The Phantom of the Opera is there, inside your mind. Also closing today, after 35 years.

Old art, new eyes — tween edition

(This article is my first in the Old Art, New Eyes series, in which I look back at media I liked a long time ago and see what I think of it now. If you like this, please consider subscribing. If you really like this, and would like to support more of my fiction and nonfiction writing, please consider supporting me at my Patreon.)

Photo of, I believe, West 44th Street in Manhattan (ask how I know), by Rodrigo dos Santos on Unsplash

For the past few months, various outlets have been announcing the looming end of the Broadway run of the now longest-running musical in the Great White Way’s history: The Phantom of the Opera. In the midst of this event, a critic at Vulture has taken the time to write a simply blistering takedown of it, from its beginnings as an opulent Reagan-era schmaltzfest to its breathless and extremely profitable heyday through to its awkward and tired final moments.

The writer takes some very fair swipes, and as an adult, I’m certainly not Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber’s biggest fan. Today, I can appreciate the terrible politics, the deriviative and repetitive music, the trite story, the disturbing incel overtones. She digs deep and gets to some extremely trenchant commentaries on the state of musical theatre, of the arts, of the economics of it all.

It gets pretty brutal, to the point where a commenter wondered if Andrew Lloyd Webber had killed the reviewer’s dog or something. But I was most struck by the sentence that starts the third paragraph, which reads, simply:

“Why did anyone ever like this?”

As a young teenage girl, though, it was my absolute life.

The unsinkable pre-teen heart

I’ve been listening a lot lately to the podcast You Are Good, which bills itself as “a feelings podcast about movies.” Unlike a lot of other podcasts that go deep on film theory or involve, as co-host Sarah Marshall says, “people yelling at each other about movies,” You Are Good goes for things that one of the hosts, or their guest stars, loves and holds dear to their hearts. Often they strive to earnestly rescue a film from the ravages of irony, cynicism, and a misunderstanding of camp. And in so doing, they’ve returned me to the joy of certain things that, previously, I hadn’t dared to love—or at least, not to love anymore.

Titanic, for example. I remember how deeply I fell for this movie when it came out, and I was maybe 22. I loved it. It was beautiful, and so was the young Leo DiCaprio. For a few shining moments, I was as besotted with this movie as any 9-year-old girl (as Sarah had been at the time). Then, a fabulous older gay theatre friend smacked it down, and I felt stupid for having liked it. A few years later, in grad school, a teacher who was giving us a crash course in screenplay structure for a novel-into-film literature class said, “I love watching Titanic, because even though the movie is way too long, after the iceberg hits you get to watch these assholes drown for an hour and a half.” It was an extremely Gen X thing to say and a bitter one, but I laughed. It wasn’t cool or intelligent or deep to like Titanic. Message received.

In the episode I was struck by Sarah Marshall saying, “It demonstrates the length to which society will go to denigrate anything that tween girls care about that we think that romantic love is a frivolous and made-up thing to care about.”

(Why did anyone ever like this?)

And all I can say is: yeah. Yeah, that.

Turn your thoughts away from cold, unfeeling light

When I was twelve years old, my first-ever boyfriend introduced me to a musical that had only recently come to Broadway. In it, a young singer with a raw but undeveloped talent is taken under the wing of a dark and mysterious mentor, and made into a star of the Parisian opera.

At the time, I was already something of a musical theatre nerd, an affliction which would later become much, much worse. But I had grown up on the stuff: I saw Peter Pan on Broadway when I was all of five, and came up watching Fiddler on the Roof, The Sound of Music, Oliver and Annie (the orphan musicals!), West Side Story and any number of other things. I used to listen to my parents’ records of the soundtracks, and read along with the plot synopses in the liner notes. I even eventually got to watch The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, with Dolly Parton and Burt Reynolds of all things, having previously only glimpsed the album cover with its mysterious title as a child.

But coming as it did at the age as it did, along with my first romantic relationship and the intense hormanal cascade that accompanied it, Phantom was a whole other animal. He had gotten to see it; I hadn’t, but he showed me everything: the soundtrack, the playbill, the huge art book he’d bought all about the show’s development. We listened over and over, obsessing over the most romantic moments. I was coming into my own as a singer: long after that relationship ended, I would stand in the empty living room after school and practice the shrieking vocal exercises Sarah Brightman performs at the end of the title track, trying (and ever-failing) for that final high E.

To me—to us, me and my boyfriend—the story of the rejected and disfigured Phantom seemed like the most romantic tale ever. We cooed as the tenor Michael Crawford, with his so-distinctive cutting tone, wept in head voice over the lovers’ duet. We united in our hatred of Raoul, the incredibly boring baritone love interest, who clearly doesn’t know Christine at all. We sighed as Christine, right after the Phantom threatens Raoul with death if she doesn’t stay with him instead, grants the Phantom a kiss. In this action, I recognize as I write this, she becomes the heroine through compassion. The kiss isn’t saying: fine, I’ll accept your hostage-situation terms and submit. It’s saying, well, this:

Pitiful creature of darkness,

What kind of life have you known?

God give me courage to show you

You are not alone.

And yes, though it’s deeply uncool to admit it: I teared up just typing that line, remembering how the music swells, and how the “Angel of Music” melody soars over that act of pity and kindness. It’s especially great how Raoul kind of has to stand there awkwardly, the Phantom’s magical lasso still noosed around his neck, while his fiancée kisses her weird old music teacher/father figure who just tried to kill him.

But what happens next? He lets them go.

It was years before I ever saw the show, but I can’t get out of my mind the way Crawford somehow managed to communicate, aurally, the sense of not just being completely broken but of hardly being able to look at them after that kiss. The way he chokes out, “Take her, forget me, forget all of this…” before increasingly urgently hustling them away with a final “Go now and LEAVE ME!” It allowed me to see that that scene in my head clearly long before I ever actually saw it. In fact, I’m guessing that all my auditory absorbtion of musical theatre soundtracks in the subsequent years, all that imagining of theatrical staging in my head, led to my aspirations as a director.

All of this is of course leaving out the massive influence the show had on my sexual awakening. Let’s not even go into the whole “spooky masked guy with a sexy voice sweeps me into his billowing cloak and ferries me through a candleabra-soaked catacomb on a boat to his shadowy velvet lair, whereupon he instantly starts playing a pipe organ”—although the goth cred of that is of course very, very important.

But for me in particular, there were some powerful resonances that I’d only understand much, much later. I mean, a mysterious and dark adult figure to admire my budding talent and shape me into a star performer? Someone who cared about me to the point of being a bit obsessed? Someone who wanted to make me shine? That “Music of the Night” business with his arm around her shoulder and neck, the way she rests in his arms, the way his hypnotic power seduces but also calms and comforts her? Come on.

Just like that early romance of mine, it was a little bit forbidden, a little bit scary, but also thrilling and sweet and romantic.

Also, it made me sing.

You alone can make my song take flight

Why did anyone ever like this? I don’t know, Vulture writer, maybe it just came along at exactly the right time, from exactly the right source, directly into the brainstem of a neglected 12-year-old girl who really, really needed to feel like she was important and loved. And to deny that now just because the show is hackneyed (it is) and derivative (it is) and problematic (oh, it deeply is) would be to deny that child who had already been denied so much. And more: to deny how very passionately I was her, when I was her, and how much this silly spectacle lit me up.

The Phantom of the Opera doesn’t need me to defend it, for sure; 35 damn years on Broadway says a lot about its success and appeal, well-earned criticism notwithstanding.

But that 12-year-old girl does need me to defend her, and this is part of that. Another episode of You Are Good recently brought up the notion that while sometimes the things that were important to us as kids and teenagers are deeply embarrassing in retrospect, pretending we never liked them is not just a fool’s errand but a denial of some deep part of ourselves. What was it, we might gently ask, holding that younger self’s hand, that made Grease so vital to your development? Why did Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet speak to you so powerfully? Was it difficult, later on, having loved Michael Jackson so much? When you were nine and listening to ABBA, what did it seem like they were saying to you alone? Whatever it was, don’t forget it. It’s important, even if the material, ultimately, isn’t.

Farewell, Opera Ghost. It’s over now, the music of the night.