Absolutely fantastic thread! Check it out friends:
Ticket info:
http://www.loveneverdies.com/
Article:
"Love Never Dies" a Brilliant Sequel to "Phantom"
LONDON (Hollywood Reporter) - Unlike lightning, Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Phantom" does strike twice.
More than 23 years after "Phantom of the Opera" became a worldwide sensation, the British composer has delivered a sequel in "Love Never Dies." As handsome as the original and filled with infectious melodies, startling images and wonderful performances, it's running through October 23 at the Adelphi Theater.
The sequel is set in the early years of the 20th Century a decade after the ending of the original, with the key players from the first show caught up in a Gothic drama set in a spooky theater on Coney Island.
Soprano Christine (Sierra Boggess) arrives for a special performance bringing along her gambler husband Raoul (Joseph Millson) and their 10-year-old son Gustave. Unknown to them, the show's impresario is the Phantom (Ramin Karimloo). It is revealed in the first act that the scarred composer and his muse shared a night of passion before she got married and went away, and the question of who is the boy's father drives the story.
Further complications come from the current star of the Phantom's show, Meg (Sierra Russell), whose mother Madame Giry (Liz Robertson) fears that Christine's arrival will lead to their being abandoned.
Lloyd Webber gives credit to comedian/writer Ben Elton for coming up with the plotline for the show and he brings not the guile of "Blackadder" but the simplicity of another hit stage musical he wrote, the Queen show "We Will Rock You."
It's pure romantic melodrama but the lack of complexity leaves Lloyd Webber free to concentrate on the music, which he does with extraordinary vigor. His melodies radiate immediately and Glenn Slater's no-nonsense lyrics don't get in the way at all.
Iranian-born and Canada-based Karimloo has the strut and posture the Phantom needs and he has full command of a rich and subtle voice. Colorado-born Boggess' delivery of the title song alone is worth the price of admission. Its simple lyric becomes heart-rending as Boggess caresses and sculpts the song in a spotlight moment that in times gone by would have been called a showstopper. Millson, Robertson and Strallen also have their moments to shine as Lloyd Webber shakes up the musical tone with lively dancing girls and even some prog-rock.
His rousing and moving orchestrations with David Cullen lean less to his traditional keyboards and more toward strings and brass with exceptional playing by seasoned professionals including one of Britain's top flugelhorn players John Barclay, familiar from many James Bond movie scores.
The whole thing is rendered in a magnificent design that combines video projection; smoke and mirrors; beguiling illusions; and mischievous devices to create a vital atmosphere where love, jealousy and death can play out with sumptuous musicality.
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http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wirestory?id=10080614&page=1
Another article:
Does Love Never Dies tell us what the voters want?
Great cartoon by Garland today on the comment pages - have you seen it? - niftily tying in the opening of Love Never Dies with the nightmare prospect of a sequel to the Brown government. Cue picture of a half-masked Gordon with his fingers in full throttle-position around the neck of the electorate, envisaged as the ravishing young soprano Christine. “Coming Soon! The Phantom of the Soap Opera - Starring The Same Old Cast” runs the sharp wording, and below: ‘Return by Popular Demand”.
Those of us who fear that the past few years have just been a dress-rehearsal for an even bigger catastrophe should cut it out and frame it.
I have to say that I think he’s got it in one. I haven’t yet read all the reviews of Love Never Dies - and I think it’s beyond ordinary mortal power to wade through all the commentary that has been spewing forth in the blogo-sphere ever since the curtain went up on the show’s first preview, two weeks ago.
To my knowledge, though, no one has yet highlighted the peculiar way in which Love Never Does does indeed appear to capture the particular political mood of the moment. It’s no secret that Andrew Lloyd Webber, having mulled over the idea of a sequel to Phantom of the Opera for at least the past decade, only properly got to grips with the project during the last two years - ie, under the full gothic gloom of the Brown premiership. And so many parallels come into play when considering the affinities between Number 10’s main occupant and the figure who flits, in Phantom Mark 2, to Coney Island, that it’s very tempting to conclude that Lloyd Webber was inspired, albeit at a subconscious level, by our brooding, reclusive, scheming PM.
Without wishing to give away too much of the sequel’s storyline - although there are so many spoilers running amok in cyberspace, not to mention fully edited Wikipedia articles, that coyness is futile - the grim truth lurking in Love Never Dies is that the sinister anti-hero of the musical is endowed with a fatal attraction the heroine can’t resist. Whatever dastardly ploys he uses to secure his power over her, it’s what she wants, at the end of the day, that proves the clinching factor - and that boringly ordinary, potentially decent aristocrat husband Raoul (yep, let's read that as David Cameron) isn’t in the frame of her desires. Beauty will have her Beast, you see. And that grisly insight made musical flesh should send as many shivers down the collective spine of the Conservative Party as any dire opinion poll. Love Never Dies may or may not last forever, but it's a product of its age.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/...-Never-Dies-tell-us-what-the-voters-want.html
