If Bob Fosse had a recurring nightmare of being forced to stage a flamenco show in Vegas, this is what it would look like. In fact, the scariest thing here is the Phantom’s opera version of Don Juan (wait, didn’t Mozart write one already? Never mind). All the while, Schumacher keeps his camera gliding, tilting, swooping, falling askew, either to create an air of mystery or the better to see all the pretty setsand costumes. The Phantom’s subterranean lair gets a makeover, but the soprano’s first visit, a love duet aboard a gondola, now has all the romance of a Disneyland ride. They give the Phantom a new backstory, which belongs to the Elephant Man, who wants it back, preferably before David Lynch calls his lawyer. Following the movie-musical adaptation handbook, they reshuffle scenes, prolong laughably bad dialogue, and tack on the requisite Oscar-qualifying original song, but still keep the insufferable disco-kitschy title number. Schumacher, who co-wrote the screenplay with Lord Lloyd Webber, re-enacts the highlights of Prince’s staging, to no avail: Coups de théâtre-actors plunging into a dark abyss, candelabra rising from the mist-look run-of-the-mill onscreen. Sure, all the ingredients of camp are there (oh, the hubris!), but this isn’t a so-bad-it’s-good classic. Louder, longer, flashier than its predecessor, this Phantom‘s an overblown mess of ostentatious razzmatazz. Prince’s magic covered the show’s many flaws-thin plot, pedestrian lyrics, and schmaltzy derivative score-like so much mechanical fog. What little there is in terms of story-a shadowy figure who tries to lure an up-and-coming soprano away from the opera’s new benefactor-served merely as an excuse for Lord Lloyd Webber’s pernicious earworms. Say what you will of Harold Prince’s 1988 Broadway production, but there’s something irresistible about his stage wizardry. It’s emblematic of Schumacher’s super-size approach to the material. In the press notes, director Joel Schumacher dismisses it as “a huge municipal building with a bureaucratic feel.” So he built a bigger, gaudier soundstage opera house, with a larger, shinier product-placement chandelier. Rumors of an underground lake (nothing as mundane as a flooded basement) inspired Gaston Leroux’s novel The Phantom of the Opera, which begat that other monument to excess, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s perennial tuner, starring a lighting fixture.įor the film version, however, the Palais Garnier was just too shabby.
PicturesĬharles Garnier’s Paris Opéra stands as a monument to Second Empire excess: cherubs, caryatids, mosaics, 10 kinds of marble, six types of limestone, gold, onyx, turquoise, bronze-and that’s just the foyer.
Music of the trite: Chandelirious Opera stars Rossum and Butler photo: Warner Bros.
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