Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Broadway production of The Phantom of the Opera is either a lot of flash with little substance or one of the best musicals of all time, depending on your personal tastes. It undoubtedly has incredible sets and costumes paired with beautiful music. Whether that is enough to overcome the way it glosses over many of the meatier parts of Gaston Leroux’s novel is a matter of some debate. One thing is sure, however: it brings the love story from that novel back to scenter stage.

Continue reading “Phantom Histories: The 1986 Musical” →

The 1962 adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera is everything the 1943 film was but more so. It has strong acting (with the Phantom played by Herbert Lom), plays up the disfigurement of the title character, and has the unfortunate tendency to overemphasize the Phantom as a charming and sympathetic character. It matches what the 1943 film did well (save for the extra spoke in the love triangle), but keeps from being the ideal adaptation by repeating the previous film’s flaw of making the Phantom too much of a good guy.

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What do Claude Rains, Lon Chaney, and Michael Crawford all have in common? They each starred as the titular antagonist in adaptations of The Phantom of the Opera which, while excellent on their own, missed key pieces of the puzzle that keep me from considering them to be on the same level as the original novel.

The 1943 adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera goes one step further in that, while solid on its own, I believe that it actually did some long-term damage to the franchise that carried over into subsequent adaptations. Yet, at the same time, it gave the story some interesting twists that you can’t find anywhere else.

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For most people, the 1925 adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera is the first time Gaston Leroux’s novel reached the big screen. While a Russian film based on the novel did come out in 1916, it is now a historical footnote as no copies of that movie survived to the modern era. Thus, for our discussion of The Phantom of the Opera and its many adaptations, we have to skip over the first one and go right to the 1925 silent film starring Lon Chaney.

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The Phantom of the Opera is one of my favorite stories but also one of the most frustrating.

Continue reading “Phantom Histories: Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera” →