Phantoms and Crooners

Photo by Jay Maidment

And there are Louis and there are Georges . . .

—Stephen Sondheim

Sondheim wrote that memorable lyric near the end of the first act of what is probably the greatest of his musicals, 1984’s Sunday in the Park With George. The words issue from the mouth of Dot, mistress and muse to 19th-century Impressionist painter Georges Seurat, and serve to contrast Seurat against the simpleton baker with whom Dot has just conceived a child. ("Louis’ thoughts are not hard to follow/Louis’ art is not hard to swallow," she sings a few bars earlier.) Of course, what Sondheim was really talking about was the great divide between the glib and the rigorous in the popular arts — the struggle to do mature work in a culture that persistently embraces the sophomoric. In short, Sondheim might just as soon have been describing the relationship of his own oeuvre to that of Andrew Lloyd Webber, the enterprising Brit composer whose event musicals began arriving on Broadway in the 1970s, helping to transform the American musical theater into a kitsch junkyard of singing cats and hunky Jesuses.

In 1986, Webber and lyricist Charles Hart musicalized Gaston Leroux’s novel The Phantom of the Opera and its tale of the oddball love triangle between rising young opera star Christine Daae, her dashing suitor Raoul, and the disfigured Phantom who himself pines for Christine. Two decades and some 80 million admissions later, the show is a bona fide global phenomenon, albeit one that, until recently, I’d managed to evade. The trauma I’d already sustained from the touring production of Webber’s Cats and the film version of his Evita had been enough to quell my curiosity. But now Phantom is a movie too, produced by Webber and directed by Joel Schumacher (another "artist" unlikely ever to be accused of exercising restraint), and movies, alas, are not so easily evaded . . .

If only The Phantom of the Opera could be accused of being kitsch or camp or trashy good fun. Instead, Schumacher and Webber treat their material with the solemn reverence of two museum guards assigned to protect some indisputably valuable heirloom. Which isn’t the only thing that makes the movie feel like an excavated artifact from another era. A film of Phantom, with Schumacher attached, has been in the works almost since the show first arrived on Broadway (where it continues to run), and having finally been made, the movie plays like a not-so-brief history of why Hollywood stopped making musicals in the first place. Whatever one thinks of Moulin Rougeand Chicago— and I didn’t particularly care for either of them — they were at least sexy and vivacious, and it was possible to imagine a young audience going to see them and actually staying through to the end credits. Conversely, watching the passionless Phantom, with its geriatric story-framing device, gooey dimestore romanticism and tawdry pop ballads about unrequited yearning, feels akin to dying and waking up in your parents’ easy-listening-radio hell.

In its broad outlines, the Phantomstory is a perennial — the suffering beast (here played by Gerard Butler) who can only be redeemed by the love of the gentle beauty, Christine (the vocally strong but emotionally distant Emmy Rossum). In the 1925 silent film version starring Lon Chaney, it was even possible to feel empathy (if not exactly sympathy) for the titular hero-villain. Here, as conceived by Webber/Schumacher and interpreted by Butler — an actor who never hesitates to bellow when mere shouting would suffice — Phantom’s Phantom seems less misunderstood monster than stark raving madman. Yet Webber’s opus has a reputation as a grand romance, and surely 80 million theatergoers can’t really be wrong, can they? The extent to which Webber’s simplistic melodies have become the background Muzak for an entire generation seems in itself a supernatural feat. But in Schumacher’s hands, even the famous crashing chandelier and fog-shrouded gondola ride don’t quite register. The film is less directed than event-planned, with lots of extras and decorous pageantry trotted before the camera, but no real feeling for atmosphere; it doesn’t lift us up in the way a good movie musical can, let alone carry us away. In other words, we can always see the strings — or, at least, the dry-ice machine just off camera, blowing its smoke.

If The Phantom of the Opera is content to rest on its laurels, the holiday season’s other musical offering, Beyond the Sea, never stops trying to prove itself — much like its subject, one Walden Robert Cassotto. With a heart weakened by a childhood bout with rheumatic fever, Cassotto wasn’t expected to live past the age of 15, long before he rechristened himself with his celebrated stage name. But Cassotto didn’t die, and Bobby Darin was born, henceforth driven by a relentless ambition to become the best he could be at everything that he did.

Starring Kevin Spacey as Darin, Beyond the Seatraces the singer’s too-brief life from his early days as a nightclub act through his overnight success with the hit "Splish, Splash," his marriage to Sandra Dee (powerfully played by Kate Bosworth) and his largely unsuccessful bid to reinvent himself as mustachioed folk singer Bob Darin. The film purports to be a movie about Darin’s life made by Darin himself, and that’s exactly how it feels, like the go-for-broke vanity project of a man who knows he’s living on borrowed time. As many have pointed out, Spacey, at 45, is already eight years older than Darin was when his bad heart launched its final, fatal attack in 1973. But not only hasn’t Spacey (who, in a Darin-worthy gesture, also directed, co-produced and co-wrote the film) let such literal-minded concerns stop him — he’s elected to shine a great big spotlight on them. Like Bob Fosse’s phantasmagoric All That Jazz(to which it owes some, but not all, of its moves), Beyond the Seais a bejeweled dreamscape about the surreality of a life lived in show biz, and about the make-believe of the movies themselves. It’s about how a performer steps onto a stage or in front of a camera and is momentarily transported into another dimension, free of mortal concerns — where a Kevin Spacey can become a Bobby Darin and where a Bobby Darin might well live forever. And it may be that, in Darin, Spacey has the best role of his career, the one that thrives on the superciliousness that is part and parccel of his own screen persona.