Phantom to change to "re-staged" production in flagship productions?- Page 17

[imeldasturn]

Posted: 7/28/21 at 6:24am

“So often the show is referred to as a spectacle—it isn’t. I would maintain that once again the proscenium design—the picture frame—is the key to the show. Its magnificently carved gilt figures erotically entwined. And when it is revealed after the prologue, I don’t believe the audience examines it, but I’m certain that it casts a heavy erotic atmosphere over the entire show.”

Harold Prince, “Sense of Occasion” (2017)

Updated On: 7/28/21 at 06:24 AM

[iluvtheatertrash]

Posted: 7/28/21 at 8:35am

Kip4 said: "iluvtheatertrash said: "Yes. Easy to see it’s been completely ruined from three cropped photos."

Yes, it is easy to see it's completely ruined based on the photos above. The entire aesthetic of the production has changed. The cast, I'm sure, is phenomenal."

If the cast is phenomenal, then it isn’t “completely” ruined.

[Lot666]

Posted: 7/28/21 at 8:50am

It looks sad.

[JayElle]

Posted: 7/28/21 at 9:19am

Understudy wrote in part, "..The Majestic is COVERED in scaffolding! I"

Seems NYC  is and feels perpetual.

[CATSNYrevival]

Posted: 7/28/21 at 1:39pm

JayElle said: "Seems NYC is and feels perpetual."

It's ever changing, yet it's never changed.

[everythingtaboo]

Posted: 7/28/21 at 2:01pm

CATSNYrevival said: "JayElle said: "Seems NYC is and feels perpetual."

It's everchanging, yet it's never changed."

New York City! It'll be so great once they finish it!

[ImAProphet]

Posted: 7/31/21 at 9:21pm

FYI if anyone wants to visit the Majestic before October and make sure they haven't effed with the proscenium (or just to be back inside) the documentary The Show Must Go On is premiering there August 9 and you can get tickets. https://www.telecharge.com/Broadway/The-Show-Must-Go-On-Film-Premier/Overview

[The Scorpion]

Posted: 8/2/21 at 12:38pm

Broadway should keep its fingers crossed that what has happened to the flagship production in London is not replicated on the other side of the pond. It’s even worse than people have said, because I feel much of the reaction last week to the opening (not ‘re-opening’, as this isn’t the same show) was down to the fact that this is one of the first shows to play since the pandemic hit. The audience last Tuesday was full of fans who were going to love what they saw no matter what. But the show now at Her Majesty’s in London is not the same, and not remotely the equal, of what hopefully will return at the Majestic in October.

The proscenium, which Hal Prince and Maria Björnson repeatedly stated was the crucial framing device for the show, in that it informed its erotic subtext, has been butchered beyond recognition. None of Maria’s satyrs, gargoyles, and angels remain on the sides. Instead, Matt Kinley (Cameron’s go-to assistant when he wants set designs diluted) has replaced this with a weird (and frankly cheap-looking) ‘shattered’ effect that never repairs itself, even during/after overture. Not only that, Björnson’s favourite set piece, the descending Angel, has been axed entirely. A bust sits in its place and does nothing during the show. The Phantom’s rooftop appearance is now from a statue of Pegasus that is rolled onstage. While it’s quite a handsome sculpture (and replicates Lequesne’s statue on the roof of the Palais Garnier), it isn’t as theatrical as the Angel, and it is rather literal in comparison (the Angel had a lot of erotic subtext with the Phantom spread out across it when he issues his warning, plus there’s the metaphor of the Phantom as a fallen angel etc). It does not generate the same gasps. Cameron Mackintosh has tried to justify the Pegasus by saying that this is what Björnson designed herself. While that may be true, it was a rejected design she never once used in any international production. Every production where the Angel could not descend that Björnson supervised, such as the original Japanese production, at least had the Angel as a fixed part of the proscenium. Björnson resisted calls throughout her life to remove the Angel. They were talking about it as early as the 1990s!

Other ‘gasp’ moments have been axed for no apparent reason. Most egregious is the magical effect of seeing the Phantom and Christine descend through a trap door just after Christine walks through the mirror, only to reappear nearly instantaneously at the top of the zigzagging travelator. This effect, so simple in its execution with the two sets of doubles, still got gasps as late as 2019 from first-timers. Now instead Raoul just wanders around aimlessly on stage, while the urgency of the musical segue from ‘The Mirror’ to the title song has been destroyed entirely, since they’ve delayed the start of the title song to add in a few extra bars where nothing happens. The cinematic fluidity that Hal Prince created is therefore massively compromised – the whole point was one scene was supposed to start before the previous one had ended, and this is now wrecked. Even the following scene with the boat, which was the defining sequence of the show, has been cheapened. The candelabra used to move out towards the wings after appearing from below in time with the music. Now they do nothing after they first appear.

Prince’s black box concept that he again repeatedly stated was crucial has also been destroyed. As at the Majestic, the boxes closest to the stage at Her Majesty’s were blacked out and the ceiling directly above the proscenium were painted black. As part of Her Majesty’s restoration, Really Useful has for some odd reason decided to remove all that black paint and return those boxes to use to cram more audience members in. The result is a pastel mess of bright colours that clash with the set and ruin the dark, Gothic mood of the show. It’s therefore odd for the producers to have said the new production ‘blurs the boundaries between the set and the audience’, because those boundaries are far more prominent than they ever were now that those boxes are back in use…and also because the Phantom is now never seen on the catwalk above the proscenium. There is no longer the feeling that he haunts the theatre.

Particularly offensive are the stage pictures just before the show starts, during the interval, and at the very end. Since Mackintosh no longer wants to pay stage hands to hang drapes over the proscenium and remove them during the overture, they hang pointlessly and limply (and half-heartedly, since they don’t fully cover everything) over a frame that sits within the proscenium arch. Obviously they don’t really reveal anything since the sculptures have gone. When you enter the theatre, it looks like you’re looking at someone’s washing line. Although the beautiful red curtain used during Il Muto is still there, it is not displayed during the Entr’acte or the exit music playout. Instead a very cheap-looking flat painted curtain is used. While it is based on the curtain of the Palais Garnier, the colours have been changed from reds and gold to blues and greens, and it doesn’t gel with the rest of the set. It also contradicts the intention of Hal and Maria to use heavy, weighted, textured drapes throughout the show.

Even the chandelier is compromised. While it is bigger than its predecessor, it does not look right on the stage. It is far too big for the auction scene and it looks very plastic, lacking many of Björnson’s finer details such as the beads that draped across the circumference and the lattice in the metal. The chandelier itself is a rather good metaphor for this production, since it’s basically an afterthought. The intention was, given its size, for it NOT to rise from the stage but simply to drop vertically (and already be hung in the air when audiences enter the theatre). But outcry from long-time fans and constant comments in social media prompted a last-minute change (and by last minute, I mean exactly that – they brought in an older chandelier and, with hours to go before curtain up last Tuesday, they hacked off the lyres of the old chandelier to stick them on to this new one). The bottom of the chandelier is incomplete and has a hole in it. It was supposed to have a protruding end but when they changed plans for it to rise from the stage, that could no longer be a part of it, so they had to hack it off.

All this is on top of the decimation of the orchestra, which sounds weak. I’d heard the 14-piece orchestration before in very recent international productions and at some points it was laughable, particularly where the orchestra was supposed to swell. Sadly, for all the talk by the producers of supposed new technology, nothing sounds better about this in London. And it made me realise what a key part of the show the orchestra is. This isn’t meant to be a pit band – the show is set in an opera house so the orchestra is integral to the show. It’s a character in its own right, and other characters even interact with it during the mock operas. So to have this instead of what was the West End’s largest orchestra is just heartbreaking.

Sadly they don’t make the old lighting rigs they used to use, so they’ve switched to LED. I guess there’s nothing they can do to avoid that since the parts just aren’t made any more. The unfortunate effect of this is that the show looks a lot brighter than it really ought to. Gone is the sense of darkness, mystery, sexuality…it all just feels clinical and Disneyfied. And cheapened. The current cast aren’t good enough to save it – most of them are too young and inexperienced, and the principal three are all lacking vocally and in chemistry. They wouldn’t get cast in the Broadway production.

Cameron’s lackey Seth Sklar-Heyn is billed as director. Essentially it is just Cameron running the show, thinking he is a director. It was him, and not Sklar-Heyn, who opened last Tuesday’s show with a speech about how this butchered production is supposedly bigger and better than its illustrious predecessor, when that clearly isn’t the case. Sklar-Heyn was instead in the stalls, heard to complain out loud to fellow creatives that he has no control over this show.

If Cameron Mackintosh is honest that the original was no longer viable, then I can understand the need to economise, but the degree to which they’ve done this is so extreme that there’s little left of the magic of the original. As isolated changes, you can perhaps forgive each of the above; but cumulatively they are to the show’s detriment. I would not be surprised if this impacts on the longevity of the run.

Is it better than the Laurence Connor tour? Yes, but that’s isn’t hard.  The reason it is so difficult to be generous with this show is that it is pretending to be something it is not. Lloyd Webber and Really Useful repeatedly stated last year that any rumours about changes were false and that Hal Prince’s production would return “unchanged”, “in its entirety”, “bigger and better than ever” and using Björnson’s original designs. None of these things are true. The London show was not, as far as anyone knows, suffering financially. It had not even appeared on TKTS for many months prior to lockdown.

My understanding from people very close to the show and part of the original production was that this was in the works for some time. Cameron has steadily been downgrading the London productions of all his 80s megamusicals into bus-and-truck versions that can run for years and years at much reduced cost. The Connor tour was intended to be the new version, but it was poorly received and ALW didn’t like it, so it’s been junked. My understanding is that it will never be seen again save in Australia next year.

Yes, the producers can do what they want with the show. BUT they should be honest about what they’re doing. The idea that any of this is ‘bigger’ or ‘better’ or down to technological advances is absolute nonsense. Not only that, it is very disrespectful to attribute what is seen on stage to Hal Prince and Maria Björnson. Some of the latter’s associates who worked with her on the show (and who were not asked by Cameron for their input) are not at all impressed with how her iconic designs have been diluted in the flagship original home.

At least with Les Misérables, there was no pretence regarding the fact that the Nunn/Caird/Napier original had been ditched and replaced. Here, however, the social media team repeatedly stated during 2020 that it would be the “brilliant original” returning. It was only in the last month that they  stopped using that tagline entirely, going so far as to remove it from the website, from all the posters around London, and from their official social media accounts. I think they realise the outcry it would have caused if they had falsely billed this as the brilliant original. But it hasn’t stopped them from pretending little to nothing has changed, and many average audience members who do not read message boards are clueless about what has happened. COVID was used as a cover to fire everyone from the original production, close that down, and put in the 2020 UK tour into Her Majesty’s. Cameron no longer has to pay a full orchestra or the original 1986 investors, all of whom have been cut out. Hal Prince’s estate will no longer receive the whopping 4% of the gross as his fee that he negotiated (at least in London) since that was an agreement for run of show. All the insight and know-how gained over the last 34 years has vanished from the building since the entire company has been replaced, so there is really no-one left who was in the room with Prince, Björnson, and Lynne.

I don’t believe any of this was necessary and, as far as I can tell, this simply is the result of greed. If it was necessary, then it would have been far more respectful to close the original production in dignity and produce a thoughtful revival in a brand new production in a few years’ time, rather than claim false continuity like this.

It’ll be interesting to see what Cameron’s moves are re Broadway. He does not have the majority share in the Broadway production, and some changes made in London cannot happen on Broadway (e.g. 14-piece orchestra would break the rules…though he may try and get away with 18 players). In the meantime, I will head to Manhattan if I want to see this show again, because London is a phantom of what it was.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Fosse76]

Posted: 8/2/21 at 3:20pm

The Scorpion said: "Broadway should keep its fingers crossed that what has happened to the flagship production in London is not replicated on the other side of the pond.

Just like in London, contractual agreements would require them to officially close the show. Unlike in London, neither CM nor ALW own the Majestic, which significantly complicates replacing the production. For one, agreements with theaters prevent producers from closing a show just to downsize to move to another theater (Mamma Mia consulted with the Shuberts to move). Two, Phantom currently operates without a stop-clause. Based on advanced ticket sales, there's no way the Shuberts would eliminate it for a new production, and likewise Phantom can't afford to operate without one at this point in time. Three, there's no guarantee the Shuberts would keep them at the Majestic. It needs work, and the production vacating the building would be the time to do it. 

 The audience last Tuesday was full of fans who were going to love what they saw no matter what.

Considering that Phantom's fans are the most certifiably insane group of fans, I'd argue they were always going to hate the changes. 

[Lot666]

Posted: 8/4/21 at 12:52pm

The Scorpion said: "the show now at Her Majesty’s in London is not the same, and not remotely the equal, of what hopefully will return at the Majestic in October."

You have confirmed my worst fears. Every detail of your account exactly reflects my expectations of what this "bigger and better" production would actually be. I'll be at The Majestic on reopening night and I fervently hope that Mackintosh will not be allowed anywhere near it.

[morosco]

Posted: 8/4/21 at 2:31pm

This deceptive video has it sound as if they are still using the original full orchestrations with lots of strings instead of the 14 musicians that are now in the pit.

THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA Takes First Bows in West End Return 

[TaffyDavenport]

Posted: 8/9/21 at 7:59pm

Some pics from inside the Majestic today

The Phantom of the Opera on Instagram • Photos and Videos

The Phantom of the Opera on Instagram • Photos and Videos

[EDSOSLO858]

Posted: 8/9/21 at 8:04pm

So glad to see that it looks like the Angel and "Lot 666" are both being preserved from the Brilliant Original!

[FANtomFollies]

Posted: 8/10/21 at 9:35am

Thank goodness the Broadway production looks unchanged! I will say - the Majestic is badly in need of a renovation in terms of the lobby/auditorium. Although with the lost revenue of the pandemic who knows if/when that will happen.

[Phantom4ever]

Posted: 8/10/21 at 1:13pm

I am elated to see the Angel, the original proscenium, boxes, and of course, the chandelier are still in the Majestic Theater! 

Fantom Follies, I am curious about what specific parts of the auditorium and lobby need renovating? I definitely saw some peeling paint up near the air vents in the ceiling of the auditorium, but that's about it from what I've seen. And I would prefer all of the paint peel off rather than give Cameron an excuse to get rid of any of the original 1988 aspects of the show. 

By the way, I wonder if there are any people in the theatrical lighting field on this thread?  It is my understanding that the lighting that this production uses is no longer in use anywhere else on Broadway or the West End, and the parts for it are not made anymore. I read that the new version in the West End looks so different because it employs modern lighting, which is often too bright for the gothic feel of the show. Can anyone shed some light (ha!) on if this production can keep running indefinitely with a lighting system that is no longer supported?  

Also, I am surprised that the scaffolding appears to still be up in front of the Majestic. I know it's been there since at least my visit in April 2021. I wonder if it will be down in time for re-opening night?  

[Lot666]

Posted: 8/10/21 at 2:46pm

TaffyDavenport said: "Some pics from inside the Majestic today

The Phantom of the Opera on Instagram • Photos and Videos

The Phantom of the Opera on Instagram • Photos and Videos"

Oh, HURRAH!  

[Fosse76]

Posted: 8/10/21 at 3:55pm

Are you people really that dense? We would have known if there had been any changes long before now.

[Lot666]

Posted: 8/24/21 at 10:16am

"As orchestra sizes dwindle as the years go by, I mourn the loss of the artists in our orchestra pits particularly this one. I will never forget the sound of Phantom’s original 27 odd piece orchestration, its impact only matched by the dynamic overture for Love Never Dies I doubt will ever be heard again live. It’s our loss!"

 

[GiantsInTheSky2]

Posted: 9/14/21 at 9:43am

Congrats to Emilie Kouatchou, who is joining the Broadway cast as the Christine alternate - the first black woman the play the role in the United States! I believe this is also her Broadway debut, from glancing at her resume.

The rest of the reopening Broadway cast:
Ben Crawford (Phantom), Meghan Picerno (Christine), John Riddle (Raoul), Bradley Dean (Monsieur André), Craig Bennett (Monsieur Firmin), Raquel Suarez Groen (Carlotta), Maree Johnson (Madame Giry), Carlton Moe (Piangi), Sara Esty (Meg Giry)

[Nolan LuPone]

Posted: 9/14/21 at 9:54am

Wow! Another POC as Christine. Great job Phantom! Also, so glad to see Raquel is staying with the show. She is amazing to see live.

Updated On: 9/14/21 at 09:54 AM

[Fosse76]

Posted: 9/14/21 at 10:21am

Nolan LuPone said: "Wow! Another POC as Christine. Great job Phantom! Also, so glad to see Raquel is staying with the show. She is amazing to see live."

I wouldn't say great job...it took them 30 years.

[Nolan LuPone]

Posted: 9/14/21 at 11:07am

Phantom London just got their first POC Christine. I would agree that it is pathetic that Phantom has taken so long to cast black actresses, but it's good to finally see progress.

[labellaragazza1]

Posted: 9/14/21 at 11:28am

Annoyed and disappointed that it took so long but also celebrating that it's happening. Can't wait for her schedule to come out, would love to see her first performance!

[FANtomFollies]

Posted: 9/14/21 at 1:06pm

labellaragazza1 said: "Annoyed and disappointed thatit took so long but also celebrating that it's happening.Can't wait for her schedule to come out, would love to see her first performance!"

Long overdue, but very exciting news!

[Lunalaaaaaaaa]

Posted: 9/14/21 at 1:26pm

GiantsInTheSky2 said: "Congrats to Emilie Kouatchou, who is joining the Broadway cast as the Christine alternate - the first black woman the play the role in the United States! I believe this is also her Broadway debut, from glancing at her resume.

The rest of the reopening Broadway cast:
Ben Crawford (Phantom), Meghan Picerno (Christine), John Riddle (Raoul), Bradley Dean (Monsieur André, Craig Bennett (Monsieur Firmin), Raquel Suarez Groen (Carlotta), Maree Johnson (Madame Giry), Carlton Moe (Piangi), Sara Esty (Meg Giry)"

Congrats Emilie!!! So wonderful!!!

I thought Ben Crawford was basically confirmed already?

I wonder who they will be casting for Phantom's 35th anniversary though.