Commentary
“The Phantom of the Opera” closed on April 16 after 13,981 performances on Broadway. With 35 years on the Great White Way, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s wildly popular musical has held the record for the longest-running show on Broadway since 2006. However, this was by no means an original story when it debuted in London’s West End in 1986. It started as a 1910 Gothic French novel by Gaston Leroux, and it’s remained a very popular story since then, having been adapted multiple times.
This story was made into multiple films before the musical by composer Lloyd Webber and lyricist Charles Hart was even a thought. The most famous of these is the 1925 Universal silent film starring Lon Chaney, which was the first American adaptation. It began the studio’s successful run of horror films and established “The Phantom of the Opera” as a horror story, which it wasn’t originally. The second major motion picture based on this story was made in 1943, starring Claude Rains as the Phantom, Susanna Foster as his muse, Christine, and Nelson Eddy as his rival for Christine and a singer at the Paris Opera….