"Love Never Dies": An Update

Greetings once again, and Happy Earth Day! Today, I bring you yet another post relating to "Love Never Dies" (the Broadway premiere of which appears to have been pushed back to next spring). I would have posted it a while ago, but didn't for two major reasons: 1) I was super-busy with school, and 2) I wanted to make sure I had as much accurate information as possible before posting. In this case, new info kept coming out pretty much non-stop . . . Such is life. But anyway, here's the post that was several weeks in the making.

Before I get into the meat of this post, though . . . First off, I'd like to make a couple of corrections to my previous post on LND, just so that nobody will think I intentionally got certain plot points wrong in order to make the show look bad (since it does a pretty good job of that on its own). The first is that the Phantom (or "Mr. Y.," as he's called -- ha ha, get it? Mr. Y = Mystery! Sheer genius, I say!) does not rape Christine; she returns to sleep with him the night before she marries Raoul, which puts their characters in a much better light. (For those of you playing along at home, that was sarcasm.)

The other correction I need to make is that the Phantom doesn't follow Christine and Raoul to New York; instead, he sets up his theme park/freak show/thingy on Coney Island ten years after the original (the math doesn't really make sense there as far as dates are concerned, but I guess we're supposed to just go with it), and then he tricks them into coming to work for him at a time when they're desperate for money thanks to Raoul's boozing habit . . . and somehow, Christine has no idea that this mysterious guy who wants her to sing but refuses to give his name or show his face is actually (gasp) the Phantom! Um, sure . . .

Since I'm in a "kernels-of-truth" kind of mood, I have an admission to make as well: I never intended to blog on LND again here. I heard the cast album from a free source a week or so after my last post on the show and found the music and lyrics to be so underwhelming that I thought it unworthy of review on this blog. (Certain melodies sound partially or mostly plagiarized, as well, and not always from ALW's previous work -- listen to "Sally's Song" from Nightmare Before Christmas, then listen to "Beneath a Moonless Sky" from LND and tell me they don't sound the same!)

Anyway, I thought my previous LND post would be my final word on that sorry, Twilight-ified show. Recent revelations about the show and Andrew Lloyd Webber's company the Really Useful Group, however, have made it necessary to bring up LND once again.

"Love Never Dies" -- Why I Won't Be Seeing It

As I'm sure most Phantom fans reading this are aware, Andrew Lloyd Webber will soon be debuting a sequel to his musical version of The Phantom of the Opera, called Love Never Dies. The London premiere will be on March 9th, and a Broadway premiere is expected to follow, scheduled to begin on November 11th. While some Phantom Phans seem ambivalent or supportive of this sequel, it looks like the vast majority of die-hards are horrified by the idea. In this case, I stand with the latter group.

This is not to say that I think ALW has no right to do the sequel -- certainly, he wrote his original version and still holds the copyright over it, and he can do with it whatever he wishes. Plus, I'd be a bit of a hypocrite if I claimed he had no right to make a sequel since I've always been a steadfast supporter of the First Amendment right to free speech (not to mention that I myself have had some pretty crazy ideas for creative projects).

But at the same time, we the fans (and Phans) have rights too. We have the right to decide for ourselves whether or not this sequel is something we want to spend our hard-earned money on, and we also have the right to voice our opinions on this show whether we are supportive or opposed to it. Here are some of the major reasons why I don't plan to buy the cast album, let alone trek to London or New York to see it live: