the clips before I could listen to them :(

2010-02-09T19:22:00.001+11:00

AWWWWWWWWWWW BUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ryan.

Love Never Dies Amazon soundclips

2010-02-09T17:03:00.009+11:00

30 second soundclips from the "Love Never Dies" CD are now available at the UK Amazon website. I haven't had a chance to listen to them yet but I will tonight. I came across this news rather abruptly. No one tells me anything. Here's a transcript of the clips from a Phantom of the Opera website. I've never seen such hatefilled responses since the release of "The Phantom Menace". Still curious tho...

***WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD***

QUOTE

1. "Phantasma. City of wonders. Mr. Y presents marvelous astonishments, human prodigies. The ooh la la girl."

2. Orchestral - Coney Island Waltz

3."Do you mean?"
"That's the world you destroyed with your greed!"
"It wasn't my fault - I couldn't have known."
"Don't you remember what happened back then? When we, even we, dared to walk among men? When even a Phantom could dream his dark dreams once again?"

4. "It's a little slice of heaven by the sea. The sights, the sounds, the lights, the spells. The wonderwheels, the carousels. The .... a modern holidays. The lights, the shows - the rush, the whirl, the sheer romance! And the rumors! Things so odd, you daren't..."

5. Meg: "I'll be waiting in the wings, wound up tighter than a spring, as the house begins to dim. And I'll practice every line, hoping desperately to shine, shining only for him. Just imagine how he'll cheer at the moment you appear, stepping out before the screen. Let them whoop and let them call, I won't hear the crowd at all. No, it's only for him."

6. Orchestral - The Ayrie

7. Phantom: "I find I can't give them a voice without you. My Christine, my Christine. Lost and gone, lost and gone."

8. Mme. Giry: Can't you see that the master's at work? Can't you see that his mind's somewhere else? Can't you see that obviously he's thinking of things more important than you?
Man: Careful, Madame. You're forgetting yourself.
Mme. Giry: Don't you see, he forgot what this is. Opening day, a big deal, what a fuss. Our success means nought I guess compared to the things that the master must do!
Man: That's quite enough!

9. French pastries, did you?
There's nothing over there we don't have bigger and better
over here, I assure you.
How was Europe?
Wait, there she is!

10. Where you'll be when it arrives.
This is outrageous!
Amazing!
I'm telling you, that Mr. Y's a genius.
it's a funhouse where the mirrors all reflect what's real. And reality's as twisted as the mirror's reveal. And the man is finding out what the mirrors show..."

11. Raoul: What a farce, what an outright slap in the face!
It's an utter disgrace. I've got a mind to pack and go, never you mind the debts we owe. God, I can't believe we've sung this low.
Gustave: Father, please come play with me!
Raoul: Please, tell the boy the answer's no! Must you make
that racket?
Christine: Why, it's the aria I'm to sing -
Raoul: It hurts my head.

12. Christine: "The heart understands. The heart never lies. Believe what it feels, and trust what it shows. Look with your heart, the heart always knows.Love is not always beautiful, love..."

13. Christine: I should have known.

14. Christine: "And must be done, and now we have no choice. We do what we must do, we love within we give what we can give. And take what little..."

15. Phantom: Tell me where you'd like to go, tell me what
you'd want to see. I can grant you any wish!"
Gustave: Could you how me if you please all the Island's
mysteries? All that's strange and wild and dark in the shadows of the park?
Phantom: You shall see it all tomorrow - I promise!
Christine: Back to sleep now, Gustave.

16. Mme. Giry: The beginning of the season.
Meg: Does he agree? It's been three months! He never comes to see the show.
Mme. Giry: You may get more than that. He has been composing again, late at night. Not this cheap, vaudville trash. Something glorious.
Meg: For me?
Mme. Giry: Continue to work hard - make yourself useful to
him!

17. Fleck: Hurry up and follow us - hurry if you care to. Soon the dark will swallow us - follow if you dare to.
Gustave: Is this where Mr. Y lives?
Fleck (or someone, who knows): This is where he works.
Fleck (or one of the others - I can't keep them straight!): Step lively, child. He is waiting.

18. Phantom: Have you ever yearned to go past the world you
think you know? Been enthralled to the call of the beauty
underneath? Have you let it draw you in past the place where dreams begin? Felt the full breathless pull of the beauty underneath. When the dark unfolds its wings, do you sense the strangest things? Things no one could..."

19. Phantom: ...want the truth right now, if so!
Christine: Once upon another time you went off and left me
alone. But that's not all you did - you left me with a son."

ACT TWO

1. Entr'acte

2. Orchestral

3. Phantom: We've been here before, but that was a long time ago, Vicomte. And we were playing a different game. Look at you, deep in debt, stinking drunk. Pitiful. Shall we two make a bet - devil take the hindmost?
Raoul: Look at you, foul as sin...

4. With your lady and your fella, and your kids and your
umbrella on a little slice of heaven by the sea. The service,
and the breeze, the food, the peace upon the...

5. "Your delectation. Marvelous automatons of his own
creation. Plus a finale to sweep you away - what a ... to
perform just one day! Come see the breathtaking Christine
Daae!"

6. Meg: I took a little trip to Coney Island to get away from all the city sprawl. I couldn't bear to...

7. Meg: Mother, what's wrong?
Mme. Giry: Meg, sweet fool, you did all that you could.
Charming, bright and yet still not enough.
Meg: What do you mean?
Mme. Giry: How you danced there, all entranced yes, all but
the one whose entrancement we sought!
Meg: He wasn't there?
Mme. Giry: Where, poor girl do you think that he was? Yes,
that's right, in with her all alone.
Meg: What, Christine?
Mme. Giry: Dreaming of their son, their love, too smitten to spare you a moment of thought. All that you gave him, it's all been a waste.
Meg: But you said -

8. Gustave: ...very beautiful. Like a queen in a book.
Christine: You too are beautiful, so very beautiful. Once this performance is through, we'll spend some time...

9. Gustave: ooooooh (waltz theme in background)
Phantom: Will she sing? Will she flee? What is she thinking
now? Is it him? Is it me? Devil take the hindmost.
Stage Crew: Ready on the floor?

10. Orchestral

11. Christine: every word, and it felt beautiful and I felt
beautiful.
Christine and the Phantom: Lost in the music once more,
feeling it rise up and soar, alive once again!

12. Man: The Vicomte de Chagny left here in a carriage. Saw it with my own eyes, sir. There was no one with him.
Phantom: Are you quite certain he left here alone?
Man: Sir, was there anyone else here backstage?
Phantom: Yes, yes. Mme. Giry, she was here with her vicious
little sneer. And that comment she made, the ungrateful...

13. Meg: ...everything away...
Gustave: I can't swim!
Meg: Don't worry, it's almost over. Sink into the deep, blue and cool and kind. Then drift off to sleep, let the past unwind.

END QUOTE

Yes, I'm a little worried at the moment...

Ryan.

More Coney Island fires, they appear to have been common

2010-02-06T17:54:00.005+11:00

This is from a WordPress entry dated 30 September 2006. The full link is included below. I found these bits most interesting...

QUOTE

Fires seemed to be a common occurence in these parks. The buildings and rides were all built using very flammable materials: frames of thin strips of wood covered with a moldable mixture of plaster of Paris. That, coupled with the number of electric lights used in the parks – when lightbulbs were still a novelty, created the perfect situation for FIRE.

END QUOTE

SECOND QUOTE

SO Dreamland here was the crazy one. It was only around from 1904 til 1911, but it went all out in that short time, trying to compete with Luna Park next door. It billed itself “High-Class Entertainment” and even through in some educational exhibits. Apparently it had over one million light bulbs illuminating the park and its buildings (REMEMBER THIS: 1 million)

Among Dreamland’s attractions were a railway that ran through a Swiss alpine landscape; imitation Venetian canals with gondolas; a “Lilliputian Village” with three hundred dwarf inhabitants; and a demonstration of fire-fighting in which two thousand people pretended to put out a blazing six-story building. Creepiest of all, there was a display of baby incubators, where premature babies were cared for and exhibited. Yup, preemies on display.

Now, on the night before opening for the 1911 season, a new ride called Hell Gate was undergoing last minute repairs. On the ride, boats rushed through dim caverns – very scary. Anyways, a leak had to be plugged with tar, and at 1:30 in the morning that night, the electric lights illuminating the workers started to explode and in the darkness one of the workers knocked over a bucket of hot pitch. And Hell Gate was on FIRE.

The flames quickly spread through the entire park. A brand new high-pressure water pumping station failed, and there wasn’t enough water to keep the fire under control.

It was complete chaos in the park. With only the light of the fire, everyone was trying to save the animals and preemies. The one-armed lion tamer, Captain Bonavita, was trying to save his cats when a few of the terrified lions escaped. One named Black Prince ran out into the streets, where crowds of people were watching the fire, and was shot by police. The New York Times reported that all the preemies were lost to the flames, then later learned that they had all survived. Preemies, lions and fire. How completely crazy is that?

The park was never rebuilt.

END SECOND QUOTE

http://alexbee.wordpress.com/2006/09/30/haunted-by-coney-island/

This further backs my theory that there may be a gigantic fire at the climax of "Love Never Dies". We'll know in a few weeks.

Ryan.

A 1907 article on the Steeplechase Park, Coney Island fire

2010-02-06T17:52:00.000+11:00

Bridgeport, CT Steeplechase Island Ballpark Fire, Aug 1907
Posted May 31st, 2009 by Linda Horton

FIRE AT TILYOU'S BRIDGEPORT PLACE

His Connecticut Steeplechase Is Destroyed as Was His Coney Island Property.

DYNAMITE TO STOP FLAMES.

With No Water Pressure, the Whole Island Is Threatened--The Loss Is $60,000.

Special to The New York Times.

BRIDGEPORT, Aug. 18--Some one dropped a lighted cigarette under the bleachers at George C. Tilyou's Steeplechase Island, where the Chicago National League baseball team and the Bridgeport team were warming up for an exhibition game this afternoon. Forty minutes later the bleachers, grand stand, the Steeplechase building, and the earthquake house had been destroyed by flames. The total loss is $60,000.

At the time the fire broke out the bleachers and grand stand were filled with 5,000 men, women, and children. A small boy was the first to see the flames and shouted that there was a bonfire under the bleachers. Some men looked at the incipient blaze and remarked, "Ah, let it burn."

It looked at that time as if a cup of water would have been sufficient to kill it, but the fire caught some waste paper and dry tinder, and then ignited the woodwork of the bleachers. There was a scrambled for safety, but in spite of it the very best order prevailed.

Men shouted that there was plenty of time and the great crowd acted with splendid judgment. There was no hurrying and everybody had left the grand stand when the flames attacked it.

Then the fire spread to the Steeplechase, and that structure was completely at the mercy of the flames twenty minutes later. There is no water supply on the island sufficient to fight a fire, and the wind was blowing the flames toward the main cluster of buildings in the centre of the island.

Manager Paul Boynton attempted to blow up the front of the Steeplechase building with dynamite to stop the progress of the flames. The attempt was a failure, but luckily there was a shift in the wind, and any further spreading of the fire was stopped.

The Fire Department was called out from this place, but was unable to get to the Island, there being no dock heavy enough to land any of the steamers. Hose companies were shipped over to the island, however, but there was no pressure to the water, and the buildings were allowed to smother themselves out.

Besides the two structures mentioned Robert Weber's cottage was destroyed, with all its contents. There was some damage to the bathing pavilion and to the booths of the east side of the Trail.

Mr. Tilyou has a very small insurance. Mr. Weber's loss is about $3,000.

After the fences, grand stand, and bleachers were destroyed the ball teams played five innings to satisfy those who had paid admissions. Every foul ball went over into the smoldering section and was consumed.

About 10,000 people clustered about the diamond to watch the game. It was a free exhibition except to those who had paid before the fire broke out. The Chicago team won by the score of 3 to 1.

______________

Three weeks ago yesterday Mr. Tilyou's Steeplechase Park, at Coney Island, was destroyed by fire, at an estimated loss of $1,000,000.

A representative of Mr. Tilyou said at Coney Island last night that Mr. Tilyou would certainly replace all of the structures destroyed at Bridgeport yesterday. There was some insurance on the Bridgeport property, Mr. Tilyou's representative said. How much he did not know.

The New York Times, New York, NY 19 Aug 1907
__________________

Transcribed by Linda Horton. Thank you, Linda!

http://www3.gendisasters.com/connecticut/12854/bridgeport-ct-steeplechase-island-ballpark-fire-aug-1907

What we know about Love Never Dies, the continuation of The Phantom of the Opera

2010-02-05T15:54:00.011+11:00

The CD tracklist accidentally leaked through eBay where RUG have been selling copies (I purchased one of them promptly because I didn't have a credit card so I couldn't purchase one through the website):

Disc 1

1. Prologue
2. The Coney Island Waltz
3. That's The Place You Ruined, You Fool!
4. A Little Slice Of Heaven
5. Only For Him/Only For You
6. The Ayrie
7. 'Till I Hear You Sing
8. Giry Confronts The Phantom/'Till I Hear You Sing (Reprise)
9. Christine Disembarks
10. Arrival Of The Trio/Are You Ready To Begin?
11. What A Dreadful Town!...
12. Look With Your Heart
13. Beneath A Moonless Sky
14. Once Upon Another Time
15. "Mother Please, I’m Scared!"
16. Dear Old Friend
17. Beautiful
18. The Beauty Underneath
19. The Phantom Confronts Christine

Disc 2

1. Entr'acte
2. Why Does She Love Me?
3. Devil Take The Hindmost
4. A Little Slice Of Heaven (Reprise)
5. Ladies… Gents!/The Coney Island Waltz (Reprise)
6. Bathing Beauty
7. "Mother, Did You Watch?"
8. Before The Performance
9. Devil Take The Hindmost (Quartet)
10. Love Never Dies
11. "Ah, Christine!..."
12. "Gustave! Gustave!..."
13. "Please, Miss Giry, I Want To Go Back…"

The first song revealed at the launch sung by Ramin Karimloo who will be playing the Phantom. He was accompanied by the full orchestra. "Coney Island Waltz" was released through the website shortly beforehand:

‘TILL I HEAR YOU SING – Phantom

The day starts
The day ends
Time crawls by
Night steals in
Pacing the floor
The moments creep
Yet I can’t bear to sleep
Till I hear you sing

And weeks pass
And months pass
Seasons fly
Still you don’t
Walk through the door
And in a haze
I count the silent days
Till I hear you sing
Once more

And sometimes
At night time
I dream that you are there
But wake
Holding nothing but the
Empty air

And years come
And years go
Time runs dry
Still I ache
Down to the core
My broken soul
Can’t be alive and whole
Till I hear you sing
Once more

And music
Your music
It teases at my ear
I turn
And it fades away
And you’re not here

Let hopes pass
Let dreams pass
Let them die
Without you
What are they for?
I’ll always feel
No more than half way real
Till I hear you sing
Once more

The second song revealed at the last South Bank Awards sung by Sierra Boggess who will be playing Christine. She was accompanied by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Louise Hunt on pianos.

LOVE NEVER DIES – Christine

Who knows when love begins
Who knows what makes it start
One day it’s simply there
Alive inside your heart

It slips into your thoughts
It infiltrates your soul
It takes you by surprise
Then seizes full control

Try to deny it
And try to protest
But love won’t let you go
Once you’ve been possessed

Love never dies
Love never falters
Once it has spoken
Love is yours

Love never fades
Love never alters
Hearts may get broken
Love endures
Hearts may get broken
Love endures

And soon as you submit
Surrender flesh and bone
That love takes on a life
Much bigger than your own

It uses you at whim
And drives you to despair
And forces you to feel
More joy than you can bear

Love gives you pleasure
And love brings you pain
And yet when both are gone
Love will still remain

Love never dies
Love never falters
Once it has spoken
Love is yours

Love never fades
Love never alters
Hearts may get broken
Love endures
Hearts may get broken...

Love never dies
Love will continue
Love keeps on beating
When you’re gone

Love never dies
Once it is in you
Life merely fleeting
Love lives on
Life merely fleeting
Love lives on

The tune for this song was recycled from "The Heart Is Slow To Learn", a number written for an earlier attempt at a sequel in the late 90s. When that was abandoned, Andrew recycled the tune for the chorus for "Our Kind Of Love" in his 2000 musical "The Beautiful Game" with Ben Elton. That was, in turn, removed from the 2009 Canadian revisal "The Boys In The Photograph" and speculation began about whether or not the original "Heart..." song would return for the sequel. It has now returned with the new lyric by Glenn Slater. I'll post the lyrics for "Heart..." and "Our Kind Of Love" later on, for reference.

Ryan.

Love Never Dies...Inferno?

2010-02-05T14:44:00.004+11:00

It came to my attention recently that there was a great fire at Steeplechase Park, Coney Island, in 1907, the same year Andrew Lloyd Webber's Love Never Dies takes place. Here's some information from Wikipedia:

QUOTE:

Steeplechase burned during the 1907 season, destroying most of the park. The morning after the fire Tilyou posted a sign outside the park. It read:

To enquiring friends: I have troubles today that I had not yesterday. I had troubles yesterday which I have not today. On this site will be built a bigger, better, Steeplechase Park. Admission to the burning ruins -- Ten cents.

The park was rebuilt for the 1908 season, although the new park was not fully open until 1909. It now included a "Pavilion of Fun" in an indoor enclosure covered by steel and glass that covered 5 acres (20,000 m2).[1] Steeplechase burned again in less-destructive incidents in 1936 and 1939.

END QUOTE

Does this explain why the events of the original "Phantom of the Opera" were moved 16 years forward to accommodate the "ten years later..." storyline from "Love Never Dies"? I hear programs from the original production have changed the dates from the traditional 1881 setting to the new 1897 (Interesting also the original cast album libretto includes the misprint 1865 while the George Perry companion from Pavilion changes it back to 1881. I'm still not actually certain 1865 was a misprint, just what I've been told by people who saw the original production.) As for the film, Joel Schumacher sets it in 1870.

Why would Andrew change the dates after all these years? Because he wanted to accommodate the Steeplechase Park incident from 1907? And does this back my theory Christine will somehow die or become scarred like the Phantom during the fire? And is Madame Giry, the new villain of the story replacing Darius from "The Phantom of Manhattan", responsible for the fire? Because she is jealous of Christine and wants her daughter Meg to be with the Phantom? Or because Gustave, who may be the Phantom's son, could stand to inherit all of his fortune when Phantom is gone?

It's all very intriguing...

Ryan.

A Brilliant New Article on Batman: The Musical (Dark Knight Of The Soul mention as well)

2010-01-30T03:04:00.004+11:00

http://www.comicsalliance.com/2010/01/28/batman-musical/

Wow, thank you for the mention too.

- Ryan L

When Disney cartoons became reanimated

2010-01-14T17:53:00.001+11:00

The film 'Waking Sleeping Beauty' shows how the studio went from the bleak '80s to creative and box office success.

By John Horn >>>
January 10, 2010

It was like any other class reunion -- friends who hadn't seen each other for decades catching up while "When You Wish Upon a Star" played in the background. But even though there also was talk of old wounds and slights, this holiday-season gathering wasn't marking the anniversary of any high school or college graduation. Instead, the several hundred people crowding into Hollywood's El Capitan Theatre had come together to revisit one of the best comeback stories in show business history: the resurrection of Walt Disney Animation.

The reunion was actually a screening of "Waking Sleeping Beauty," a new documentary recounting the 10 years starting in 1984 when Disney's animation arm was transformed from a rudderless shadow of its former self (the dark and disturbing "The Black Cauldron" marking the nadir) into the creative and financial heart (with the life-affirming "The Lion King" at the apex) of the sprawling entertainment conglomerate.

Scheduled to be released theatrically March 26, "Waking Sleeping Beauty" will premiere to local audiences today at the Palm Springs International Film Festival. While the movie is not likely to generate as much "is-that-fool-based-on-me?" chatter as 1992's "The Player," the documentary does offer an unusually forthright peek into one of the most contentious but ultimately fruitful periods in modern Hollywood.

Inside the El Capitan at the screening for Disney animators several weeks ago, the atmosphere was festive. "Most of you are in this movie," the film's producer, Peter Schneider, told the veteran animators before the movie commenced. Added the film's director, Don Hahn: "It's your movie."

The introduction was only partly true -- "Waking Sleeping Beauty" is Schneider and Hahn's story as well. The two were witnesses to and participants in the animation turnaround: Schneider was president of Disney animation during its resurgence, while Hahn was a producer of the division's "Beauty and the Beast" and "The Lion King" blockbusters.

Given their backgrounds and Schneider's explanation to the El Capitan crowd of why he made the documentary -- journalists covering the studio during that time loved recounting Disney's boardroom fights, "but I never felt they captured the joy and beauty of making these movies," Schneider said -- you might expect "Waking Sleeping Beauty" to be self-serving hagiography, a wart-free portrait of artists in all their animation glory. In addition, the film was financed by Disney, which also will distribute it.

What's surprising about the documentary, though, is that it's not all singing squirrels.

"That period was very good and very hard," Ron Clements, a director and writer of "The Little Mermaid" and "Aladdin," said after the screening. "It was stressful, but it was a very fun period."

"Waking Sleeping Beauty" doesn't paint over the conflicts that not only were inevitable in Disney's resurgence but also were an outcome of the turnaround itself, as the studio's most senior executives (Jeffrey Katzenberg, Michael Eisner, Roy E. Disney) squabbled over who deserved credit for the renaissance.

"We were hyper aware of not making a puff piece," Hahn said in an interview.

"Waking Sleeping Beauty" tracks two parallel plots. The first and most central to the documentary is how low Disney's animation division had fallen in the years leading to the 1980s -- "given up for dead," the movie states -- and what it took to restore the division to its former brilliance. The second story line follows the studio managers determined to bring the unit back and how their infighting ultimately split Disney apart.

The documentary opens with the 1994 premiere of "The Lion King," which would go on to gross more than $780 million worldwide and make vastly more money as a Broadway musical. "To an outsider, it looked like a perfect world," Hahn says in the film's narration. "But backstage, the tension had reached a peak."

The movie then takes audiences behind the Disney curtain.

A big shake-up

Though Pixar Animation Studios (now a part of Disney) currently enjoys the best track record among any filmmaking company, what the company founded by Walt Disney began to accomplish in animation 25 years ago is scarcely less extraordinary -- especially given the division's doldrums.

Once the studio's artistic and economic lynch pin, animation had tumbled from the cultural landmarks of the 1930s and '40s ("Fantasia," " Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," "Dumbo") to "The Fox and the Hound" and "The Black Cauldron," movies that attracted as little critical attention as it did box office. As badly as the Disney animated films were performing, morale among the filmmakers was arguably worse; the animators were eventually kicked off Disney's Burbank lot, to scruffy Glendale offices.

As the movie -- composed of archival footage and off-camera interviews of the animators and executives -- makes clear, the animators (including a young Tim Burton and John Lasseter) weren't pushed to do their best: long lunches and midday volleyball games rather than spirited story meetings and motivated brainstorming were the norm. Competitors were taking advantage: Disney exile Don Bluth's "An American Tail" beat Disney's "The Great Mouse Detective" at the box office, and the low-rent "The Care Bears Movie" even toppled "The Black Cauldron."

That devil-may-care passivity changed in a 1984 shake-up. New Chief Executive Officer Eisner (a hard-charging star at ABC and Paramount Pictures) and studio chief Katzenberg (Eisner's tireless, demanding Paramount partner) arrived in Burbank, and Disney (Walt's nephew) was put in charge of animation, which had been drifting without a leader.

Eisner is described in the film by Roy Disney as "a little bit nuts" while animator Glen Keane labels Katzenberg "a maniac." Hahn says of Katzenberg in the movie, "You never knew if he was going to hug you or kick you."

What Eisner and Katzenberg might have lacked in people skills, the two more than made up for in ambition and focus: They pushed their animators harder than they'd ever been pushed -- Sunday meetings at 8 a.m., for starters -- and the results, while incremental at first, were soon forthcoming. The animators rebelled over the boot camp discipline but soon realized they had been artistically unleashed. (Eisner and Katzenberg declined to comment for this story; Disney died in December.)

There was no fixing some long-gestating movies whose DNA was terminally damaged (including "The Great Mouse Detective"), but the division's new productions held better prospects, thanks in large part to the songs of Howard Ashman. Still, there were some nearly ruinous decisions. Katzenberg wanted to eliminate Ashman and Alan Menken's "Part of Your World," one of the signature songs from 1989's "The Little Mermaid," feeling it stopped the movie. At one point, "The Lion King" was considered the troubled movie, while 1991's "Beauty and the Beast," the only animated movie nominated for the best picture Oscar, was once going to be made without musical numbers.

As amusing in hindsight as those near missteps appear, the fighting among Eisner, Katzenberg and Disney was a more serious matter. In a Shakespearean twist, the kingdom they created was undone by the results themselves -- they essentially succeeded too well. When Frank Wells, Disney's peacekeeping Disney president and chief operating officer, died in a helicopter accident in 1994, the simmering internal feuds boiled over, as pettiness replaced professionalism -- Eisner, for instance, announced that Disney was building a new animation studio without sharing his plans with Katzenberg.

Before long, Katzenberg, denied Wells' job by Eisner, would leave Disney and help launch DreamWorks, now the biggest competitor to Disney's once near-total animation monopoly.

Telling the full story

Schneider and Hahn said that though it took some work to persuade Eisner to participate, Katzenberg was generous with his time and input. The two were also careful to include unflattering glimpses of their own behavior; Schneider in one documentary scene lashes out at his animation staff over a spoof memo sent under Schneider's name.

"But we did not do this to do a good guys and bad guys story," Schneider said.

He said he was inspired to make the movie in large part in reaction to James Stewart's book "Disney War," largely a takedown of Eisner's reign. Some of the animators in the film said they believed the film fairly balanced the creative accomplishments with the professional sniping.

"I was impressed with its honesty. It definitely felt fair," said Rob Minkoff, the director (with Roger Allers) of "The Lion King," who arrived at Disney two years before Eisner, Katzenberg and Disney. "Everybody who had been there just desperately wanted it to change. There was this pent-up energy unleashed by Jeffrey and Michael. I suppose if Frank Wells hadn't died in that helicopter crash, the story would be different."

Schneider said the film is particularly relevant to today's Hollywood. "It's a cautionary tale," he said. "It's about what happens when growth is the goal as opposed to making great art -- and then worrying over where the credit resides."

john.horn@latimes.com

Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-disney10-2010jan10,0,2327240.story

The Phantom is taking shape...

2010-01-08T22:31:00.000+11:00

By Baz Bamigboye
Last updated at 9:33 AM on 08th January 2010

Phantom Of The Opera sequel Love Never Dies is like a theatrical version of Avatar, in that it's a long-awaited work from a giant of the genre, it will (hopefully) push musical theatre forward as Phantom did in its day, and it will (hopefully) make lots of money.

The producers are obviously looking at how many tickets have been sold - so far, the advance is £8.5 million. But the primary focus is on getting the show right and the behind-the-scenes work has been going on for more than a year, so it is more than 'right' by opening night.

The score is certainly melodic and finds Andrew Lloyd Webber at his most haunting and romantic. Director Jack O'Brien was at pre-rehearsals on Monday working with singers and dancers, and going over various circus stunts and illusions.

Next week, the full company will assemble and be divided up into groups at a theatrical rehearsal complex in South London.

Centrepiece in the largest of the halls being used is a giant 'revolve', costing some £100,000, which will resemble the revolving stage that is about to be installed at the Adelphi Theatre, where Love Never Dies will begin previews on February 20.

The revolve will be used only for the four weeks the Love Never Dies folks are south of the river, although it can be dismantled and shipped for LND productions in New York and Sydney.

Principal members of the company - Ramin Karimloo, Sierra Boggess and Summer Strallen, who play the Phantom, Christine and Meg Giry, respectively - know their roles well because they spent a lot of time working on the show's concept album.

Sally Dexter and John Barrowman performed as Madame Giry and Raoul on the record, but Liz Robertson and Joseph Millson have those roles for the stage show.

The album will be released around the same time as the official first night of Love Never Dies on March 9.

But while O'Brien and choreographer Jerry Mitchell put the cast through their paces - observed, by the way, by associates visiting from the U.S. and Australia - designer Bob Crowley is busy overseeing the paint room at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, where the backdrops are being painted, and backstage at the Adelphi, where his incredible Coney Island roller-coaster and fairground is being built.

It's certainly the biggest - and most important - musical of the year. And, as O'Brien observed, 'it brings full circle what Andrew has been doing for the past quarter of a century'.

It's a score full of the emotion of the composer's life.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1241522/BAZ-BAMIGBOYE-Car-Carey-Mulligan-New-British-It-girl-girlfriend-Shia-LaBeouf-destined-big-things-Hollywood.html#ixzz0byTLVLHu

"Avatar" director James Cameron back in spotlight

2009-12-18T20:10:00.000+11:00

D.E. Williams, Reuters
December 18, 2009, 5:47 pm

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - James Cameron is "the king of the world" again. "Avatar," the director's first feature since 1997's "Titanic," opens worldwide this weekend amid critical acclaim and expectations of boffo box office.

He recently spoke with the Hollywood Reporter about his early days, commercial success and his struggle to make "Avatar."

WHEN YOUR CAREER BROKE BIG IN 1984 WITH "THE TERMINATOR," YOU WENT FROM BEING A PART-TIME TRUCK DRIVER AND UNKNOWN FILMMAKER TO A HOT HOLLYWOOD WRITER-DIRECTOR.

Cameron: Well, I was actually a full-time truck driver and part-time scriptwriter! I remember pulling the truck over to the side of the road and hiding behind a billboard to write for 20 minutes, hoping that the other drivers wouldn't see me.

BUT AFTER THESE YEARS OF STRUGGLE, YOU BECAME A SORT OF QUINTESSENTIAL "OVERNIGHT SUCCESS." DID YOUR PERCEPTION OF FAME CHANGE?

I never thought of the director as ever being famous. My fantasy of it was that you sort of work in the shadows, creating these things. The actors become famous. But when I really got to the point of being recognized, even away from a venue where one of my films was screening, that's when it really started getting strange. The peak of that was, of course, the couple of weeks after the Academy Awards in 1998. Every other person on the street here in L.A. was looking at me.

THE "JAMES CAMERON" BRAND IS ON THE LEVEL OF A "GEORGE LUCAS" OR "STEVEN SPIELBERG." EVERY WRITER-DIRECTOR DREAMS OF HAVING THIS STATUS, BUT IS IT ALL IT'S CRACKED UP TO BE?

It's very helpful when you try to do something radical and new, like "Avatar." When I pitched it at Fox, it was good to have a track record of successful films, to be able to say to them that I've never directed a film that has lost money, and I'm not about to start now. That was maybe the most compelling thing I said when I was asking them to fund a very expensive film in which the main characters were going to be completely CGI, with blue faces and big golden eyes and tails! Sometimes they'd ask, "Do they need to have tails?" Like it was about the tails. Well, it wasn't about the tails, it was about the fact that they were computer-generated characters and their unease with that. But I had this track record, which helped. I don't care how good the script was, I could not have gotten "Avatar" funded if I hadn't made "Titanic."

HOW DID "TITANIC" ALLOW YOU TO PURSUE OTHER INTERESTS DURING THE PAST 10 YEARS?

The success of "Titanic" assured me of two things. First, I've got an income for a while. Second, I've got a career that's not going to evaporate. I've had enough hits that people can't say it was a fluke. So I could go do some other things. And my logic was that I can't lead a deep-ocean expedition, riding around on 50-foot seas in a Zodiac, when I'm 80 years old. But I can direct a movie when I'm 80. So if I want to go do this expedition stuff (chronicled in Cameron's 2003 documentary "Ghosts of the Abyss"), this is the time to do it. And I didn't want to dabble in it; I wanted to embrace it and be good at it and have the respect of the institutional oceanographic community -- at least to the point that I wasn't just some crackpot. And that took some time. And it also took some time to build the technology -- camera housings, and even some things that sound simple, like a pan-and-tilt camera head that operates outside a submersible vehicle at great depths. That didn't exist. We had to make it, and make it work at 12,000 or 16,000 feet down. We built a lot of stuff -- robotics, lighting systems -- and those designs subsequently found their way into the work of other oceanographic institutes. Hollywood doesn't know about that world or even recognize it, but that's fine. I don't mind that, but it's a little funny when people ask me, "So, what have you been doing for the last 10 years?" Well, I've been really, really busy.

WILL IT SURPRISE PEOPLE TO HEAR THAT ONE OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL DIRECTORS ON THE PLANET STILL HAS TO STRUGGLE TO GET HIS VISION TO THE SCREEN?

Well, if it was just about ego for me, I'd get to this point and then make some small movie -- small-er movie -- maybe a $50 million or $60 million film and just tell them to show up at the premiere. I'd just handle the rest. And I could probably get that deal, but that's not the kind of movie I want to make. And so long as I want to make these big films that have so much at risk, then I have to be in a more collegial partnership.

YOU POKED FUN AT YOUR OWN PUBLIC IMAGE IN MOVIES AND AT THE OSCARS WHEN YOU SAID YOU WERE KING OF THE WORLD. HOW DOES HUMOR HELP ONE DEAL WITH FAME?

I don't think some people understood that I was having fun with that moment at the Academy Awards. I think they thought I was just being an egotistical jerk! I think humor is very important in my day-to-day world. As a director you're a leader, whether on set or in post working with visual effects crews. It can get very tense and you have to be focused. But you can't constantly be this disciplined and detail-oriented guy. You have to crack up the room once in a while.

http://au.news.yahoo.com/a/-/entertainment/6604654/avatar-director-james-cameron-back-in-spotlight/

I believe in thing called (Meat) Loaf

2009-12-18T14:28:00.000+11:00

Published: 12 Dec 2009

MIGHTY MEAT LOAF is making a comeback with former DARKNESS frontman JUSTIN HAWKINS steering his return to the big time.
Wow. What a combination. I predict Meat Loaf's voice and the rocker's guitar magic will spell sure-fire success.

Hawkins has penned five tracks for the forthcoming collection. And I understand an eight-minute axe epic called Love Is Not Real is the standout song so far.

Hawkins - whose track I Believe In A Thing Called Love was a No2 hit in 2003 - is hot song-writing property. He penned an anthem on American Idol runner-up ADAM LAMBERT's For Your Entertainment album, which hit No3 in the Billboard charts. And he's had loads of offers since.

Loaf's last studio album was 2006's Bat Out Of Hell 3. But the new offering won't be another in the series.

A source said: "There's a huge buzz about the material. They're amazing rock tracks and everyone is excited."

I can't wait to have a listen.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/showbiz/bizarre/2769002/Justin-Hawkins-backing-Meat-Loaf-comeback.html

LOVE NEVER DIES FULL CAST ANNOUNCED

2009-12-17T23:00:00.000+11:00

17 December 2009

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s long awaited new show “LOVE NEVER DIES” will have its World Premiere in London at the Adelphi Theatre on Tuesday 9 March 2010, followed by New York on Thursday 11 November and Australia in 2011.

“LOVE NEVER DIES” continues the story of ‘The Phantom’, who has moved from his lair in the Paris Opera House to haunt the fairgrounds of Coney Island, far across the Atlantic. Set ten years after the mysterious disappearance of ‘The Phantom’ from Paris, this show is a rollercoaster ride of obsession and intrigue...in which music and memory can play cruel tricks...and ‘The Phantom’ sets out to prove that, indeed, “LOVE NEVER DIES”.

“The Phantom of the Opera”, based on the French novel by Gaston Leroux, has proved a huge success the world over and has been seen by over 100 million people, making it the single most successful entertainment entity in history. The show has been translated into 15 languages and has played in over 25 different countries, including China, Brazil, Poland and Korea. “The Phantom of the Opera” opened at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London on 9 October 1986 starring Sarah Brightman and Michael Crawford and celebrated its 23rd London birthday on 9 October 2009. “The Phantom of the Opera” has won a staggering 50 awards worldwide, whilst global album sales currently stand at over 40 million copies.

Ramin Karimloo will create the role of ‘The Phantom’ in “LOVE NEVER DIES”, having already played the role to great acclaim in “The Phantom of the Opera” in London. Ramin’s other stage credits include starring as ‘Enjolras’ in “Les Misérables” in the West End, ‘Chris’ in the UK tour of “Miss Saigon” and ‘Artie Green’ in the UK tour of “Sunset Boulevard”. Ramin also played ‘Raoul’ in the West End production of “The Phantom of the Opera”, as well as the role of ‘Christine’s Father’ in Joel Schumacher’s film, making him the only actor to play all three of ‘Christine’s’ loves.

Sierra Boggess will create the role of ‘Christine’ in “LOVE NEVER DIES”. Sierra made her Broadway debut creating the lead role of ‘Ariel’ in Disney’s “The Little Mermaid”, receiving both Drama League and Drama Desk Award nominations and a Broadway.com Audience Award for ‘Favourite Breakthrough Performance’. She also understudied the role of ‘Cosette’ in the U.S. national tour of “Les Misérables”. In 2007 Sierra was handpicked by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Hal Prince to originate the role of ‘Christine’ in the brand new production of “Phantom - The Las Vegas Spectacular”. “LOVE NEVER DIES” marks Sierra’s West End debut.

Joseph Millson will play ‘Raoul’. He has worked extensively in theatre, film and television, including many roles at both the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. He was nominated as ‘Best Actor 2001’ at the Royal Television Society Awards, and as ‘Most Promising Actor 1999’ and ‘Best Actor 2000’ at the National Television Awards for his starring role as ‘Sam Morgan’ in five series of “Peak Practice”.

Liz Robertson will play ‘Madame Giry’. Liz Robertson has starred in many West End and regional musicals, including “The King and I”, “The Sound of Music”, “I Love My Wife”, “The Mitford Girls” and “Song and Dance”. She starred as ‘Eliza Doolittle’ in “My Fair Lady” at the Adelphi Theatre for which she earned rave reviews and The Variety Club’s ‘Most Promising Actress’ Award, as well as an ‘Olivier’ nomination for ‘Best Actress in a Musical’.

Summer Strallen will play ‘Meg Giry’. She, also, has starred in many West End musicals, including “Scrooge”, “Cats”, “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”, “Guys and Dolls”, “The Boyfriend” (for which she was nominated for the 2007 ‘Olivier’ Award for ‘Best Supporting Role in a Musical’) and “The Drowsy Chaperone” (for which she was nominated for the 2008 ‘Olivier’ Award for ‘Best Actress in a Musical’). She recently starred as ‘Maria’ in the London Palladium production of “The Sound of Music”, having won the role whilst playing ‘Summer Shaw’ in “Hollyoaks” on television.

‘Fleck’, ‘Squelch’ and ‘Gangle’ will be played respectively by Niamh Perry, Adam Pearce and Jami Reid-Quarrell. Niamh has recently starred as ‘Sophie’ in “MAMMA MIA!” at the Prince of Wales Theatre and was one of the twelve finalists in “I’d Do Anything” on BBC 1, in which she came fifth. Adam spent four years with the National Youth Music Theatre and has subsequently played in “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat” and “Evita”, both at the Adelphi Theatre in London. Jami has worked with the English National Opera, the West Yorkshire Playhouse, the Royal Opera House and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and was in the recent West End production of “Equus” and played the lead in “Depeche Mode” for television.

The cast will also include Derek Andrews, Dean Chisnall, Helen Dixon, Lucie Downer, Paul Farrell, Charlene Ford, Chris Gage, Lucy van Gasse, Celia Graham, Simon Ray Harvey, Jack Horner, Erin Anna Jameson, Pip Jordan, Jessica Kirton, Louise Madison, Janet Mooney, Colette Morrow, Tam Mutu, Ashley Nottingham, Tom Oakley, Mark Skipper, Jonathan Stewart, Tim Walton and Annette Yeo.

Lyricist Glenn Slater was nominated for the 2008 Tony and Grammy Awards for Disney’s theatrical production of “The Little Mermaid”. He is lyricist on the current London production of “Sister Act”. Bob Crowley, set and costume designer, recently worked on “Phèdre” with Helen Mirren at the National Theatre. His many award-winning productions include “The History Boys”, “Les Liaisons Dangereuses”, Disney’s “Aida”, “Mary Poppins” and “The Year of Magical Thinking”. Choreographer Jerry Mitchell recently made his directorial debut with “Legally Blonde”, both on Broadway and in the West End, and choreographed the award-winning musical productions of “La Cage aux Folles”, “Hairspray”, “The Full Monty” and “Catch Me If You Can”, which recently opened in Seattle. Director Jack O’Brien directed the award-winning London production of “Hairspray” and won Tony awards for the Broadway productions of Tom Stoppard’s “The Coast of Utopia”, “Hairspray” and the 2004 production of “Henry IV”. His other productions include Stoppard’s “The Invention of Love”, “The Full Monty”, “Hapgood”, “Damn Yankees”, “The Little Foxes”, “Catch Me If You Can”, and operas including “Street Scene” at New York City Opera and “Il Triticco” at the Metropolitan Opera.

The World Premiere of “LOVE NEVER DIES” will take place in London on 9 March 2010 at the Adelphi Theatre. Previews begin on 20 February. The show will subsequently open in New York on 11 November 2010 and then in Australia in 2011.

March 2010 sees the Polydor/Universal release of the album of “LOVE NEVER DIES”, the long awaited follow up to “The Phantom Of The Opera” (the eighth best-selling album of ALL TIME, unprecedented for a musical theatre album). The album release will coincide with the opening of the show in London’s West End and will be available in both deluxe and standard versions.

http://www.loveneverdies.com/news/

Roy Disney, nephew of Walt, dead at 79

2009-12-17T13:09:00.000+11:00

By Adam S. Miller, Canwest News Service
December 16, 2009 4:03 PM

The revered nephew of Walt Disney died Wednesday after struggling with cancer, according to Clifford A. Miller, a spokesman for Disney's company Shamrock Holdings, as reported by the L.A. Times.

Roy Edward Disney was best known for his revival of Disney's famous animation team, and made headlines after organizing the dismissal of two of Disney's top executives — Ron Miller in 1984 and Michael Eisner in 2005.

He first began working for the Disney Company as his uncle's personal assistant director, producing True-Life Adventure films in 1954. He then married Patricia Ann Dailey in 1955 and had four children with her. He continued to work as a director, producer and writer until 1967 when he was elected to the Walt Disney Company Board of Directors.

Disney worked mainly on nature films for the first 20 years of his career with the company, including The Owl That Didn't Give A Hoot, Pancho, A Dog of the Plains as well as an Oscar-nominated short Mysteries of the Deep.

After Walt Disney died in 1966, followed by Roy's father in 1971, Roy was criticized for wanting to take on a larger role in the company. He decided to quit in 1977 over disagreements with corporate decisions at the time, but remained on its board, where he was largely a symbolic figurehead in the company.

He spoke of the controversial decision to resign later in life: "I just felt creatively, the company was not going anywhere interesting. It was very stifling."

In 1984, he resigned his seat on the board amid the turmoil of a corporate takeover, and after Ron Miller was replaced as CEO and company president by Michael Eisner and Frank Wells, Roy hastily returned to the company under the title of vice-chairman of the board of directors and head of the animation department.

In recent years, Disney saw his power in the company decline, which prompted his decision to resign from the board on Nov. 30, 2003, citing "serious differences of opinion about the direction and style of management."

He wrote a critical letter of Eisner's managing principles, stating that Eisner had gravely mismanaged the company, neglected the studio's animation division, failed deals with ABC, timidly handled the theme park business and most importantly instilled a corporate mentality in the company, which turned the Disney into a "rapacious, soulless" company.

After his resignation, Disney helped create the website SaveDisney.com, intended to oust Eisner and his supporters from their positions and to revamp the Walt Disney Company.

As criticism of Eisner increased, his position within the company became increasingly less significant and on March 13, 2005, Eisner announced that he would step down as CEO of the company one year before his contract was to expire.

Roy Disney's efforts to oust Eisner from the Disney Company were well-documented by author James B. Stewart in his best-selling book Disney War.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Disney+nephew+Walt+dead/2349151/story.html

Purchased my copy of Love Never Dies CD thru eBay

2009-12-12T02:49:00.006+11:00

From the same link that (at one time) was listing the tracklist. It's great because we use PayPal and not credit card and I was kinda depressed that I wasn't able to pre-order through the website. I have the money, and the payment should be made anytime between now and next week. I can't wait until March. At least I know the CD's coming. If I find it in the stores before it arrives, I'll pass it on to someone else.

Ryan.

Love Never Dies CD Tracklist?

2009-12-12T02:28:00.006+11:00

According to an auction on eBay, this is supposed to be the (current) tracklist for the CD of Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Love Never Dies", the sequel to "The Phantom of the Opera". This has since been removed (for good reason, I'm sure) but the information is still available on several other sites and frankly I'm amazed I didn't catch it sooner.

Disc 1

1. Prologue
2. The Coney Island Waltz
3. That's the place you ruined, you fool!
4. A Little Slice of Heaven
5. Only For Him/Only For You
6. The Ayrie
7. 'Till I Hear You Sing
8. Giry Confronts the Phantom/'Till I Hear You Sing (Reprise)
9. Christine Disembarks
10. Arrival of the Trio/Are You Ready to Begin?
11. What a Dreadful Town!...
12. Look With Your Heart
13. Beneath a Moonless Sky
14. Once Upon Another Time
15. "Mother Please, I'm Scared!"
16. Dear Old Friend
17. Beautiful
18. The Beauty Underneath
19. The Phantom Confronts Christine

Disc 2

1. Entr'acte
2. Why Does She Love Me?
3. Devil Take the Hindmost
4. A Little Slice of Heaven (Reprise)
5. Ladies... Gents!/The Coney Island Waltz (Reprise)
6. Bathing Beauty
7. "Mother, Did You Watch?"
8. Before the Performance
9. Devil Take the Hindmost (Quartet)
10. Love Never Dies
11. "Ah, Christine!..."
12. "Gustave! Gustave!..."
13. "Please, Miss Giry, I Want to Go Back..."

For the record now, my iTunes play count for "The Coney Island Waltz" is 39 and "Till I Hear You Sing" 20. It's some of the best music I've heard from a musical in years now.

Ryan.

MY NEW BAT OUT OF EXCESS SITE ONLINE

2009-11-07T04:16:00.003+11:00

http://www.lordsteinman.webs.com

CHECK IT OUT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Evening Standard ad for BOOH The Musical

2009-11-06T12:01:00.003+11:00

Here it is

http://img39.imageshack.us/img39/2120/batadi.jpg

NOW WHO'S EXCITED!!!

Jim Steinman's BAT OUT OF HELL A New Musical Spectacular

2009-11-06T02:24:00.002+11:00

Website now online, just a sign-up page for news updates at this stage BUT A MIRACLE FOR JIM'S FANS!

Apparently there is also a double-page spread personally designed by Jim in the London Evening Standard. If anyone has this, please send in a scan.

http://www.batoutofhellthemusical.com/

Wow

2009-10-30T01:11:00.005+11:00

I HAVE to point out this fantastic new video from YouTube containing images/film excerpts of classic Disney villains against the backdrop of one of Steinman's most theatrical songs. When I was younger, Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" was my all-time favourite film and I watched it repeatedly, and "Bat out of Hell 2" was my favourite album. Now, in what almost seems like a dream come true, my childhood inspirations have almost been combined, childhood inspirations that inspired me to become a writer: Jim Steinman's music and Walt Disney's artistry. This is incredible. Anyone with any interest in Disney films and Steinman music has to stop everything they're doing RIGHT NOW and watch this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa46GFQ3_qQ

Ryan.

Updates to the website

2009-10-25T23:19:00.003+11:00

* New home-page write-up
* New Essay section
* Press/Articles page combined
* FAQ slightly revised to include mention of Scaramouche who nobody @ Dark Knight Of The Soul has any contact with for those minority writing in & asking.

Recently site reached 33,333 hits after 3 years and 3 weeks precisely! How ironic!

Ryan.

Andrew Lloyd Webber Disses Coney Island of Today

2009-10-22T16:04:00.001+11:00

By John Del Signore in Arts and Events on October 20, 2009 2:54 PM

When news broke two weeks ago that Andrew Lloyd Webber had set his hotly-dreaded Phantom of the Opera sequel in Coney Island circa 1919, the AP quoted Webber saying, "[Coney Island] was the eighth wonder of the world. Think of Vegas and then triple it." But the wire service left out the best and most controversial part of that quote, and some Coney Island locals have been insulted a little bit.

The full quote Webber gave at the press conference included this declaration of war on the entire borough of Brooklyn: "Of course, Coney Island today is nothing at all.." Damn, you gonna take that Coney? Not Dennis Vourderis, co-owner of Deno's Wonder Wheel Amusement Park, who tells the Daily News, "What he said is insulting. If we're 'nothing at all' why did he set his new musical here?" And Dick Zigun, founder of the Coney Island Circus Sideshow, retorts, "We have a more authentic freak show than what he's got onstage."

A publicist for the sequel, called Love Never Dies, has tried to placate locals by insisting that Webber was "simply pointing out that it is a different place today than it was 100 years ago." Which is certainly true, but not for nothing, it's not "nothing." Until Weber personally apologizes to Coney Island, we're boycotting the Broadway transfer of Love Never Dies!

http://gothamist.com/2009/10/20/andrew_lloyd_webber_disses_coney_is.php

Summer Strallen brings a little Ohh La La to the West End

2009-10-17T13:00:00.001+11:00

By Baz Bamigboye
Last updated at 12:41 PM on 16th October 2009

Summer Strallen's definition of Ooh La La is 'it's like wow and fireworks at the same time'. In a way, she epitomises the term herself. She sashays through a lobby and heads turn. She moves the way Kay Thompson (Liza Minnelli's real-life godmother) did in Funny Face: as if her long legs are moving to a cool rhythm only she can hear.

As we exited my office building for a cup of cappuccino, I expected lush music to accompany her as she strode across the road.

Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and director Jack O'Brien have cast Summer to play the Ooh La La girl in the big-time musical Love Never Dies, which follows the Phantom from the Paris Opera across the Atlantic to Coney Island, where he calls himself Mr Y and runs the Phantasma funfair attractions.

The Ooh La La girl is the name Mr Y has given to Meg Giry, who was the young ballet student in the original Phantom musical.

'In the first Phantom, Meg's very quiet - not very outlandish - so when she goes to Coney Island she changes a lot. She wants attention and thinks she's going to be a star.

'She's from France and hasn't forgotten how to be French, so the French aspects, coupled with being in America, bring out the ooh la la in her! It's like "wow" and when you watch a firework display . . . Ooh la la! There's going to be fireworks, we hope,' Summer, 25, told me. Unfortunately, Mr Y feels Meg lacks style. 'He doesn't believe she has that class that Christine, his former protegee, possesses,' Summer told me.

Instead of writing Meg stirring arias, Mr Y gives her end-of-the-pier fare - and that's exemplified in Summer's big song-and-dance number Bathing Beauty, which director O'Brien and choreographer Jerry Mitchell plan to build into a rousing vaudeville turn.

'Meg's a dancer who wants to be a star,' is as much as the actress will give away.

Summer sang on the show's concept album and her character's story arc is brilliantly dramatic. But people will have to wait until preview performances begin on February 20 to discover what fate awaits her at Phantasma.

Summer will feature opposite Sierra Boggess as Christine and Ramin Karimloo, playing the Phantom.

Liz Robertson will play Meg's mother Madame Giry and Joseph Millson has the role of Christine's husband Raoul, the Vicomte de Chagny.

Official rehearsals start early in January, although a lot of technical work has already been accomplished and Lloyd Webber's sublime score is complete.

Summer, who was in The Sound Of Music and Land Girls on BBC TV, is looking forward to the official opening night at the Adelphi on March 9. Her family will turn out in force and there's an affinity with the venue, too, because her father Sandy Strallen played there in Sunset Boulevard (another Lloyd Webber show) in the Nineties and her mother, Cherida Langford, trained children who have appeared there.

'My mother is already beside herself - and we haven't opened yet,' Summer declared.

The show will open to what could be the biggest box office in West End history.

By last night some £4.7 million worth of tickets had been snapped up in a week.

Interestingly, seats are being sold, through the Really Useful Company at least, without a booking fee.

Prices range from £25 to £67.50. Adding a booking fee would have sent prices to the £70 mark, which would have stirred up a revolt .

'The psychology is that £67.50 sounds a lot cheaper than £70,' one West End sage explained.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1220772/Summer-Strallen-brings-little-Ohh-La-La-West-End.html

Phantom finds himself a new haunt

2009-10-17T12:55:00.000+11:00

Friday, 16 October 2009

Andrew Lloyd Webber confessed that he has already sent the soundtrack of his latest musical, ‘Love Never Dies’ (sequel to ‘The Phantom of the Opera’) to two key figures – both of whom were involved in ‘Phantom’, and neither of whom have a part to play in the sequel: Cameron Mackinstosh, who worked with Lloyd Webber on the original, and Sarah Brightman (right), Lloyd Webber’s former wife and the first leading lady, Christine. Lloyd Webber said: “The two people in the world I most wanted to hear the soundtrack were Sarah Brightman and Cameron Macintosh.” After hearing the songs, Webber said that Cameron “wrote me one of the sweetest letters I have ever had”, while Sarah’s response was similarly supportive, and “funny”, he added. When quizzed about why Mackintosh was not producing the sequel, which takes place a decade after we last encountered the murderous phantom, now living on Coney Island, Lloyd Webber said: “Cameron has been incredibly supportive? but he has got his own life.” He said there would be no other sequels after this one. “I can’t say that the story could possibly continue.” The show opens on 9 March 2010 at the Adelphi Theatre, London

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/the-diary-andrew-lloyd-webber-john-walker-alice-channer-ian-mcewan-hilary-mantel-1803267.html

TILL I HEAR YOU SING...

2009-10-13T17:30:00.002+11:00

TILL I HEAR YOU SING

From Love Never Dies

The day starts
The day ends
Time crawls by
Night steals in
Pacing the floor
The moments creep
Yet I can’t bear to sleep
Till I hear you sing

And weeks pass
And months pass
Seasons fly
Still you don’t
Walk through the door
And in a haze
I count the silent days
Till I hear you sing
Once more

And sometimes
At night time
I dream that you are there
But wake
Holding nothing but the
Empty air

And years come
And years go
Time runs dry
Still I ache
Down to the core
My broken soul
Can’t be alive and whole
Till I hear you sing
Once more

And music
Your music
It teases at my ear
I turn
And it fades away
And you’re not here

Let hopes pass
Let dreams pass
Let them die
Without you
What are they for?
I’ll always feel
No more than half way real
Till I hear you sing
Once more

Q&A Video with Andrew Lloyd Webber re: Love Never Dies

2009-10-09T01:54:00.000+11:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vm99m3ghMyY

Thoughts on the video for Love Never Dies

2009-10-09T00:20:00.005+11:00

OK, I won't print any of the hundreds of articles now appearing on the internet, I'll just summarize...

We are treated to 2 songs from the show

The Overture/Coney Island Waltz & The Phantom's first solo
TILL I HEAR YOU SING...

Here are the lyrics a person from BroadwayWorld transcribed

QUOTE:

LYRICS:

The day starts
The day ends
Time crawls by
Night stealing(?)
Pacing the floor
The moment's creep yet I can't bear to sleep
Till I hear you sing
And weeks past, and months past
seasons fly
still you don't walk through the door
and in a hate I count the silent days
till I hear you sing once more
and sometimes and nighttime I dream that you are there
But wake holding nothing but the empty air
and eves come and leaves go
Time runs dry
Still I ache down to the core
My broken soul can't be alive and whole tell I hear you sing once more
and music your music, it teases in my ear
It turns and it fades away and you're not hear
Let hopes past. Let dreams past. Let them die
without you what are they for.
I'll always feel no more than halfway real
Till I hear you sing once more

[Sorry I can't structurally rewrite the lyrics for crap, and some I couldn't hear properly]

WATCH THE VIDEO @ www.loveneverdies.com!!!

The music is quite beautiful and soaring and I predict some success for Phantom 2 but, on the whole, it's nothing TOO special. It DOES feel like it will be better than most if not ALL of his scores since the original Phantom opened.

IMO.

Ryan.

Watching the launch

2009-10-08T22:38:00.001+11:00

The video is just about to appear at the website www.loveneverdies.com

LOVE NEVER DIES has been ANNOUNCED!!!!

2009-10-08T21:23:00.003+11:00

This is the email I just received from the newly rendered OFFICIAL WEBSITE:

PREVIEW PERFORMANCES BEGIN 20TH FEBRUARY 2010

TICKETS NOW ON SALE!

The principal characters of The Phantom of the Opera continue their stories in Andrew Lloyd Webber's LOVE NEVER DIES.

Ten years after the mysterious disappearance of The Phantom from the Paris Opera House, Christine Daaé accepts an offer to come to America and perform at New York's fabulous new playground of the world - Coney Island.

Christine arrives in New York with her husband Raoul and their son Gustave. She soon discovers the identity of the anonymous impresario who has lured her from France to sing.

LOVE NEVER DIES is a rollercoaster ride of obsession and intrigue...
in which music and memory can play cruel tricks... and The Phantom
sets out to prove that, indeed, LOVE NEVER DIES.

Watch the London launch at
www.loveneverdies.com

CLICK TO BOOK ONLINE
or call the Box Office on
0844 412 4651

ADELPHI THEATRE
Strand • London WC2

It begins...

2009-10-08T12:58:00.002+11:00

Quote from BWW article (Can't find any others yet)

QUOTE:

"...Rialto Chatter has learned that "The Heart Is Slow To Learn", a number that debuted at Lord Lloyd Webber's 50th birthday concert and who's melody was used for the song "Our Kind Of Love" in his 2000 West End musical 'The Beautiful Game', will again return as part of the 'PHANTOM' sequel. Another song that struck a chord with people who have heard the score is the dark and romantic "Fortune Teller." Vocally the "Phantom" and "Christine" will be very different from their original musical identities. Interestingly, an audience member who witnessed the last full workshop, remarked that "Love Never Dies" is "a worthy chapter in the Phantom's story" and the most "romantic music we've heard in years."

http://broadwayworld.com/article/Lloyd_Webbers_LOVE_NEVER_DIES_Officially_Reveals_Itself_108_20091007

Thursday this week

2009-10-05T22:26:00.005+11:00

It will not only be the press launch of "Love Never Dies", the sequel to "The Phantom of the Opera", but the day the new logo for my novel/night opera "Don Claude Devious" is unveiled on its respective website. I was really impressed with the results!

So big day Thursday!

I also heard back from Karla DeVito who sang on the original tour for "Bat out of Hell" in 1978, and recorded vocals for the Jim Steinman album "Bad for Good". She sent me a really sweet reply to my message about what it was like to record Jim's solo album which I think is brilliant and has never gotten the attention it deserved.

Ryan.

Andrew Lloyd Webber attempts to make history with Phantom of the Opera sequel

2009-10-04T18:16:00.000+11:00

Andrew Lloyd Webber faces his greatest challenge yet this week when he launches the sequel to The Phantom of the Opera.

By Roya Nikkhah, Arts Correspondent
Published: 7:55AM BST 04 Oct 2009

Tickets to Love Never Dies are expected to go on sale on Thursday. The show, which is scheduled to open at the Adelphi Theatre in March 2010, will be the first ever West End musical sequel.

In a move that some theatre experts have described as "risky", Lloyd Webber will also attempt to make history by staging the first successful sequel to a musical anywhere in the world. All previous bids to repeat the triumph of original productions have failed miserably.

Love Never Dies continues the story of Christine Daaé, the beautiful Parisienne soprano who becomes the protégée of Erik, a mysterious, disfigured musical genius also known as the Phantom.

Billed as "a roller-coaster ride of obsession and intrigue", the sequel is set in 1907, 10 years after the mysterious disappearance of the Phantom from the Paris Opera House. The story unfolds as Christine accepts an invitation to perform at Phantasma, a new attraction at New York's Coney Island.

But when she arrives in New York with her husband, Raoul and their young son Gustave, she soon discovers the identity of the anonymous impresario who has lured her away from Paris

The original musical, which was based on the 1909 novel The Phantom of the Opera by the French author Gaston Leroux, opened in London in October 1986 at Her Majesty's Theatre. Composed by Lloyd Webber with lyrics by Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe, it initially starred Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman in the leading roles.

The most successful live entertainment event of all time, it has spawned more than 20 productions around the world, taking over £3.5 billion at the box office and playing to more than 100 million people.

It also holds the record for the longest-running production on Broadway and the second-longest running in West End musical history, after Les Misérables.

Fans of The Phantom of the Opera have been hoping for a sequel since 1999, when the author Frederick Forsyth published the novel The Phantom of Manhattan with Lloyd Webber's approval. But plans to adapt the book for the stage were abandoned when it was poorly received by critics.

Lyrics to the £10 million production of Love Never Dies, which will feature a life-size automaton of Christine, have been written by Glenn Slater, who also wrote the songs for the hit West End show Sister Act.

It will star Sierra Boggess, the American soprano, and Ramin Karimloo, the Iranian-born baritone who is currently playing the lead in the London production of The Phantom of the Opera. If successful, the show is expected to open on Broadway next autumn.

Ken Davenport, a theatre producer whose shows include the Broadway musical 13 and Altar Boyz, the longest-running off-Broadway musical to open in the last 10 years, said that musical sequels were "a risky proposition".

"Nobody has attempted a musical sequel in a long time because there have been some really dismal failures in the past," he said. "It is an incredibly risky proposition and I was nervous when Andrew announced it.

"You could argue that sequels should only ever be done if the audience has had enough of the first run. But the Phantom is both a powerful global brand and a very romantic and mysterious character, so a lot of people will want to know what happened next.

"Certainly there is always the chance for a flop. People said in the past that Andrew could never write anything that wouldn't be a success, but then we got Whistle Down the Wind."

Whistle Down the Wind, Lloyd Webber's adaptation of the 1961 film about three children who discover a fugitive hiding in their barn, opened in Washington DC in 1996 to scathing reviews. Nicknamed "Whistle Down the Drain" by critics, its Broadway transfer was cancelled.

Musical sequels in the theatre have a woeful track record. The original production of Annie opened on Broadway in 1977 and ran for 2,377 performances, with similar success soon afterwards in the West End.

But a 1989 sequel, Annie 2: Miss Hannigan's Revenge opened to disastrous reviews and never made it to Broadway. In 1993, a second attempt at a sequel, Annie Warbucks, opened off-Broadway but fared little better, closing after only 200 performances.

The 1960 hit Broadway musical Bye Bye Birdie, a satire of Elvis Presley, opened to critical acclaim and ran for 607 performances. But in 1981, the same creative team staged a sequel called Bring Back Birdie, which folded after just four performances.

A similar fate awaited the sequel to the 1978 Broadway musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, which ran for 1,584 performances. Its successor, The Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public, opened in 1994 and closed after just two weeks.

Musicals with film sequels have avoided repeating the venture in the theatre. Grease and Dirty Dancing are both long-running West End productions as well as successful films. Their film sequels, Grease 2 and Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, were commercial flops; neither has spawned a stage sequel.

Sir Tim Rice, the Oscar-wining lyricist who has collaborated with Lloyd Webber on musicals including Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita, said that the fate of previous musical sequels was "irrelevant".

He said: "Rules are made to be broken and whether a musical is a sequel or original is irrelevant. All that matters is whether or not it is any good and word of mouth."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-news/6257769/Andrew-Lloyd-Webber-attempts-to-make-history-with-Phantom-of-the-Opera-sequel.html

The oompaloompas, live and in person

2009-10-03T02:12:00.000+10:00

By Steven Zeitchik

Willy Wonka could soon be kicking up his heels.

Warner Bros. is developing a stage musical based on "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," the children's classic that it bought to the big screen four years ago.

Sam Mendes' and Caro Newling's Neal Street Prods. are on board to produce the project. Mendes is eyeing it as a directing vehicle, but is far from making a decision on helming, said people familiar with the situation.

David Greig has been hired to write the book. The Scottish playwright has penned a slew of plays, including "Damascus," "The American Pilot" and the real-estate drama "The Architect," which became a 2006 movie starring Anthony LaPaglia.

Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, meanwhile, will compose the music; both worked on Warners/New Line 2007 big screen treatment of "Hairspray."

The concept behind the stage version of "Factory" is to take the candy-colored set pieces -- seen most elaborately in the effects of Tim Burton's 2005 pic -- and translate them to the stage, while also creating new musical elements and transferring some that animated the pic.

The project is being overseen by Gregg Maday's Warner Bros. Theatre Ventures, which was also involved in the musical adaptation of "The Color Purple" and the Elton John vampire musical “Lestat.”

Roald Dahl's children's classic -- about a poor boy who wins a tour of a mysterious chocolate factory from the eccentric Willy Wonka -- first came to the screen in 1971 from Paramount as "Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory." The Warners version, titled “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and starring Johnny Depp as Wonka, made nearly $500 million worldwide for the studio in 2005, fusing Dahl's quirky imagination with Burton's elaborate visuals.

Maybe more important -- and more encouraging for Warners -- the property historically has been known for its music. The 1971 version won an Oscar for best original score and featured hits such as "The Candy Man Can," while the 2005 pic featured a score composed (and a few songs sung) by Danny Elfman.

Mendes has been the rare presence who toggles between film and stage work. He came to prominence as artistic director at London's Donmar Warehouse, and on the British stage has directed the Stephen Sondheim musical "Assassins" as well as the revival of "Cabaret," among others. In the U.S., he has in the past few years helmed "Gypsy" and "The Vertical Hours" on Broadway and Shakespeare and Chekhov at BAM.

But he is only at the consideration stage of directing any stage version of "Factory." The hyphenate is currently contemplating a number of film projects, particularly at Focus Features, where he is developing the George Eliot novel "Middlemarch," the cattle-herding saga "Butcher's Crossing" and the post-9/11 tale "Netherland" as producing and potential directing vehicles. He's also attached to the comicbook adaptation 'Preacher." Mendes most recently helmed the young-parent dramedy "Away We Go" for Focus.

http://www.riskybusinessblog.com/2009/10/charlie-and-the-chocolate-factory-musical.html

Love Never Dies Budget $8 Million US

2009-10-02T19:29:00.005+10:00

5.5million UK pounds.

Compare this to the reports "Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark" is costing a staggering $45 million US to produce.

Also read my posts on "Love Never Dies" and "Spider-Man" and you'll see why I can easily route for Phantom 2 over that horrifying gluttonous Bono-ridden spectacle from every young artist's nightmare about the future lying in the gutter covered in rejection slips!

Ryan.

Lloyd Webber's angels are waiting in the wings

2009-10-02T16:22:00.000+10:00

By Baz Bamigboye
Last updated at 12:26 AM on 02nd October 2009

Investors are being asked to fund Andrew Lloyd Webber's £5.5million sequel to Phantom Of The Opera, Love Never Dies, in £25,000 blocks.

Theatrical angels can buy as many £25,000 units as they want.

One well-known theatrical and literary figure told me he was considering stumping up £500,000 for 20 units of the show, which will begin previews at the Adelphi Theatre on February 20 and have its official world premiere first night on March 9. (However, because of the complexities of opening a new musical, those dates may shift.)

Angels are also being given the opportunity, if they so desire, to plough their money into the three productions of Love Never Dies being set for London, New York and Australasia.

Director Jack O'Brien and designer Bob Crowley spent most of August at the Adelphi ensuring that sets involving illusions and special effects were given test runs.

Lloyd Webber told me earlier in the summer that he didn't want the complex sets screwing up rehearsals and previews and insisted any kinks be sorted out well in advance.

On Thursday, Lloyd Webber will gather folk at Her Majesty's Theatre, Haymarket (home of Phantom Of The Opera) to announce what this page told you several months ago: that Ramin Karimloo will play the Phantom - although for a while in Love Never Dies he's a mysterious figure known as Mr Y who runs the Phantasma funfair attraction on Coney Island where the action, set in 1907, takes place. Mr Karimloo has played the Phantom in London, and also the role of Raoul.

Soprano Sierra Boggess will play Christine, a part she knows well. She played Christine in the Las Vegas production of Phantom and both she and Karimloo played their respective roles on the Love Never Dies concept album, which I have heard and which, for me, marks the composer's best score in more than a decade. Certainly, it's lush, dramatic and romantic.

If everything works at the Adelphi, audiences will be swept off their feet.

Tickets are being priced from £25 to £67.50, which includes a 75p restoration levy, which I have to say I find a bit of a con. A lot of theatres do this, I know, but when I go to Waitrose or Morrisons, they don't ask me to donate money to fix up any of their crumbling stores. So why should the Adelphi?

Arlene Phillips, a million-and-one times better than woeful Alesha Dixon, on Strictly... is about to follow the yellow brick road.

She will choreograph the new Wizard Of Oz stage musical that's being put together by director Jeremy Sams, with Andrew Lloyd Webber and Glenn Slater providing some new songs.

Glenn has also written lyrics for Love Never Dies and Sister Act at the London Palladium. Wizard Of Oz will be part of some awful TV casting show, but I'm more interested in the stage version, which will hit the West End late next year or early in 2011.

Can't wait to see Arlene put those Munchkins through their paces.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1217522/BAZ-BAMIGBOYE-Pianos-tuned-Lets-show.html

Tim Curry

2009-09-28T16:45:00.001+10:00

It just occurred to me while watching clips from Stephen King's IT that Tim Curry would make an excellent Joker in The Musical. It would be a great comeback for him and I have ALWAYS wanted to see him take on some Steinman.

Well done, Dark Knight Of The Soul

2009-09-28T15:18:00.001+10:00

Today:

32,782 hits after 3 years precisely!!

The plea continues...

Zoltar1979 Bat Out Of Excess video

2009-09-25T04:01:00.002+10:00

Now linked from the main page at the Batman website.

Getting the word out on new musicals…

2009-09-22T14:41:00.001+10:00

By Mark Shenton on September 21, 2009 11:37 AM

Regular readers of this column will know how much I love musicals and how much I like to champion them. But so often, unfortunately, they behave like a chronically unfaithful lover, and repeatedly let you down. And eventually, it’s tempting to simply give up hope. Never mind that the West End and Broadway are full of musicals: finding an original one is hard to come by. This year we saw the fast failure of the most original ones to venture our way in ages, when Spring Awakening came to the Novello and quickly went.

Only Sister Act has stayed around, and that - with its pre-existing film source and pastiche score - is merely mediocre, but makes us feel pathetically grateful that it least it’s a new one, even if it deliberately sounds instantly recycled. On Broadway, things have been better this year with the thrilling Next to Normal, but beside it there’s also been Rock of Ages, another dire rock compilation show.

At least the autumn season there sees the start of previews this week for a new musical Memphis, set in the rock ‘n’ roll world but with both an original story (by Joe diPietro) and score (by Bon Jovi’s David Bryan), while next month sees the transfer from off-Broadway of Fela!, that uses the music of Afrobeat legend Fela Anikulapo Kuti (no, I haven’t heard of him, either, but his work is apparently a blend of jazz, funk and African rhythm and harmonies) to create what is described as a “provocative hybrid of concert, dance and musical theater.” That’s at least stretching the template of musical theatre a bit; but otherwise, we’re being thrown back on some safe(r) revivals: Bye Bye Birdie (already in preview), Finian’s Rainbow and Ragtime are all on the schedule imminently.

In London, we may be in the midst of the busiest autumn of new productions of plays that I can remember; but there’s barely a musical, new or old, amongst them. Only the Young Vic is reviving Annie Get Your Gun (of all things), and then Legally Blonde - the Musical arrives in December, to begin a long preview period at the Savoy before opening in mid-January. Otherwise, there’s the odd fringe entry, like the arrival of Christopher Hamilton’s debut musical Over the Threshold from its Edinburgh premiere to Jermyn Street Theatre this week, or the British premiere of Michael John LaChiusa’s First Lady Suite at the Union next week - both, coincidentally, presented under the auspices of Take Note Theatre, a young company dedicated to bringing “lesser known musical works to new audiences as well as encouraging, producing and developing our own shows through to full production.”

It’s youthful initiatives like this where the future may well lie. At least they instinctively recognise one important factor: it’s all very well to workshop shows endlessly (the US model), but the best way to make shows happen is by actually getting them up on their feet and in front of an audience, however small that audience might be (Jermyn Street has 70 seats, the Union around 50).

On the weekend, I saw another option: the revival of the old-fashioned regional try-out route. While regional theatres have all but abandoned doing original musicals as part of their regular output - they are simply too expensive and too risky to programme, so instead tried-and-tested revivals are offered, usually in the panto Christmas slot - I travelled to Ipswich on Saturday to see a new musical version of the 1946 Frank Capra movie It’s a Wonderful Life, being tried out at the New Wolsey Theatre there. I looked up the last (and only) time I’ve been there before I went, and was astonished to discover that it was all of 20 years ago, when Trevor Nunn did a try-out there for the UK premiere he directed of Stephen Schwartz’s The Baker’s Wife in 1989, before bringing it to the West End’s Phoenix Theatre (where it sadly ran for just over a month, and I’m not referring to the running time of the show but the length of the entire run).

This is a delightful, intimate auditorium (seating 400), and Ipswich has an increasing arts profile: the New Wolsey now has Gecko physical theatre company based there as an associate company, and a brand-new dance theatre, the Jerwood DanceHouse, is being built in the town, too, as part of a new residential tower, while the independent Red Rose Chain Film and Theatre Company is soon to have its own, purpose-built waterfront home, the Witchbottle Theatre. The town has also developed its own annual fringe festival (Pulse, which drew an admiring blog](http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2009/aug/05/edinburgh-fringe-ipswich-pulse-festival) from Andrew Haydon on The Guardian website, which noted that it “serves its local constituency perfectly. It doesn’t get, but nor does it need, much coverage from the national press.”

Nor, frankly, has the Wolsey attracted much national attention of late, but partly thanks to the services of a London theatre PR for It’s a Wonderful Life, many of us have made the trip for It’s A Wonderful Life; Variety’s David Benedict was there on Saturday afternoon along with me, and the Daily Mail’s Patrick Marmion, the Telegraph’s Dominic Cavendish, and Sam Marlowe and John Peter for respectively The Times and the Sunday Times, have all been in. Though they’ve already been rewarded with a four-star review in the Daily Mail, it may be a little too early for such detailed scrutiny - though critical reactions are, of course, part of the process of the development of a new musical, I hope that the creators aren’t either lulled into a false sense of security by the positive notice, or sent off track by others that may follow.

There’s something here already, but there’s also serious work still to be done. But it’s encouraging, at least, that the first steps have been taken towards realising this work so confidently and ambitiously; and what’s enabled Ipswich to produce It’s a Wonderful Life (with a cast of 17, plus 7 kids and orchestra of four) is commercial enhancement money from London comedy, television and occasional theatre management Avalon Promotions (who also previously took Jerry Springer - the Opera from BAC to develop at the National in 2003, before then taking it into the West End). I hope Avalon stick with it, but also accept this as only a first draft. Just as Steve Brown’s last, Olivier Award winning musical Spend Spend Spend began its life at West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, it could yet end up in the West End, but it needs careful nurturing.

And that’s what British musical theatre needs more of, in every way. Last night I heard some of how much raw talent is on offer, in a showcase evening of new musical writing called Snappy Title, staged at Piccadilly’s Pigalle Club to mark the launch of New Musicals Network, a new networking site for those interested in the creation and promotion of new musical theatre works. The evening showcased the work of some 15 composers or composing teams, most of them as yet unknown, but who include one, Joe Robinson, who is just 17 and another team, Julian Chenery and Matt Gimblett, who have been writing together for nearly as long as long as Joe has been alive!

The best part of last night was that it gave a live outing to songs that exist otherwise mainly as demos, and that’s how songs live: by being sung. (A terrific cast of young West End talent was assembled to give them their best shot, too; though I was shocked by the professional discourtesy of two of them, Jenna Lee James and Jon Boydon, in whispering comments to each other constantly while they waited their turn onstage as Lucy May Barker performed Joe Robinson’s number).

New musicals are clearly still being written, furiously, all over the place, but the challenge is now to translate that into wider distribution and hopefully production. Some composers are still trying the old-fashioned route of producing CD showcases - I’ve just received a beautifully produced one for Gareth Peter’s Bluebird, that features a cast that includes Ramin Karimloo, the current Phantom in The Phantom of the Opera and who will shortly be starring in Lloyd Webber’s follow-up Love Never Dies.

But I’ve also recently come across an even bolder attempt to use the internet to harness a potentially global audience to be interested in a new musical. Andrew Lloyd Webber may be getting his Phantom to twitter ahead of the launch of Love Never Dies, but as Lloyd Webber told me himself last year, the musical genre itself “will continue to change in ways that neither you nor I can see at the moment. In the next year or two - and it sure as hell won’t be me - there will be some kind of musical or entertainment that is evolved on the internet.”

And last week a musical writer Matthew Sweetapple wrote to me to say, “I read, with interest, your piece in which it’s suggested that Andrew Lloyd Webber believes the next big musical will originate on the internet. With this in mind, I wanted to bring the success of our on-line musical story to your attention as it demonstrates perfectly how well suited the internet/downloads etc are for musical story telling. Rockford’s Rock Opera was written by me, with Steve Punt (Now Show etc), it’s now been streamed by over 400,000 people and it’s being used in over 8,000 schools around the world. All though word of mouth on the web. I have loved musicals since I was very young. Crucially, for musical storytellers, the internet now provides an immediate world stage for our work.”

Now he wants to bring it to the theatre; as he wittily says, “Today the world, tomorrow the King’s Head?” Meanwhile, however, you can get a taster of what’s on offer by joining the online community: as Matthew says, “In true internet style, Part One is free so there’s lots to hear right now,” here.

http://blogs.thestage.co.uk/shenton/2009/09/getting-the-word-out-on-new-musicals/

THE NEW BAT OUT OF EXCESS VIDEO BY ZOLTAR1979

2009-09-12T04:55:00.002+10:00

NOW ONLINE @ MY JIM STEINMAN WEBSITE

http://www.freewebs.com/lordsteinman/

I love this guy's work! I'm so lucky to have been part of it.

You gotta check it out if you love Jim's music!

More on the trailer & "Threat notice" at Andrew's website

2009-09-12T04:27:00.007+10:00

I'm surprised more people didn't notice the music from the end of "The Point of no Return" at the beginning of the trailer. Andrew said there would be some quotes from the original score in "Love Never Dies". I personally hope that is one of them. I have always found that piece of music to be particularly chilling, just before the Phantom reprises "All I ask of you" in his production of "Don Juan Triumphant". Anyway, the campaign continues with a new notice from The Phantom at Andrew Lloyd Webber's official website. He has made his "threat" public to the entire world.

Check it out www.andrewlloydwebber.com

What interests me, as a writer, is whether or not The Phantom finally had success as a composer. "Don Juan Triumphant" was a spectacular disaster but it was quite revolutionary for its time. Perhaps The Phantom learned from his mistakes and composed one of the greatest scores of all time?

Ryan.

The Trailer

2009-09-11T18:33:00.003+10:00

I LOVE IT!

I hope they put this in the ads because it's so strange and frightening:

http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a206/rockfenris2005/batmanthemusical/loveneverdies1.jpg

THE MUSIC SOUNDS AS BRILLIANT AS "EVITA"!

Love Never Dies Trailer

2009-09-11T17:18:00.008+10:00

Yes, I'm aware about it, but I haven't been able to watch it yet. I'll watch it tonight. Tickets are expected to go on sale October 8 (I was one of the first 20 people to follow "The Phantom" on twitter.) I'm really looking forward to seeing how this one goes. So far I've been told that we can actually hear what might be some of the music over a series of clips from the original production, archival footage of Coney Island in the early 20th century, and the automaton robot of Christine (!)

Today is both the anniversary of a terrible tragedy in history and the night I began my musical "Don Claude Devious". I can't believe it's already been 8 years.

No matter what the difficulties we've had putting this piece together, the people who care don't want it to be over. Hopefully D.C. will go somewhere "Batman" never did. Hopefully. I believe in it wholeheartedly.

Ryan.

From the Webmaster

2009-09-08T02:57:00.005+10:00

I can now reveal the first image from the opening video for the "Bat Out Of Excess" site ZOLTAR1979 has been working on. He sent me the rough tonight which I thought I was incredible. In all honesty, I was blown away. I don't know how he does it. We can't wait to reveal the full thing.

But here's the image.................................!

http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a206/rockfenris2005/batmanthemusical/excess.jpg

Ryan.