Love Never Dies: More fan fiction than sequel

MANILA, Philippines - How does a composer top his own best show? He doesn’t, but he at least tries not to be too far off the mark. Andrew Lloyd Webber has yet to write a show that would equal the success he has had with The Phantom of the Opera, now the longest running show on Broadway. His last hit, Sunset Boulevard, closed on Broadway some 10 years ago, and his last two shows The Woman in White and The Beautiful Game were critical and commercial flops. The last did not even make it to Broadway.

So heavy, then, seems to be the onus that Love Never Dies, Webber’s sequel to Phantom, has to bear. If the original cast recording, now out in stores, is any indication, however, it seems to hold itself up well enough, though not without wobbling.

Set in 1907, Love Never Dies continues the story of Phantom and brings it to Coney Island. Spirited away from Paris by Madame Giry (Sally Dexter) and her daughter Meg (Summer Strallen), the Phantom (Ramin Kamirloo) has reinvented himself as an impresario, the mysterious Mr. Y. He runs an attraction called Phantasma, which features a troupe of freaks and dancing girls (called the “Ooh-la-la girls”). Despite the attentions of Meg and the queues to his show, the Phantom still longs for Christine (Sierra Boggess). Christine has married Raoul (Joseph Millson) and now has a 10-year-old son named Gustave. The Vicomte, however, has become a gambler, a drunk, and a bankrupt. To help get him out of debt, she has agreed to sing at Phantasma, not knowing Mr. Y.’s true identity. 

When Christine and the Phantom finally meet, they sing the show’s first, rather soupy, duet (Beneath a Moonless Sky). The back story, which defies belief, is briefly recounted. From there, the show takes as many twists as a fairground roller coaster ride: Secrets are exposed, bets placed, and loyalties tested, until the show reaches its 14-minute finale.

How well does the sequel fare against the original? One could answer by quoting what Che Guevara said of Evita’s “rainbow tour” in another show: “A qualified success.”

The strength of any Webber show is the music. The main themes linger in one’s head long after the last notes have faded away. This show is no exception. Love Never Dies probably does not have as high a hits-per-minute average as Phantom, but there are not a few memorable tunes. ’Til I Hear You Sing, the main theme of this show’s Phantom, easily matches The Music of the Night; structured AABABA, it has, however, less of that song’s symmetry. The other is the title song, the aria that the Phantom composes for Christine. Originally incarnated as The Heart Is Slow to Learn (first performed publicly by Kiri Te Kanawa in 1998) and recycled as Our Kind of Love in The Beautiful Game, it is, in its latest embodiment, still shamelessly romantic — and despite its lyrics, irresistibly ravishing, with six gloriously high notes and as many grave ones. (Thankfully, Boggess, who used to play Ariel in The Little Mermaid, is equal to the latitude.) 

Then, there are Old Friends, a waltz that glides effortlessly from cordiality to sarcasm, Devil Take the Hindmost, a “duel” between Raoul and the Phantom built out of counterpoint, and Once Upon Another Time, the less maudlin duet between the Phantom and Christine.

Webber’s early works, like Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, was built on parody. Here his ability to write across musical styles is made to serve the show. Characters are sketched by musical motifs, and the contrasting worlds of the Paris Opera House, on the one hand, and the vaudeville stage of the New World, on the other, are evoked musically. Thus, Meg’s bouncy, earth-bound showgirl themes (Bathing Beauty and Only for Him) — “cheap modern trash,” Madame Giry calls them — are perfect foils to Christine’s solo, a song of operatic heights possessing the dignity that a full symphonic orchestra bestows.

Remarkable, too, is how Webber alludes to the original Phantom. For a composer notorious for plagiarizing himself, it is a surprise that he rehashes only two themes from Phantom, neither of them major, and places these judiciously, at critical points in the second act. (But, ah, he recycles a number of fragments from his other shows, chiefly, The Woman in White, Sunset Boulevard, and the movie version of Phantom, and also from Richard Rodgers). In most places, the world of the original Phantom is evoked by a few tonal echoes.

The main weakness of Love Never Dies, as is often the case with a Webber show, is the libretto. Based on The Phantom of Manhattan, a novel by Frederick Forsythe, Love Never Dies suffers because the liberties it takes neither build on the strengths of the original material nor cast the first show in a new light. As such, Love Never Dies comes across as fan fiction more than genuine sequel. The Phantom ceases to be that mixture of menace, romantic aspiration, and wicked humor which made him an attractive figure in the original show. Raoul’s downward spiral from courtier to cavalier seems sudden and unwarranted. The big reveals at the end of each act turn out to be clichés worthy of E! True Hollywood Lives. (Untangling the Meg Giry intrigue, one even wonders whether one isn’t listening to Gypsy and not the sequel to Phantom.)

The lyrics, too, are unequal to the music. Surely, the best Webber compositions deserve more than pedestrian rhymes (like sleep/creep) and development by doggerel (e.g., “Love never dies. / Love never falters.”), which ever threaten to deflate them.

It is unlikely that Love Never Dies will ever approximate the success of The Phantom of the Opera. How does one match a show that won seven Tony Awards, sold 25 million albums, and grossed over $3-B? Perhaps, it is the tragedy of Andrew Lloyd Webber to be haunted by his own success. In that, he is something like his own creation the Phantom, who having turned an ingénue into a prima donna repairs to his aerie, there to brood like the Spirit of God hovering over the face of the deep, until creation begin and he hear her sing once more.