In my piece, I wondered what kind of pared-down revival Phantom could get if it ever closed. Other classic musicals are reimagined and revived on Broadway every fifteen years or so (like its 1988 Tony rival, Into the Woods, currently enjoying its own second reimagining/revival right across the street from Phantom).
One of the first things I wrote for this site was titled “Help Me Remake The Music of the Night.” It was about how, while it’s really cool that a production like Phantom could just keep going and going and going indefinitely, a monumental feat of cultural strength, that kind of accomplishment does stifle it somewhat in terms of its creative life. In a way, OnStage Blog helped me prepare for this moment back in 2015. And yet, the news that it will close next winter, a few weeks after our birthdays (my 36th, its 35th), is not the devastating blow to my identity that it might have been. It’s a mere accident of timing, but so is everything, and that never stops people from making meaning.
I have long joked that the Broadway production of The Phantom of the Opera was Andrew Lloyd Webber and Michael Crawford’s birthday present to me, and though I lived in complete ignorance of it for twelve years, finding out that we do, sort of, share a birthday and are, essentially, the same age, years after I first fell in love with the songs has, in its way, haunted me. That a production could open on Broadway on the eve of my first birthday and hang around long enough for me to become obsessed with it as a teenager, dive into the history and characters in college, and see it twice on Broadway after moving to New York City to pursue the career trajectory it started me on, almost makes one tempted to believe in destiny, but if destiny were a thing, surely there would have been a way forward for Christine and the Phantom. By Aaron Netsky, Guest on Twitter, on Instagram
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