I attended “Phantom of the Opera” this weekend and two orchestra seats cost me exactly $651.55. With that kind of money at stake, one wants to derive maximal pleasure from the experience. I’m sure you would agree. Since I foolishly enjoy the arts I will not hesitate to spend these kinds of dollars in order to edify my soul, despite the moans and groans voiced by my little wallet.
You might say this has put me in a quandary of sorts. First, I like the arts and will spend money to experience the same. Second, I like to hold onto my money. After thinking long and hard about this quandary I have decided to provide you with a down and dirty guide to help you to enjoy this play if perhaps you have the urge to travel to the Majestic Theater on West 43rd St. to see it.
The “Phantom of the Opera” is the longest-running play in Broadway history. After 32 years straight it is still running to sold-out shows. To give you an idea of how good this show is, “Les Miserable” and “Cats”, two other Broadway blockbusters only ran half that long.
Phantom won seven Tony Awards and has played in over 35 different countries and in 15 different languages. Its box office revenue exceeds any play or film ever produced, is considered to be one of the most successful pieces of entertainment of all time and continues as an unstoppable juggernaut into the foreseeable future.
But I am similar to Clark Griswold with his Wagon Queen Family Truckster, desperately trying to enjoy family fun but in the end not having much fun at all. Yet I remain, much like Clark Griswold, a steadfast optimist with an undaunted belief that I will be able to attend in this case a Broadway musical and come away with a feeling that I did not get ripped off and did have some fun.
So here is how you go about enjoying this play:
The first thing to do is to go to Paris and take a tour of the Paris Opera House. It is a remarkably beautiful building and seeing it gives you a good background. A special tour will take you into the many sublevels where they have a lake, horse stables, and other oddities. The cost of the trip was about $6,000 for two people.
The second thing is to go to the classics section of Barnes and Noble and buy the original book by Gaston Leroux. I will grant you this guy is not Marcel Proust, Honore de Balzac or Victor Hugo but the tale he weaves about the innards of the Paris Opera House makes you believe that a man could live there for years without beginning found. About 35 hours to finish the book.
The third thing is to take a primer course in the psychoanalysis of art at Adelphi Derner Institute. This will help you to understand that any work of art has many characters but in fact, all the characters are a part of the inner workings of the artist’s mind. The cost, maybe $900.
And if you do these things you are sure to be equipped with enough history and background knowledge to easily appreciate the ins and outs of this play. But in the event you feel it is not worth the bother of spending over $7,000 and countless hours in preparation, let me give you a summary of what you will see when you get to the play.
When you enter the theater you will see that the stage is draped in dreary coverings which insinuate that this is a story about the past. The tale is essentially about the burden of talent that a girl must face when it is discovered that she has a gift for singing.
You could interpret the play as really being about a ghost, the phantom, who is the Angel of Music, but in fact, it is a play about receiving inspiration from outside oneself and then having to face up to the responsibility of fulfilling one’s gifts. This tale is quite similar to “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley, the story of how a scientist created something special only to run from it as if it was a monster.
The big conflict in this play was whether the girl with the gift, Christine Daae, would live up to her talent or instead, go for love and marriage. In the end, she goes for love and marriage.
Living a life of the artist versus living a normal life with love and marriage was also the theme is the Oscar-winning film “La La Land.” However, in that story, written in modern times, the lovers decided to pursue their art rather than their love.
The final scene in the Phantom of the Opera was stunning. The lovers had gone off to live together and the Phantom was alone and bereft. When a child came down to the lake under the opera house to find him all she found left behind was the white mask, a wonderful symbol that the art object is given to us, the audience, is a true thing of lasting beauty but is born from much suffering and sacrifice. And there was not a dry eye in the house when the curtain fell.
So if you are perhaps one of the few American’s who has not yet seen Phantom give yourself a treat and see for yourself why great art is such a thing of wonder. Like the Paris Opera House, this Broadway masterpiece has many levels. On the most surface level, it is well-produced with wonderful music, great operatic talent, and glittering sets. But it is a show with considerable depth touching on unresolved loss, incest, possessiveness, jealousy, and envy. And at the very bottom of it all is a story about the cost one pays to make great art and why artists provide to us the most rarified and most precious of gifts we can receive.
