Gil Hates Everything

Hmmm. OK.

Regular readers will know I have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to Maury Yeston musicals. They just don’t suit me, let’s put it like that. He can definitely write nice music, but I’m not convinced that he can write a gripping musical. This is his version of the Phantom story, and it’s… okay….

The back-story to why there are two Phantoms is on Wikipedia, but if you want a summary: Yeston and a friend started work on it, with the aid of the rights to the original book, in 1983, but unfortunately for Yeston, books come out of copyright earlier in the UK (don’t get me started on this), enabling Andrew Lloyd Webber to develop his version for free as long as he didn’t go to Broadway with it. Of course, once the copyright lapsed in the US as well, Webber had a full version to hand, and Yeston lost his backers. However, it’s a sufficiently different take (significantly less bombastic for one thing) and although it’s never been on Broadway, it’s been staged all around, even to the point of having Kristin Chenoweth play Christine.

The story being told seems to be really small-scale. Christine is a street singer whose voice earns her a recommendation to the opera. She takes the lead part from Carlotta (suck it, Carlotta) and starts getting singing lessons from the mysterious Erik, the Phantom, who has been protected by the opera manager, Carriere, until the latter loses his position. It turns out that Carriere is Erik’s father. The police show up, Erik begs his father for help, and Carriere shoots him dead. (End of another fucking happy and uplifting story ;-) I can’t think why people stay home and watch sitcoms…)

“Alright, I know the plot – how is it musically, Panda?” Well, it’s… old-fashioned. It’s even got an entr’acte. Of the songs, I liked “This Place Is Mine”, Carlotta’s rant about entitlement, and “The Music Lessons”, just because it’s kinda cute hearing a singing lesson. (See also that one song set to a piano lesson in “The Music Man”.)

However, as part of a new policy to give shows more of a chance to impress me, I listened to the whole score twice, and most of the other songs went straight through my ears and disappeared down a black hole both times. For example, I’m listening again to “My Mother Bore Me” (a bad title to start with, practically inviting a killer putdown) and yep, it’s realllllly tedious. It might be intended as a pastiche of European classical song, but if so, it’s too good. It sounds like it would be the most horribly boring song to sing. And it’s not the only one. There are some songs here which sound like marathons. Specifically, the last part of a marathon, where everyone’s exhausted and going slowly and can only just reach the end. (One of the reasons “This Place Is Mine” stands out is that it doesn’t sound like everyone is on valium.)

There’s also the extremely old-school fact that of the seventeen tracks, eleven belong to the first act and only six (including that entr’acte) to the second. I sense massive amounts of scripty plot-dumping…

This doesn’t seem like an actively bad show, but I can totally see why the Webber version dominates the hell out of it commercially, and I’ll be spinning up that version tomorrow to check what I think of it (I saw it live a long time ago).

In the meantime, Random Panda awards this show five out of ten pieces of bamboo. Sorry, Maury.

(originally posted 2009)