Part 4 of this track-by-track Love Never Dies commentary deals with our introduction to Christine, Raoul and the new addition to their family three months after the Phantom sent for Christine under his ‘Mr Y’ pseudonym. (Mister Y = Mystery, get it?) This sequence of scenes can be found on tracks 9-12 on the original cast recording.
9. “Christine Disembarks”
In The Phantom of the Opera, the reprise of “Angel of Music” is sharply interrupted by the start of the title song. In Love Never Dies, the reprise of “‘Til I Hear You Sing” ends with the sound of the foghorn at the docks, where the ship that is bringing Christine to New York has arrived. Now a world famous soprano, she is greeted by a group of newspapermen, much to Raoul’s displeasure.
This section of the show is interesting for two reasons. It is the first time that the creators of Love Never Dies seem to shift away from the structure of the original production. In the original production, we were taken into the Phantom’s lair with the title song – a supposedly wonderful experience, so transcendent that it required a kind of hybrid rock-disco composition to communicate the experience. Has this building block completely disappeared? No – but it has been displaced and will turn up later in a scene between Gustave and the Phantom in a song entitled “The Beauty Underneath”. The section in the original show following that, which establishes the dynamics of the Phantom-Christine relationship has also been displaced, although far less so, as it follows this chunk of exposition and will be discussed in the next part of this track-by-track commentary. Meanwhile, we have a series of scenes that seems without precedent in the original – although perhaps later we will discover a scene in The Phantom of the Opera that has been retrospectively displaced too.
The second interesting point arising from this sequence is the characterisation of Raoul, who seems to suddenly have become a kind of character variation of Ravenal from Show Boat. What he has in common with his predecessor is his shame and his financially devastating gambling habit; where he differs is that he has no charm whatsoever – and that, I believe, will become a problem for the show. The choice makes things too easy for Christine. If we are going to end up in a situation where she has to choose once again between the Phantom and Raoul, this is the kind of thing that removes any kind of dramatic tension from that choice, which makes the climax itself weaker. Christine is, after all, the protagonist of this franchise and it should be her choice, as in the original, that spurs the drama on towards its climax. But how much more interesting would it be if that choice was between either the lessor of two evils or an embarrassment of riches, instead of simply being between one thing that is apparently good and on that is apparently bad.
Getting back to the piece itself, we have some general hobnobbing by the press as they wait for Christine to disembark the ship. She does to to a strain of music that we haven’t heard yet, but which will become one of the melodic phrases in “Once Upon Another Time” in the next sequence. It’s a nostalgic little phrase, just enough to tell us that perhaps this isn’t as triumphant an appearance for Christine as it could be and, when we understand the resonance of the phrase itself after it is developed later, it signals to us that she is still in conflict with the events of her past. Raoul then takes on the press with remarkably bad form, with text that really needs to be played with a bit more not only by the librettists but also by Joseph Millson, who is Raoul on this recording and in the original production. Even a creative reading by Millson could have salvaged the drama of this dialogue somewhat, but it’s annoyingly one note as it appears here. It would be nice to see a Raoul in conflict, tortured by his love for his family and his failure as provider and lover, struggling to protect their private lives in this invasive public context. Instead, we only see a man who is mean-spirited because he is a gambler and, we discover later, a drunk and therefore he is obviously signaled as “bad news” – and there’s nothing dramatically interesting about that.
The attention shifts to Christine’s song, Gustave, who notices a strange sight approaching the company while he is being questioned by the press…
10. “Arrival Of The Trio – Are You Ready To Begin?”
“Mister Y” has sent three of the Coney Island freaks to greet the De Chagny party, much to Raoul’s displeasure. Once again, I feel like there could be more to his reaction to the trio than the general ranting and raving we are given. Why not play into the obvious subtext about being met by the deformed given the events he endured in The Phantom of the Opera? It would at least give him some motivation and contribute to greater internal conflict for the character that can be used later in the show.
Musically, we first hear a music box styled theme that we will come to associate with these three characters when they once again come to fetch Gustave for a visit with the Phantom later in the show. This alternates with a theme that will develop into the song in that scene, “The Beauty Underneath”. Here we once again get some pop music orchestration, with rock guitars underscoring the sung lines of the trio of freaks. I am certain it’s intended to sound mysterious and edgy, but it actually just sounds as if the Pharisees from Jesus Christ Superstar have wandered into Love Never Dies to sing some of their recitative. But Love Never Dies is not a rock musical, no matter how much it pretends to be one in certain sections of its score and the stylistic switch is out of place and inappropriate for what is basically an operetta. One might try to be gracious and say that it’s a post-modern take on the form, but since there is nothing else about this production that is even vaguely post-modern, I’d be hard pressed to accept that as a valid argument in favour of the presence of this type of music in this show.
Gustave is, of course, completely entranced by it all. Wouldn’t you be if you were a little boy in the early 20th century and you heard electric rock music – especially if your mother is a celebrated opera singer? Gustave’s reaction is, of course, meant to signal something to us. We’re not idiots, so I think we’re all very aware that this is probably not Raoul’s son and this pretty much confirms it without saying anything obvious. After all, isn’t the resolution of the first generation’s conflict in the second generation a staple of Gothic Romanticism? Maybe I’m being too cynical again; the revelation will probably be a great one to anybody who hasn’t read Wuthering Heights.
In any event, this all goes on for a minute or so and then the press are left to genuflect upon the incident, until the next celebrity distraction comes along.
11. “What A Dreadful Town!”
As if we haven’t had enough obvious exposition regarding Raoul’s change of character, we now get another scene in which we shown that he is a bad father, a bad husband and an ungrateful man who makes no connection between his actions and the circumstances in which the De Chagny family now finds themselves. If you haven’t got it yet, you know by now that Raoul is a Very Bad Man who makes Christine and Gustave unhappy. Once again, it’s making Christine’s choice way too obvious far too early on in the show.
What I’m most interested to know after hearing this is how Raoul gets to be the character we see in the prologue at the beginning of the The Phantom of the Opera. The regret and character reform may be easy for him to come by, but how is he going to come into money once again? But I digress…
Raoul is unwittingly faced twice with the Phantom’s music in this scene, once in a phrase played by Christine as she goes over her aria at the piano and once in a tune that is played by a music box that has been given to Gustave. These two moments work because they do play into an insecurity of Raoul’s, but I still think that this could be used as motivation for his character to leave and go out drinking (despite Christine’s heartfelt pleas) instead of just having him go out to drink because he is a drunk and therefore, as we know, a Very Bad Man.
12. “Look With Your Heart”
Gustave is very upset. His father won’t play games with him and this makes the son wonder if his father actually loves him? Cue a song in the genre of “I Whistle a Happy Tune” – although, this being Love Never Dies, it’ll be a ballad and also serve as a kind of lullaby. The song also does an interesting thing with register in terms of its ambivalent language usage. Remember Act 3 Scene 5 in Romeo and Juliet where Juliet and her mother are talking about love and marriage and death and weeping and the former is talking about Romeo and the latter about Paris and Tybalt? Here we have the same kind of thing. Christine sings the song to Gustave, ostensibly about his relationship with his father, although those of us that are familiar with the franchise understand that Christine is singing about her relationship with the Phantom. Gustave thinks Christine is singing about Raoul, but thinks that she is singing about her relationship with his father instead of his, which is why he responds to her with what sounds like strangely intuitive childish insight. Thrilling, no? Well, not as thrilling as Shakespeare’s scene, which is brilliant in isolating the different registers. This is not quite as refined an example, with the second half of the lyric, “Love is not always beautiful, not at the start”, being an obvious transgressor in straddling more than one register too obviously, but it’s nice that a song which could be taken as a mawkish throwaway piece can be elevated, perhaps, to more than it should be.
Following the song, we get an instrumental interlude that ends with a music box theme that gives us a snatch of scoring from The Phantom of the Opera. Those familiar with the original score will remember it as both a part of the “Little Lotte” sequence and as the verse of “Past the Point of No Return” where Christine sings first, “You have brought me…” and then “I have come here…”. Now, it seems, history has repeated itself and it’s time for a grand reunion…
Final verdict: Frankly, after the previous sequence of scenes, I found this section rather disappointing. Whereas the earlier scenes dealt with exposition in an economical way, these really slow down to ponder on basic points as if anything more complicated would confuse the audience completely. As I said earlier of Meg, Raoul needs to be approached in a more complex fashion if the stakes of the show are going to be high and truly compelling. We also have another intrusion of electric music here, but as I said in my previous post that is a problem with the way that the Phantom franchise has been established – some kind of populist identity crisis, if you will. At any rate, I think this section of the show needs a great deal of character work to balance the narrative developments we see here: what it requires is more action and (perhaps) fewer actions.
NEXT UP: Beneath a moonless sky…
Purchases from Amazon.com
FROM LEFT TO RIGHT:
1. Love Never Dies Concept Album Cast Recording.
2. Love Never Dies Concept Album Cast Recording – Deluxe Edition.
2. “Why Does She Love Me?”
The fifth part of my track-by-track Love Never Dies commentary gets us back on track with the the idea of a displaced formula, which was displaced in the previous sequence of scenes by further exposition. In tracks 13-15 on the original cast recording, we see Christine and the Phantom reunited and the introduction of Christine’s son, Gustave, to the Phantom.
The third part of this track-by-track commentary of Love Never Dies deals with tracks 6-8, during which the Phantom is introduced to the audience and in which we find out just how he got to be in this place, so far from the world of the Paris Opera.
Musical Cyberspace 
LOVE NEVER DIES: Track by Track – Part 10
Part 10 of this track-by-track Love Never Dies commentary takes us to Christine’s dressing room, beginning the lead up to the moment whether Christine will choose to sing or not, taking us through tracks 8-9 of the second disc of the original cast recording.
8. “Before the Performance”
“Before the Performance” consists of several musical themes and a great deal of plotting. It’s aim to to create a real crisis for Christine: will she sing or not? However, the foundations for creating a crisis have been poorly laid and this superficial attempt doesn’t really make us wonder whether the outcome will be anything but the eventual performance of the Phantom’s new song.
The scene starts off with Gustave humming a haunting little melody, which – if we’ve been paying attention – we first heard in “The Coney Island Waltz” before it became the melody for “Mother, Please I’m Scared”, when he dreamed of someone taking him away and drowning him. It’s subtle foreshadowing, I think: not enough not for anyone to put the pieces all together if they aren’t sure of the plot, but certainly one that is a delightful touch when viewing the show retrospectively.
The scene set is in Christine’s dressing room. She is putting on her jewellery and asks Gustave to help her. This leads into a reprise of “Beautiful” which has some awfully flat lyrics, about how Christine looks ‘like a queen in a book’ and how much ‘fun’ it would be for the two of them to spend some time alone together after the performance. I also wondered about the choice of music here: is the use of this melody here appropriate? “Beautiful” is meant to be a song that Gustave has in his head, that the Phantom heard him playing in his lair prior to “The Beauty Underneath”. Is this diegetic material really appropriate for use non-diegetically in this scenario? It is used non-diegetically in the scene that culminates with “The Beauty Underneath”, but there it develops out of the Phantom and Gustave’s interaction and feels as if it fits. Here, is doesn’t seem to be quite as good a match. Maybe it would be better if there was a reprise of “Look With Your Heart” here instead and perhaps that reprise should happen once Christine, the choice having not yet entered her mind, is in some turmoil about whether to perform or not. Or maybe “Beautiful” should be a completely non-diegetic piece and the melody is Gustave’s head should always be the one he is singing now.
The show also lacks an interaction in which Gustave mentions his experience of seeing the Phantom without his mask and Christine unpacks that a little in a way that makes his acceptance of his real father more moving; to achieve that Gustave should be a little more stubborn in this interaction so that the question appears to be one answered only in the moment of crisis near the end of the show. Whether or not this is the right place for that little scene is up for debate, but I think it is an important beat in the action that has been skipped over by the creators of the show.
Raoul arrives on the scene next, looking more like his old self and doing his best to be just as charming. Gustave is excused; Christine gives him permission to explore backstage on the condition that he returns to her dressing room after her performance. Raoul then has some apologetic recitative, which is then followed by his attempt to convince Christine not to sing, which culminates in a weak-willed reprise of “Why Does She Love Me?” – and that’s that. It’s not nearly good enough a proposal to throw Christine into the kind of turmoil she is supposed to experience when considering whether she would sing or not. The option of not singing is not made attractive enough, not to her or to the audience. With so much apparently on the line, Raoul’s attempt at convincing Christine not to sing needs to leave Christine (and us) believing that there is really is a possibility of a wonderful future for the three of them together as a family. Raoul needs something much better than a reprise of his pitiful drinking song from earlier in Act II; he needs an “All I Ask of You”.
We move directly on to the Phantom’s counterargument, which begins with a sequence of rather awkwardly arguments about Raoul: ‘He knows his love is not enough / He knows he isn’t what you need’. The point of his argument here is that it is time for Christine ‘to be who [she] should be’ so why not phrase them to here in the second person instead, in other words ‘You know his love is not enough / You knows he isn’t what you need’. While those lyrics might be served by a minor adjustment, the lyrics about Christine being ‘made of finer stuff’ and about how she should ‘leave him in the dust’ are, frankly, unsalvageable.
The Phantom’s argument continues with a reprise of “‘Til I Hear You Sing’, which encompasses further arguments for his case: the thrill of performing for an audience with music that makes her feel truly alive once more and the opportunity to fulfill the romantic potential discovered between them one night “Beneath a Moonless Sky” at last.
The stage manager arrives to tell Christine that it’s time for her to perform. She sings “Twisted every way, what answer can I give”. The problem is, she’s not twisted every way. One option seems clearly better than the other; the dramatists haven’t done their job and have overly relied on the moral codes of marriage and family to make an argument for staying with Raoul. Christine is given another couple of lines to sing here, but I don’t think they would be necessary if the play had set up the conflict well enough; music and body language should be enough to communicate her conflict to us in these moments before her performance. The music here represents her deliberation in itself.
The scene concludes with a sung snippet to the tune of “Prima Donna” from The Phantom of the Opera before the orchestra swells using the same musical theme. It does bring a sense of grandeur to the moment and a lump to the throat. As the melodic works up to its climax, you catch your breath and –
ANTI-CLIMAX!
Instead of being carried through to the climactic moment of Christine’s performance, we’re taken through a reprise of “Devil Take the Hindmost” – yet another poorly calculated error in judgment.
9. “Devil Take the Hindmost (Quartet)”
I’m not disputing that the idea of a reprise of “Devil Take the Hindmost” can add invaluable tension and suspense within the sequence leading up to Christine’s performance, but this is the wrong place for it. Placed here, it just becomes a frustrating scene we have to sit through while we wait for Christine to sing – or not sing, if we supposed to be seriously consider that there is a choice in the matter at this point.
So where should it be? I’m not entirely sure; there are several options and any of them would require some rewriting. The first option is to start it off between Madame Giry and Meg after their scene (“Mother Did You Watch?”), during which they could see and hear Gustave humming his tune en route to Christine’s dressing room before we see the Phantom and Raoul separately deliberating over their plans to convince Christine to sing or not. Meg can have her epiphany and leave to play her part in the final events of the show. The second option would be to place it in between Raoul and the Phantom’s visits to Christine, with Raoul reflecting on the case he has made and the Phantom reflecting on the case he is about to make, while the sections pertaining to Madame Giry, Meg and Gustave remaining the same as outlined above. The third option would be the most difficult to achieve successfully and to create a fully integrated musical backstage sequence that somehow weaves all of the themes mentioned in this section of the commentary together into one complex, masterful dramatic whole.
The song as it stands still places too much focus on Madame Giry and too little on Meg. We have to see Meg snap or at least take on some kind of agency as the villain of this show and one line at the end of a song isn’t enough. Yes, we will be shocked perhaps by her actions later – but it is a shock that seems unmotivated by the events of the play as a whole.
Final verdict: It’s clear that Ben Elton, Glenn Slater and Andrew Lloyd Webber are struggling with the question of how to tell their story. The structure of these two backstage sequences, which have a fair amount of material that works in its favour, doesn’t help the play rhythmically and there are some serious issues that need to be approached if this “moment of crisis” is going to properly set up the climax of the show. To find the answers, the creators really need need to decide what story they are telling. At the moment, its seem as if they’re just throwing together chunks of narrative and hoping for the best. Certainly chance plays some role in whether a show is successful or not, but creating drama is still primarily about making choices. That way, even if a show doesn’t go over with audiences, the theatre-makers can find some comfort in the value of their artistry. Love Never Dies can’t yet offer its creators even that.
NEXT UP: Love Never Dies.
Purchases from Amazon.com
FROM LEFT TO RIGHT:
1. Love Never Dies Concept Album Cast Recording.
2. Love Never Dies Concept Album Cast Recording – Deluxe Edition.