SURPRISE!PHANTOM, or, Love Never Dies
Sep. 7th, 2011 12:03 pmAS PROMISED!
Now, as I said the other day, this was my first experience seeing a professional musical theatre performance. I've seen a whole bunch of amateur performances, but somehow I never felt the need to pay a large sum of money to see an actual professional-type production.
The fact that I chose to pay to see Love Never Dies, and that I was inspired by these posts, does not actually reflect that well on me.
Anyway, when I was a kid I was obsessed with Phantom. My parents had a lot of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals on vinyl, and the central album art for Phantom was Christine in the boat with the Phantom behind her. And it probably says a lot about the sort of child that I was that I was mostly intrigued by the pretty lady in the dress surrounded by candles. Oh, and there's music. And some kind of love story. BUT A PRETTY LADY IN A DRESS SURROUNDED BY CANDLES.
Phantom was a brief obsession for me when I was 13 -- I wore out the soundtrack (we had now advanced to cassettes!), read the libretto, read the novel, and then watched every adaptation I could get my hands on. Alas, my family had no money, so even if it had been playing, actually seeing Phantom on stage was out of the question. And by the time I was an adult with disposable income, I was kind of embarrassed about my adolescent obsession with a camp 1980s rock opera. I did see the movie, but the only bit that sticks in my memory was Gerard Butler's snot.
So that was the context in which we saw Love Never Dies.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
selvage was visiting from Brisbane, and she enjoyed the cracktastical review posts as much as I did, so we peer-pressured piecesofalice into coming with us. Because we are good friends. We put on our nice outfits, took ourselves into the city and presented ourselves at the Regent Theatre.
Firstly, a problem that Andrew Lloyd Webber is not responsible for: toilet accessibility at the Regent kind of failed. My ankle, remember, is still sprained. The toilets are down a long, steep flight of stairs, and then there are more stairs to actually get to the stalls. Eventually (in the intermission) I found the disabled toilets, but got kicked out of line by an old lady in a wheelchair (I was wearing heavy black tights that concealed my bandage, so I didn't bother arguing), and also noticed theatre staff standing guard over the accessible toilets to ensure they weren't being used by the ostensibly able-bodied. So that was awkward.
Then, having paid $6 for a bottle of mineral water, we went in.
( So there's a guy in a mask, and some singing happens. )
Now, as I said the other day, this was my first experience seeing a professional musical theatre performance. I've seen a whole bunch of amateur performances, but somehow I never felt the need to pay a large sum of money to see an actual professional-type production.
The fact that I chose to pay to see Love Never Dies, and that I was inspired by these posts, does not actually reflect that well on me.
Anyway, when I was a kid I was obsessed with Phantom. My parents had a lot of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals on vinyl, and the central album art for Phantom was Christine in the boat with the Phantom behind her. And it probably says a lot about the sort of child that I was that I was mostly intrigued by the pretty lady in the dress surrounded by candles. Oh, and there's music. And some kind of love story. BUT A PRETTY LADY IN A DRESS SURROUNDED BY CANDLES.
Phantom was a brief obsession for me when I was 13 -- I wore out the soundtrack (we had now advanced to cassettes!), read the libretto, read the novel, and then watched every adaptation I could get my hands on. Alas, my family had no money, so even if it had been playing, actually seeing Phantom on stage was out of the question. And by the time I was an adult with disposable income, I was kind of embarrassed about my adolescent obsession with a camp 1980s rock opera. I did see the movie, but the only bit that sticks in my memory was Gerard Butler's snot.
So that was the context in which we saw Love Never Dies.
selvage was visiting from Brisbane, and she enjoyed the cracktastical review posts as much as I did, so we peer-pressured piecesofalice into coming with us. Because we are good friends. We put on our nice outfits, took ourselves into the city and presented ourselves at the Regent Theatre.Firstly, a problem that Andrew Lloyd Webber is not responsible for: toilet accessibility at the Regent kind of failed. My ankle, remember, is still sprained. The toilets are down a long, steep flight of stairs, and then there are more stairs to actually get to the stalls. Eventually (in the intermission) I found the disabled toilets, but got kicked out of line by an old lady in a wheelchair (I was wearing heavy black tights that concealed my bandage, so I didn't bother arguing), and also noticed theatre staff standing guard over the accessible toilets to ensure they weren't being used by the ostensibly able-bodied. So that was awkward.
Then, having paid $6 for a bottle of mineral water, we went in.
( So there's a guy in a mask, and some singing happens. )
