The Phantom of the Opera closed on Broadway in April 2023 after 35 years and 13,981 performances, the longest run in Broadway history, having won 7 Tony Awards including Best Musical in 1988.
This production has closed on Broadway, but touring and international productions of long-running shows often continue elsewhere — verify current availability before building a trip around it.
Andrew Lloyd Webber's score sets pastiche against pop. Three fake operas run through the evening — the mock-Meyerbeer Hannibal, the eighteenth-century Il Muto, the deliberately unhinged Don Juan Triumphant — and they exist so that the title song, with its descending organ figure and its rock backbeat, lands as an intrusion from another century. Charles Hart wrote the lyrics, with additional material from Richard Stilgoe, who shared the book with Lloyd Webber. The source is Gaston Leroux's 1910 novel, a piece of Parisian sensation fiction that the musical treats far more tenderly than Leroux did.
Harold Prince directed and Gillian Lynne choreographed, but the production's reputation belonged to Maria Björnson, who designed both the sets and more than two hundred costumes. Her chandelier, her subterranean gondola and her candelabra rising out of the stage floor were installed into the Majestic Theatre and stayed there for thirty-five years, which is an unusual thing to be able to say about any piece of theatrical machinery.
The 1988 Tony Awards gave it seven of its ten nominations: Best Musical, direction for Prince, scenic and costume design for Björnson, lighting for Andrew Bridge, Michael Crawford for lead actor and Judy Kaye for featured actress. Crawford and Sarah Brightman had originated the roles in London and carried them to New York.
It closed on 16 April 2023 after 13,981 performances, the longest run in Broadway history by a margin of several thousand. In February 2012 it had become the first Broadway production to reach ten thousand performances at all. The show was routinely dismissed by critics as a machine for selling itself, and it was; what the dismissals tended to miss is that the machine was built around a genuinely strange piece of writing, in which the romantic lead is a murderer and the plot resolves on an act of mercy rather than a rescue.
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The Phantom of the Opera is a musical with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, lyrics by Charles Hart, additional lyrics by Richard Stilgoe, and a libretto by Lloyd Webber and Stilgoe. Inspired by the 1910 novel by Gaston Leroux, it tells the tragic story of beautiful soprano Christine Daaé, who becomes the obsession of a mysterious and disfigured musical genius living in the subterranean labyrinth beneath the Paris Opera House.
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