David Christopher
Dr. Anthony Vickery
THEA 504 – Commercial Theatre
16 April 2010
Music, Melodrama, and Masks:
The Astronomical Success of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera
I hate musicals. I’ve never liked them. I never will. They are the clichéd locus of homophobic assault against theatre in the twentieth century, and as risible as any art venture that takes itself too seriously. The use of music in melodrama to underscore the drama and heighten the emotional response of audience members was a brilliant theatrical innovation, but when good melodrama is interrupted by some horribly contrived musical interjection, the magic of suspended disbelief is completely lost for me. My efforts to appreciate ‘The Musical’ aesthetically have resulted in mere tolerance at best, gag reflex at worst. I humbly admit that I was so bored with West-Side Story that I fell asleep watching it. As a theatre historian, therefore, I am a perfect heretic. How then, was I so mesmerized by Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera? What characteristics set it apart that appealed to me so much that I was nothing less than riveted? Considering its effect on me, it is no surprise that theatre-going populations who are not quite as openly blasphemous as I am, have made it the number one financial theatrical musical success of all time, bar none. Phantom participates with a number of contemporary musicals that redefined Broadway and set new standards for revenue maximums, as well as for production expenditures. Nevertheless, Phantom stands alone as the number one theatrical success of all time. The success of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera owes to an innovative integration of opera, rock, narrative and melodramatic conventions, the most important of which is the psychological appeal of an iconic gothic anti-hero in a mask.
‘The Musical’ effaces its own risibility with roaring success. But in the 1970s, the American Musical had become worn. Broadway was ready for something new and imports from Britain emerged as the unexpected source for the flamboyancy stereotypical of the previously all-American trope (Gerard). On October 12, 1971 Andrew Lloyd Webber experienced his first blockbuster success on Broadway with Jesus Christ Superstar (ibdb). Following was a sequence of similarly successful blockbusters including Evita and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Webber’s Cats opened on October 7, 1982. The show remained on Broadway for a record breaking eighteen-year run that saw a box office gross of over $400 million (USD). It appeared that Broadway had finally outdone itself, and that no other production would ever come close to such astronomical success. In the meantime, however, Webber had opened another production of even greater innovation. The Phantom of the Opera opened on January 26, 1988 at the Majestic Theatre on Broadway and as of September 16, 2009 has generated some $740 million (USD) in Broadway box office receipts alone. The box office including its international performances puts the overall revenues into the billions of dollars, a sum that dwarfs even the loftiest Hollywood film successes, and the largest revenues generated by any theatrical production in history (9000).
With his earlier Broadway productions, Webber participated with the rising avant-garde on Broadway of the ‘Rock Musical’ that had come into popular demand following the success of Hair, which originally ran from 1968 until 1972. Webber did the same with Cats but exchanged the religious myths surrounding Jesus and Joseph for gothic felines. Webber boldly adapted T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats and moved his musical away from traditional Broadway narratives (with predominantly human characters). Cats filled the stage with spectacle never before seen. A cast of giant cats prance and dance across the stage mesmerizing audiences with costume, circus theatrics, and groovy, upbeat rock compositions. The underlying text was pivotal. T. S. Eliot’s lovable but gruff characters have even names that are enchanting and phonetically allude to aspects of feline life such as Jellicle, Munkustrap, and Jennyanydots. These characters immediately suffuse the staging with the warm familiarity of a beloved text. No single characteristic of the production was exclusively responsible for the success of the production, but arguable highlights include the high energy choreography and innovations include the fantastic spectacle, Webber’s particular flavour of Broadway rock, the costuming and make-up of gothic cats, and the charming source from whence they were drawn.
Webber wisely used the same formula for his next production. He based his production on the compelling original text for Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux, rather than the myriad campy versions that had all but lost the original’s appeal. Much as with Cats, the foundational power of the text would dictate the tenor of the production and the direction his compositions would take. There is very little in Cats that comes close to the feel of the operatic music that is titular in Phantom.
The British rock opera had become hugely popular. Pink Floyd’s 1979 psychedelic rock opera The Wall was successful enough to be transferred to feature film in 1982 (imdb.com). The Who’s 1969 Tommy lent itself to the stage very well and has seen numerous stagings globally since that date, finally reaching Broadway in 1995. While the music of Cats participated more closely with Hair, the book for Phantom dictated and provided the opportunity to capitalize on the popular notion of rock opera, and to capitalize on the commercial power of opera that was beginning to show signs of popularity in the traditionally Broadway-classed demographic.
Both rock opera and opera use almost continuous music in their staging. The dramatic suspension of disbelief is not forced to vacillate between two conflicting modalities: the realism of dialogue and its antithesis in singing. While continuous singing is no more realistic, it does not strain the imagination of the listener to move between the two modes, an unnecessary interruption that abruptly amplifies the transparency of contrivance. The tension between music and drama is one that opera has been working out for hundreds of years (compared to the relatively younger genre of the Broadway musical). Continuous music in operatic fashion requires much less mental energy to engage the melodramatic narrative that underscores it.
Webber expertly weaves the conventions of opera, rock, and narrative together. The operatic lyrics interplay with the integrated dialogue of the characters. For example, during Christine’s debut she sings, “Think of me” on the opera stage within the Broadway stage. Raoul joins the song as a spectator in soliloquy, changing neither tempo nor rhythm and rhyming with the last audible line of Christine’s operatic performance within the play. “Can it be? Can it be Christine?” (Phantom). Webber moves seamlessly between the operatic spectacle and the romantic narrative within a single song. By doing so, the melodrama borrows from the opera and heightens the emotion of the narrative on both fronts. Moreover, the audience directly participates in the performance, bringing the emotion even closer to the viewer. Using the Broadway stage as the operatic stage within the narrative, the Broadway audience becomes the Opera audience within the story, and move between participation within the play and observation of it at regular intervals, marked by emotional peaks. Christine is simultaneously the Opera and Musical performer, Raoul is simultaneously the Musical performer and part of the Opera audience, and the actual audience is simultaneous to both Musical and Opera. Audience members participate with the thrill of the heroine’s debut and are literally swept away into the audience of her operatic performance within the narrative.
Another of Webber’s techniques was the implementation of iconography. In Superstar and Joseph, the narratives revolve around easily recognizable biblical mythology, centred by two of the most prominent characters within the text. In Evita, Webber moved away from biblical material and into the strictly historical with a female icon (Citron 223). In Cats he followed a different tack. The ensemble was the icon rather than an individual character. The title itself reveals as much. The three previous blockbusters were named after singular individuals already established as iconic, whereas the title of Cats is plural. One of the only weaknesses of the production was the absence of a central character. As such, the sympathies within the narrative with which audiences are expected to identify are vague. There was no obviously central character around which to anchor an iconography, but the advertising campaign brilliantly depicted the image of a cat’s eyes with dancers for pupils. The ubiquitous icon invoked a visualization of the entire dancing production, particularly the uniquely costumed and made-up cats.
With Phantom, Webber seems to have harvested all of the best characteristics of his previous icons, not the least of which was the advertising imagery. Phantom embodies the historical iconography of Superstar, Joseph, and Evita by placing in the title role a singular, central icon, harvested from a well-known historical text. In her essay Bringing It All Back Home: Family Economy and Generic Exchange, Vivian Sobchack discusses iconography in the twentieth century science-fiction. “The virginal astronaut presents an opportunity to free associate around a dominant and significant presence [which is] simultaneously icon, index, and symbol" (Sobchack 107). Like biblical icons, the phantom’s historical existence remains shrouded in myth and largely apocryphal. Like Evita, the phantom is a corrupted villain, and even more than Cats, he is mired in gothic convention. Webber combined these facets of iconography in Phantom and then went even further. Deploying the powerful iconography of theatrical masks, he centred his advertising campaign around a single, recognizable object. The mask of the phantom is a copious icon that graced t-shirts, loomed on billboards, and surfaced in magazine ads, buses, and all variety of advertising media. The phantom’s mask is universally recognized.
The Columbia University Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th Edition outlines the history of masks and their uses. The use of masks in human culture evidently predates recorded history. The encyclopedia simply states that they “have been worn from time immemorial throughout the world” (Masks). It identifies the most common historical uses: in rituals of death, as a form of protection from germs or dangerous projectiles, but most commonly in theatrical performances. Masks have long been believed to invest the wearer with magic powers, especially in the ability to influence large populations of people (Lehman). “The many masks used in ancient Greek drama represented the character being portrayed by the actor and were constructed to portray a fixed emotion such as grief or rage” (Masks). These particular emotions are the only ones listed. More recent depictions of the masks of both Spider-man and Batman have been moulded to look more angry, ominous, intimidating, and threatening, specifically regarding the shape of eyes or furrowed brows. These masks elicit an immediate emotional response in the same way that music does in drama and are remarkably theatrical.
Adding to the already powerful appeal of Webber’s production was the immeasurable power in the icon of a masked anti-hero. In the late twentieth century, the most ubiquitous icons from melodrama, horror, pop music, and comic books all participate in the astounding popularity of the masked gothic anti-hero. Certain masks became so iconic that their images represented an entire body of art and connected society with communal recognition of various particular icons. Have a look at the following images. Even if you have never seen any of the productions with which they are associated, you are probably able to identify the character or franchise immediately.
SEE IMAGES ABOVE
For the sake of posterity, and in case you’ve been living on Mars for the past four decades, they are, from left to right, the masks of Erik from Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera, Darth Vader from the Star Wars franchise, Jason Voorhees from the Friday the 13th franchise, Batman from the franchise of the same name, and likewise for Spider-man. Other masks from the horror genre that are quickly recognizable include those of Leatherface from the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Michael Myers from the Halloween franchise. Particularly interesting is the hockey mask of Jason Voorhees. It is the only mask that is not originally or exclusively associated with the character. But when you view the image of a hockey mask, its gothic iconography has such a strong hegemony over the psyche that we are first reminded of Jason, then of hockey (if of hockey at all) even in Canada! In any case, a survey of the broad spectrum of entertainment that has popularly employed masks, from Broadway musicals to sports, demonstrates a universal appeal. The use of masks may well have heightened the popularity of Phantom by extending its appeal to a wider range of patrons than the traditional Broadway Musical demographic.
In American culture it appears that the masked icon took on special power in the late twentieth century. In a culture predicated on ‘appearances’, it is no surprise. Many cultures commonly deploy costuming as a method of constructing identity. The delineation of social station based on garments is most visible in Europe’s historical sumptuary laws. Many European countries implemented regulations that placed restrictions on the consumer goods that citizens were permitted to purchase and use. In the seventeenth century, England aimed the laws specifically at clothing and dictated the appropriate dress permitted to people from different levels of the social hierarchy (Baldwin). In the nineteenth century, the fallacy still holds true. In 1964, Rene Magritte unveiled his surrealist painting, The Son of Man, which depicts a generically dressed British business man with a bowler hat and a face masked by a green apple (Magritte Son). Amongst the various interpretations of the painting is the theory that the man’s face is irrelevant because his social station is already determined by his garments.
The rise of Hollywood was concurrent with an increase in what was viewed as glamorous, and by 1988, the cosmetics industry was internationally corporate (Peiss). A competitive insecurity inherent to American culture is evident in the rise of physical alteration. Beginning with mere make-up (a form of mask), the eighties saw a rise in popularity in more permanent changes to appearance. For the first time, young women (and some men) were having eyeliner tattooed on their faces rather than suffer the inconvenience of daily application. Eventually the need for permanent changes in appearance saw the commercialization of plastic surgery, originally practised for reconstructive or therapeutic reasons to assist individuals mutilated by the increasingly destructive weaponry of war (History). With rising affluence in America, the medical nature of plastic surgery evolved into the commercial industry of cosmetic surgery (Davis) which brought with it the inevitable self-destruction of ego and physical health in the name of beauty (Lemma).
Members of the populace inevitably exhibited a self-destructive nihilism - a communal anxiety complex left over from the nuclear scare of the eighties, followed closely by economic emasculation by the Japanese automotive industry (which threatened the very affluence upon which the cosmetics industry depends) then by The World Trade Centre Attacks in 2001, and finally the population is confronted with imminent catastrophic environmental change. By the new millennium, plastic surgery had become recognized as a viable social disorder. Increasing numbers of newspaper articles and academic papers examined the practice, including a 2005 headline in the Straits Times that read “More Teens Turn to Nip and Tuck for Better Looks” (Liaw). Television shows such as Nip Tuck, or ostensible “reality” in Extreme Makeover or The Swan were highly popular. Nip Tuck won an Emmy in 2004 and a Golden Globe in 2005 and at least began to explore the negative aspects of the increasingly common procedures (imdb.com).
In A. Lemma’s PSYCHODYNAMICS OF COSMETIC SURGERY she outlines three psychological fantasies that underlie the motives for plastic surgery. The first is the fantasy that the individual can construct a perfect or ideal self (Lemma). The second is that the individual can acquire and fulfill the perfect-mate fantasy in which physical/sexual attraction plays the primary role (Lemma). The third is what she refers to as the “reclaiming fantasy”, whereby the individual purges an undesirable characteristic viewed as “alien” and re-establishes control over the creation of their visual identity (Lemma). In Cressida Heyes 2009 article, Diagnosing Culture: Body Dysmorphic Disorder and Cosmetic Surgery, she describes the psychological underpinnings as “a cultural trend that threatens to relocate ‘normalcy’ to a place of tremendous suffering” (Heyes 91). Fantasy and suffering are closely related to ideas of mutilation and disfigurement under the banner of cosmetic surgery.
The most iconic pop singer of the late twentieth century is also the paradigm example of the horrors of cosmetic surgery gone awry. Michael Jackson’s displeasure with his appearance caused him to become obsessive and irrational about his surgical choices. The media was overwhelmed with articles exhausting theories about his particular obsessions with whitening his skin and altering his nose. In a 2004 Calgary Herald article entitled Michael Jackson's mask: Documentary examines King of Pop's surgery obsession, Jamie Portman puts a Freudian twist on Jackson’s motives. He ascribes the relentless changes to a desire to look less like his father whom he publicly accused of abuse. Jackson’s psychological state was clearly troubled. Allegations of child molestation and the publicity of his extremely eccentric private life were concomitant with his descent into physical deviance. Ironically, the extensive surgery on his nose damaged his face so badly that he eventually chose to wear an actual mask to hide the collapsed bridge where his nose once had been. Michael Jackson was an icon obsessed with plastic surgery. The media has connected him to damaged psychology, severe insecurity that lead to substantial over-achieving, deviant sexuality, mutilation, and masks.
All of the iconic gothic anti-heroes have many of these characteristics in common. They are all thwarted in their romantic pursuits, often because of what is hidden behind the mask - a shame they cannot show in public; most have had a traumatic childhood – murdered parents, slavery, public humiliation; they are all anti-heroes who oppose the moral vein for what they deem a better good; they are associated with gothic sublimity or architecture: Wayne Manor (in the not-subtly-named Gotham City), the Death Star, the Paris Opera House, the sublime dark forest next to Crystal Lake, Spider-man's New York high-rise perches; they are all more active in darkened night-like settings from dark space to caves full of bats; and lastly and most obviously, they are all male. “[L]ike so many psychologically wounded narcissistic characters” they are a bunch of shame-faced males hiding behind gothic masks (Kavaler-Adler). And they fascinate us.
In recent years, the most popular comic book heroes are the ones with gothic and anti-heroic characteristics. Batman is the most obvious example, but even Spider-man fits the trope, especially in his recent dawning of a symbiotic black suit that stimulated his darker personality characteristics. Even in his original conception, however, Spider-man’s antisocial tendencies are exactly what made him appealing. In his book Comic book nation: the transformation of youth culture in America, Bradford Wright surveys the history of the comic book since its popular inception in the early twentieth century. He delineates a deep history of cultural literature, commonly enjoyed by youth or children on a generational level (like slang) in which the social development of our culture has been participant for a hundred years. We are all steeped in comic book lore. “Peter Parker furnished readers with an instant point of identification. All but the most emotionally secure adolescents could relate to Peter Parker’s self-absorbed obsessions with rejection, inadequacy, and loneliness” (Wright 210). “Peter escapes the taunts of his peers by losing himself in science” and “he designs a […] mask to conceal his identity” (Wright 210). Spider-man broke with the tradition of all-American heroism in characters such as Superman. Originally he “makes no pledge” to aid others or fight crime (Wright 210). Like Batman, who gave birth to the traumatically driven gothic hero in 1939 (Kane), in 1962, Spider-man realized the beginning of the anti-hero – the hero motivated by personal designs and vengeance (Lee).
And in 1988, poor Erik, our beloved phantom, emerges as the paradigm example of all gothic masked anti-heroes. He suffers a horrible facial deformity with which he is apparently born, and his father beats him into submission, forcing him to take part in the humiliating ritual of freak-show spectatorship behind the Paris Opera House. He is displayed as the “Devil’s Child” while other children laugh and gawk (Phantom). He then cowers in humiliation and covers his head with a burlap sack. The scene is filled with pathos until he murders his father. Madam Giry says, “I hid him from the world and its cruelties. He has known nothing else of life since then, except this opera house […] He’s a geniu,” to which Raoul responds, “Clearly, Madam Giry, genius has turned to madness” (Phantom). Erik’s madness, concomitant with his relationship with his father, is an archetype that runs deep in the human psyche and manifests itself in many forms of art (Freud).
In her essay entitled, The Stepfather: The Father as Monster in the Contemporary Horror Film, Patricia Erens focuses on the theories of Lacan and Freud relating to infancy. She describes the oedipal stage as one where a child wishes only "to bond with her mother" (Erens 358). The oedipal phase is one characterized by the "young male child's mandate to separate from the mother and to assume the physio-psychological aspects of the father [… A]t a later stage the male can reinvest his desire in a new female partner. The female child, however, equally encouraged to separate from the mother, is expected to shift her sexual attraction to the opposite sex" (Erens 358). Erens polarizes the pre-oedipal desire of the daughter to bond with her mother against the post-oedipal desire of the male to mate with her.
The post-oedipal desire for both female and male is enacted in Phantom. For Christine Daae, her desire to follow the musical teachings of an imaginary “angel of music” (predicted by her deceased father) fulfills her lust for her father in a disembodied voice that does not require her to requite sexually (Phantom). When the prospect of mating presents itself in the form of a horribly scarred freak, she is torn and the fantasy of her paternal angel of music is shattered. The romantic aspects of her paternal lust are then transferred to Raoul, the bodily perfect male specimen and benefactor. The phantom is frustrated in his post-oedipal desire to mate with Christine by a horrible deformity and becomes psychopathic. The phantom needs to hide behind a mask to exert male dominance where the voyeur’s terror would otherwise bar that fantasy from being fulfilled. Like Vader, Voorhees, and Batman, a child-borne trauma robs the hero of their oedipal fulfillment and they mask their shame. In true Freudian style, they displace their repressed sexuality into immoral violence and evil. The Freudian underpinnings of the romantic myth within the narrative are powerful and add to the Phantom's underlying psychological fascination for viewers of both genders. As audience members, we can't wait for them to unmask, and to get a glimpse of the freakish spectacle which fascinates haunts our imaginations.
But because of our own Freudian impulses, we are not unsympathetic. The prospect of such a horrible childhood is one that generates universal pathos. While we revel in the phantom’s deformity, and require his evil to justify doing so, we silently cry for his plight and silently wish for his romantic fulfillment. When Christine first views his deformity, he piteously refers to himself as “The man behind the monster / This repulsive carcass” and appeals to Christine’s sympathy. “No kind words from anyone. No compassion anywhere. Christine, why?” (Phantom). The music changes to soft woodwinds and higher stringed instruments at slower pace – typical but powerful melodramatic conventions for moments of pathos. Nevertheless, even with this mitigating sympathy that draws us to the character romantically, and the disfigured face that amplifies the sympathy, it is the very nature of his ugliness that repels us. "To a certain extent, of course, all social "monsters" are defined, or designed, in terms of supposedly unimpeachable marks of visual difference" (Bellin 169). In contrast to Christine’s beauty we cannot reconcile his visual difference in strictly sympathetic terms and we project on to Christine the horror of repulsion she would be forced to live out in a sexual union with someone so horribly disfigured. Erik articulates his awareness of her repulsion: “Turn around and face your fate. An eternity of this before your eyes” (Phantom). She responds by likening a sexual union with him to an act of murder. “Have you bored yourself at last in your lust for blood? Am I now to be prey to your lust for flesh?” Regardless of political correctness and progressive thinking, physical attraction remains a fundamental part of the mating ritual and sexual act. In an era when physical beauty has become a fanatical obsession, disfigurement, shame, and a conflation of the primitive psychologies of sex and murder are all present in popular art. To escape the horror of our own physical shortcomings, masks of all breed become a locus of security.
The appeal of the phantom’s mask is heightened even further by the titillation of what it promises to reveal. In the chapter entitled Seeing Things - The Freak on Film, in his book The Dread of Difference, Joshua Bellin focuses on the cultural construction of the "dichotomy of insider/outsider" to strengthen the existing social strata (Bellin 166). Bellin outlines the voyeurism of freaks as a commodity and the nature of freak spectacle that has been pervasive throughout history (Bellin 170). Incidentally, Bellin touches on the psychological thrill of freak-spectatorship. He describes "the spectatorial quality of the sideshow [which] implicates [...] viewers in a similar prurient voyeurism" (Bellin 166). In addition to mere freak-voyeurism, Bellin describes the effect of titillation. Bellin quotes the musings of "French Physician Amroise Pare" in his 1573 work, On Monsters and Marvels (Bellin 170). Pare does not describe all of his proclaimed subjects in physical detail "due to their great loathsomeness" which he claims prompted him to forego providing either of their physical descriptions or pictorial likenesses (Bellin 171). Bellin observes that "the doctor's disclaimer titillates as much as it abstains” complementing the “voyeuristic imperatives of revelation" (Bellin 171). In a 1965 radio interview with Jean Neyens, discussing his panting The Son of Man, Rene Magritte agrees with the titillating nature of masking and hidden objects. “We always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present” (Magritte). The mask, and its inherent promise of unmasking within a narrative, works in exactly this way, heightening the final revelation with the addition of suspense towards the viewing "pleasure" with which the viewer is ultimately satisfied.
Phantom capitalizes on the emotional power of such a moment twice. First in private, Christine tears the mask form Erik’s face and learns how much the exposure enrages him, either from the memory of his father’s humiliating abuse, or from despair at the loss of her reverence, or both. In order to satisfy the audience with the thrill of his exposure, Christine does it again, as a public spectacle to expose him as a villain during an opera performance. Since the audience for the Broadway show doubles as an audience for the opera within the show, they are rewarded with the experience from two perspectives: first in sympathetic participation with Christine from behind the fourth wall, and then as the opera audience within the narrative, exposed to all of the potential vengeance the character within the play may visit upon them, and complicit with Christine’s betrayal. It is thrilling. The viewer revels in his villainy, the spectacle of his evil motivated by his horribly scarred face not once, but twice: a double-climax of the morbid delight of his unmasking.
The melodrama in Star Wars deploys a similar double unmasking. The original trilogy played out a similar duality of titillation, showing us only the back of Vader’s mutilated head in a scene in The Empire Strikes Back when his helmet is quickly vacuum-sealed to his armor after he takes a reprieve in a parabolic chamber. Finally, at the end of Return of the Jedi, after three years of anticipation, Vader is fully exposed with all his weakness and disfigurement visible at the moment of his death and redemption. Phantom is very much like the Star Wars trilogy in several melodramatic ways. In both narratives, the masked anti-hero engages in a sword battle with the noble hero, Luke in Star Wars, and Raoul in Phantom. Immediately following the battle the Star Wars trilogy, Vader announces “I am your father” (Star Wars VI). Just before the sword battle in Phantom, Raoul announces to Christine, “Whatever you believe – this man, this thing, is not your father” (Phantom). Both productions make use of melodramatic underscoring characterized by cacophonic symphonic crescendos of music at emotional pivots. In the movie version of Phantom, the gothic rock-opera music is powerfully introduced with the use of percussive organ music at the raising of the chandelier in the same way that Star Wars used percussive punctuations of horns to heighten emotional tension during scenes of high action or celebration. In a his 2009 article “What Do We Mean by Opera, Anyway?”: Lloyd Webber’s ‘Phantom of the Opera’ and “High-Pop” Theatre, David Chandler makes note of the iconic similarities of Webber himself and his contemporary blockbuster film-maker Stephen Spielberg who collaborated with Star Wars creator George Lucas on the equally melodramatic Indiana Jones quadrilogy (Chandler 153). Both Phantom of the Opera on Broadway and Star Wars in motion picture are the number one grossing artworks of all time within their respective genres in adjusted dollars. The melodramatic structure and music, Freudian underpinnings of fatherly sins, and masked anti-heroes are common to both and clearly define the formula for artistic success in the late twentieth century.
Melodrama is characterized by an appeal to strong emotion rather than deep characterization. Its appeal is perhaps the longest standing theatrical undercurrent in history. The operatic form is necessarily void of deep characterization by virtue of its format. Webber has brilliantly married them to take advantage of the strengths of both by calling on the emotional response induced by opera music in conjunction to the emotional response of moralistic psychology, and with a participatory format for the audience. Furthermore, Webber deploys the psychological appeal of a masked anti-hero at a time when their iconic status was at its popular height. Webber discovered a unique combination of rock, opera, audience participation, melodrama, and iconography, integrated into an artistic whole never before seen – an entirely theatrical experience from beginning to end – simultaneously appealing to the most archetypal icons within our psyche and the most contemporary tastes, leaving audiences dazzled, drained, and delighted.
One might be inclined to think that his integration of an iconic mask into his already successful musical formula was mere coincidence, an inevitable result of the book he chose. However, the centre-piece of the entire performance is a masquerade ball in which all the characters participate. Even if the use of masks was unconscious, it was clearly an active part of Webber’s imagination. While much credit is due to Webber’s integration of rock and opera in the musical composition and narrative, they are not the defining characteristic of the social underpinnings at the time of Phantom’s peak popularity. At that time, the phantom was one amongst several iconic masked anti-heroes that captured the imaginations of audience members as psychologically fallible as the very villain they couldn’t wait to expose. So where the music and romance are fundamental to the success of Phantom, they are not the characteristic that has set it apart from other blockbuster musicals. The singular characteristic that launched Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera to the pinnacle of success is safely stowed in a mask. I love masks.
Works Cited
"9000 Performances of Phantom on Broadway." AndrewLloydWebber.com. AndrewLloydWebber.com, n.d. Web. 24 Feb. 2009.
Aroutian, Joanna. “The Undergrounds of The Phantom of the Opera: Sublimation and the Gothic in Leroux’s Novel and it’s Progeny.” Gothic Studies (10:1) May 2008: 73-74. Print.
Baldwin, Frances Elizabeth. Sumptuary Legislation and Personal Regulation in England. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1926. Print.
Batman. Dir. Tim Burton. Perf. Michael Keaton. Warner Bros, 1989. DVD.
Batman Begins. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Perf. Christian Bale. Warner Bros, 2005. DVD.
Bellin, Joshua David. Framing Monsters – Fantasy Film and Social Alienation. Southern Illinois University, 2005. Print.
Benjamin, Ruth, and Arthur Rosenblatt. Who Sang what on Broadway, 1866-1996. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland & Co, 2006. Print.
Bloom, Ken. The Routledge Guide to Broadway. New York: Routledge, 2007. Print.
Brantley, Ben. “It Ain’t Over Till the Goth Vampire Sings.” New York Times 10 December 2002: E1. Print.
Chandler, David. “”What Do We Mean by Opera, Anyway?”: Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera and “High-Pop” Theatre.” Journal of Popular Music Studies (21:2) 2009: 152-169. Print.
Citron, Stephen. Sondheim and Lloyd-Webber: The New Musical. Oxford [Oxfordshire] ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Print.
Davis, K. Dubious Equalities and Embodied Differences: Cultural Studies on Cosmetic Surgery. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Print.
Deutsch, Didier. “The world according to Webber.” Billboard (108:42) 19 October 1996: 2-4. Web.
England and Wales. Sovereign, and King of England Charles II. A Proclamation Anent the Sumptuary Act, 1684. Edinburgh: Printed by the heir of Andrew Anderson, printer to His Most Sacred Majesty, 1684. Print.
Erens, Patricia Brett. “The Stepfather: Father as Monster in Contemporary Horror Film.” The Dread of Difference. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. 352-363. Print.
Fralic, Shelley. “Jacko's death a reflection on our celebrity obsession.” Leader Post 26 June 2009: B4. Print.
Freud, Sigmund. "The Interpretation of Dreams, from Chapter V, The Material and Sources of Dreams." The Norton anthology of theory and criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. 919-923. Print.
Friday the 13th. Dir. Sean S. Cunningham. Paramount Pictures, 1980. DVD.
Friday the 13th Part 3. Dir. Steve Miner. Paramount Pictures, 1982. DVD.
Gerard, Jeremy. “On Their Toes.” New York Times 15 Nov. 1987: BR22. Print.
Gilman, S. L.. Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999. Print.
Guernsey, Otis L. Directory of the American Theater, 1894-1971; Indexed to the Complete Series of Best Plays Theater Yearbooks; Titles, Authors, and Composers of Broadway, Off-Broadway, and Off-Off Broadway shows and their Sources. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1971. Print.
Gussow, Mel. “’Frankie,’ the Frankenstein Tale Set to Music.” New York Times 10 Oct. 1989: C18. Print.
Haiken, E. “The Making of the Modern Face: Cosmetic Surgery.” Social Research. New York: Spring 2000 (67:1): 81-98. Print.
Haiken, E. Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1997. Print.
Halloween. Dir. John Carpenter. Compass International Pictures (Sony Pictures Entertainment), 1978. DVD.
Heyes, Cressida J. "Diagnosing Culture: Body Dysmorphic Disorder and Cosmetic Surgery." Body and Society. Volume 15.No. 4 (2009): 73-93. Print.
Holden, Stephen. “’Halloween 5’ And Sinister Rustlings.” New York Times 14 Oct. 1989: 13. Print.
Holland, Bernard. “Opera or Musical? It Can Be a Close Call.” New York Times 21 Feb. 1988: 86. Print.
Hughes, William. “Romances and Gothic Tales / Albert of Werdendorff; or, The Midnight Embrace.” Gothic Studies (9:1) May 2007: 97-100. Print.
Hurst, Lynda. “Jacko's moonwalk to disaster; Pop star's history a guide book to toxic celebrity But world rubs hands with glee as the icon falls.” Toronto Star 11 June 2005: A08. Print.
Internet Brodaway Database. Ibdb.com. Web. 16 March 2010.
Internet Movie Database. Imdb.com. Web. 16 March 2010.
James, Caryn. “A Slasher Goes Back to Work.” New York Times 22 Oct. 1988: 12. Print.
Kane, Bob. “The Bat-Man.” Detective Comics #27. New York: DC Comics, 1939. Print.
Kavaler-Adler, Susan. “Object Relations Perspectives on “Phantom of the Opera” and Its Demon Lover Theme: The Modern Film.” American Journal of Psychoananlysis June 2009: 150-166. Print.
Lee, Stan and Steve Ditko. “The Amazing Spider-man.” Amazing Fantasy #15. New York: Marvel Comics, 1962. Print.
Lehman, Henry. “No bones about it.” The Gazette [Montreal, Que.] 10 June 2006: E4. Print
Lemma, A. “Copies Without Originals: The Psychodynamics of Cosmetic Surgery.” Psychoanalytic Quarterly. Vol. 79. No. 1 (2010): 129-157. Web.
Leroux, Gaston. “The Phantom of the Opera.” The Literature Network. online-literature.com. Web. 3 February 2010.
Liaw, W. “More Teens Turn to Nip and Tuck for Better Looks.” The Straits Times [Singapore] 15 August 2005. Print.
Magritte, Rene. In a radio interview with Jean Neyens (1965), cited in Torczyner, Magritte: Ideas and Images, trans. Richard Millen. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1977. p.172. Print.
Magritte, Rene. The Son of Man. 1964. Private Collection. Art.com. Web. 16 March 2010.
“Masks.” Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th Edition, 10 January 2009. Web. 16 March 2010.
Massaro, Tony M. “Shame, Culture, and American Criminal Law.” Michigan Law Review. Michigan: 1991 (89:7): 1880-1994. Web.
Peiss, Cathy. “Educating the Eye of the Beholder: American Cosmetics Abroad.” Daedalus. Vol. 141 No. 4, 1991: 101-109. Print.
Perry, George C., et al. The Complete Phantom of the Opera. London: Pavilion, 1989. Print.
Phantom of the Opera, The. Dir. Joel Schumacher. Prod. Andrew Lloyd Webber. Warner Brothers, 2004. DVD.
Psycho. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Paramount Pictures / Universal Pictures, 1960. DVD.
Rich, Frank. “Lloyd Webber’s ‘Aspects of Love’.” New York Times 9 April 1990: C11. Print.
Rich, Frank. “Stage: ‘Phantom of the Opera.” New York Times 27 Jan. 1988: C19. Print.
Rich, Frank. “Theater: Three Musicals Liven Stages in London.” New York Times 18 June 1987: C21. Print.
Sheppard, W. Anthony. Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Music Theater. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Print.
Simas, Rick. The Musicals no One Came to See : A Guidebook to Four Decades of Musical-Comedy Casualties on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and in Out-of-Town Try-Out, 1943-1983. New York: Garland Pub, 1987. Print.
Sobchack, Vivian. “The Virginity of Astronauts: Sex and the Science Fiction Film.” Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema. Ed. Annette Kuhn. London; New York: Verso, 1990. 103-115. Print.
Spider-man. Dir. Sam Raimi. Columbia Pictures, 2002. DVD.
Spider-man 3. Dir. Sam Raimi. Columbia Pictures, 2007. DVD
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Dir. George Lucas. 20th Century Fox, 1977. DVD.
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back. Dir. Irvin Kirshner. Prod. George Lucas. 20th Century Fox, 1980. DVD.
Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. Dir. Richard Marquand. Prod. George Lucas. 20th Century Fox, 1983. DVD.
Stepfather, The. Dir. Joseph Ruben. New Century, 1987. DVD.
Steyn, Mark. “Two Cheers for Andrew Lloyd Webber.” New Criterion (15:4) 1996: 43-49. Web.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The. Dir. Tobe Hooper. Bryanston Distributing Company New Line Cinema, 1974. DVD.
The Dark Knight. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Perf. Christian Bale, Heath Ledger. Warner Bros, 2008. DVD.
“The History of Plastic Surgery.” American Society of Plastic Surgeons. Plasticsurgery.org. Web. 21 March 2010.
Tipton, N.G.. “Secret Identity Crisis: Comic Books & the Unmasking of Cold War America.” Journal of Popular Culture. Vol. 43. No. 1 (2010): 223-224. Print.
Walsh, Michael. Andrew Lloyd Webber: His Life and Works. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1989. Print.
Whitney, Craig R. “America’s Vietnam Trauma Is the Stuff of British Musical.” New York Times 23 Sept. 1989: 12. Print.
Wilson, J. The American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons' Guide to Cosmetic Surgery. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. Print.
Wright, Bradford W. Comic book nation: the transformation of youth culture in America. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2001. Print.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment