So recently I came clean about my love for musicals - so at odds with my usual tast in music. And I may have also mentioned that I have a mildly obsessive personality type. Some might refer to it as unhealthy fixation or compulsion (ha ha), but I like to think of it as passion. It has been in full force since I went to see Phantom for my birthday (tickets courtesy of my bruv and his girlfriend, Tiff). After singing every song ceaselessly for weeks, I have bought the DVD, and Tiff and I are now regularly watching it (and singing the whole way through, naturally).
Silently the senses, abandon their defences, helpless to the music that I write, as I compose the Music of the Night.
What I have always loved about Phantom is the binaries - the fight between light and dark, such familiar ground for any narrative, and yet this rock opera was so ground breaking. Instead of straight forwardly wanting her to end up with Raoul I always wish she would choose the Phantom - his love and devotion to her is terrifying and yet compelling. He only has to be near her for her to feel his pull, a pull that makes the wholesome, saccharine Raoul seem all the less appealing.
Screw Twilight and The Vampire Diaries with their morality tales and watered down take on the darker side of all of us...Christine is a woman pulled into a passionate relationship of Master and Teacher with a ruthless murder who will do anything for her and his music - makes Edward and all his tortured posing seem a little weak. And yet, despite his mad obsession, when it comes to it, he lets her go - the true test of love.
A lot of puritans were not big fans of the film. I on the other hand love it. I felt the film was a more polished version of the stage show (as of course it would be) but it still held true to the imagery in the original productions. Film allows the maker to extend on the story, and do things that would not be possible with the limitations of a stage - and why not, the stage show is still there to be seen, and the film maker gets to create something beyond the original. When I first saw it on the big screen, there were moments that filled me with as much wonder as the first time I saw the stage show - The amazing chandelier restored to its former glory and taking its rightful place at the centre of the Opera House, filling us with expectation, only to be devastated once more in the crashing down of the dream. The Gothic night time lair of the Phantom, lit gently with a thousand candles, rising mysteriously from the fog to welcome he and Christine. The beauty of a snowy graveyard, where Christine finally says goodbye to her father.
As I never saw Sarah Brightman live, I really can't compare, but Emmy Rossum is my ideal Christine, in her delicate, celestial beauty while the cleaned up, and barely recognisable, Gerard Butler smokes as the Phantom - both sinister and debonair. I am not sure who I am more in love with?! Their attraction is palpable, which is so essential to the story. At all times they seem so aware of each other. It is beautiful to watch.
And so, that is what is making my soul take flight this Sunday.
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