Phantom From the East

Greetings once again, Phans!

Alas, a new year is upon us, and with it comes another anniversary or several -- this time, my 4th anniversary of seeing the ALW musical live for the first time (on January 3rd) and the 25th anniversary of the Broadway production (which will be celebrated with a special performance starring Hugh Panaro as the Phantom and Sierra Boggess as Christine). In my case, it's also been a time for me to play catch-up with some POTO versions that I hadn't seen before.


I got to see two rather unconventional film adaptations -- the 1937 Chinese classic Song at Midnight, and its 1995 remake The Phantom Lover. Apparently, Ma-Xu Weibang (the director of the '37 film) was heavily influenced by the 1925 POTO starring Lon Chaney and wanted to make an adaptation of it that was tailored to Chinese culture. Thus, the story centers on a star of the Beijing Opera named Song Danping who was a political revolutionary who his rivals scarred with acid and left for dead in the opera house, which was set on fire. Of course, in addition to the opera house being restored, Danping is most definitely not dead; he emerges again horribly disfigured (seriously, the makeup is some of the best I've seen in a POTO adaptation; it actually manages to rival Lon Chaney's), and this appears to be the first POTO adaptation to depict a "Phantom" who was scarred later in life rather than being born deformed. In any case, when a traveling opera troupe comes to the opera house to perform, Danping takes on a protégé from the company. Unusually for POTO adaptations, the protégé the "Phantom" takes on is a male singer, in an effort for Danping to woo the woman he loved despite being hideous -- it's almost like POTO meets Cyrano de Bergerac, but with a healthy dose of revolutionary politics that goes quite a bit farther than Les Misérables (and indeed, the party Danping is aligned with would go on to become a major ruling party of China after World War II, continuing into the present day).

The Phantom Lover was a remake that followed the same general plotline but changed a few characters' names and, more importantly, went for an entirely different style. If Song at Midnight is analogous to the 1925 POTO, then Phantom Lover is very much in the vein of the 1943 POTO starring Claude Rains. Like the Rains film, it's brighter and is unabashedly a musical, though more pop than classical in style -- the focal point of the narrative is a Romeo and Juliet musical which foreshadows Sung Danping's doomed romance. The main song from this musical might remind theater fans of Frank Wildhorn's The Scarlet Pimpernel. (The songs featured in the film were actually composed by the late Leslie Cheung, who plays Sung Danping -- the film was a vehicle for him in a similar way to how the 1943 POTO was for Nelson Eddy.)

I highly recommend both of these films. They're both available as DVD rentals on Netflix, which is how I saw them (though they may also be available through other means). Regarding Song at Midnight, though, the picture quality is often iffy; many scenes, especially early in the film, may require you to turn the brightness on your TV all the way up so you can see what's going on. Apparently, no negatives of the film survived, and only a certain level of restoration was possible with the existing prints. Also, with The Phantom Lover, make sure you get the 1995 film directed by Ronny Yu; there is a 1997 porn film with the same title directed by Bosley de Longprez that is also a POTO adaptation, and apparently it's pretty bad. There's also a 1960s film called The Mid-Nightmare that is also a remake of Song at Midnight, but I haven't gotten to see it yet. So now you know about these films, and as they say, knowing is half the battle.


I remain your obedient servant,
I.A.E.