Phantom of the Opera: The Final Curtain

The word genius is bandied about too generously these days. We used to reserve it for the very best of our efforts. We knew it when we could see it, feel it, touch it, or hear it and we were instantly transported to a time and place that we had never visited before.

Welcome back to those days of glory. But this time it is a day of remembrances. Tomorrow will be the final curtain on Broadway for the magic that is the Phantom of the Opera. Its music is by Andrew Lloyd Webber, lyrics by Charles Hart, and a libretto by Lloyd Webber and Richard Stilgoe. Based on the 1910 French novel of the same name by Gaston Leroux, it tells the story of a beautiful soprano, Christine Daaé, who becomes the obsession of a mysterious, masked man living in the subterranean labyrinth beneath the Paris Opéra House.

Those of us who are not quite as literate are drawn to less precise details of a magnificient chandelier traveling down the length of the audience in darkness before exploding into a spectacular vision of light as the opera begins. That is my recollection of the Pantages Theatre in Toronto back in the early 1990s.

The rest are memories etched forever into the wonders of time and space. Great memories of songs with flair and penache. Songs that we can never again hear for the first time, but will never hear for the last.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccEax-SWUvk&ab_channel=AndrewLloydWebber-Topic