Phantoms and Crooners

—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.